Bitcoin Could Consume As Much Electricity As Denmark By 2020 (boingboing.net)

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: The numbers are very back-of-the-envelope and assume a worst case: widespread adoption of Bitcoin and not much improvement in Bitcoin mining activity, along with long replacement cycles for older, less efficient mining rigs. But even the best case [scenario] has Bitcoin consuming a shocking amount of electricity. [As mentioned in a report from Motherboard,] "The results show that in an optimistic scenario, the increase in electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network compared to now is not shocking, from around 350 MW to around 417 MW, but still on the order of one small power station. If things play out a little less favorably, however, the Bitcoin network may draw over 14 Gigawatts of electricity by 2020, equivalent to the total power generation capacity of a small country, like Denmark for example.

Comments

Energy star rated bitcoins.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost 0.

Re:Energy star rated bitcoins.

[Big Hairy Ian]

I'm just waiting for Bitcoin branded bacon :D

Already disputed and debunked

[qubezz]

The Bitcoin mining reward halves every four years, making it less profitable in the future. Nearly 75% of Bitcoins that will ever exist have already been mined. Saying that miners will collectively be spending 30x more on electricity to mine 1/4 the Bitcoins they earn now is ludicrous.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[Anonymous Coward]

The value of the remaining bitcoins keeps increasing which offsets the decreasing value.

^^^^

Already disputed and debunked :)

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[supremebob]

Bitcoin really hasn't increased in value over the past few years. The price spiked at over $1,000 a coin in late 2013, and then plummeted. Right now, it's still around $400 a coin, even though it's a hell of a lot harder now to "mine" one than it was 3 years ago.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[dbIII]

It being "mined" by malware these days so the cost gets shifted. It was obvious from near the start that such a thing was going to happen and a few people even posted here about that a few years ago. I could say "I told you so" but somebody else with far more understanding of bitcoin than I told me first.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else read this article? He doesn't even factor in a comparison to Visa's settlement bunker in New Jersey, nor does it consider the implications once mining rewards have run out. How is this marked as "troll"? This is plain economics and was argued for a very very long time when Proof of Stake was first purposed.

Once rewards are gone, there will be few operators left, and just like the precious metals industry, they will settle on an agreed rate, keeping the network safe and using only enough computational power as to guarantee no single actor could rival it.

Taking this further, the blockchain, and it's ability to do much much much more than just bitcoin, negates all the electricity these disparate platforms would have used on their own to achieve the same level of security.

This article is click bait and misleading. Like most environmental academic types, the author was too myopic to account for the totality of the situation. No amount of "data science" and pretty graphs can fix missing/incalculable data.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[alvinrod]

Doesn't that also mean that it doesn't suffer inflation as easily as other currencies though? The fact that there's no government that can fire up a printing press and devalue the existing money supply suggests that relative to other currencies it would better retain value over time.

Also, although Moore's law is slowing down, the flip side of doubling transistor density is that you can get the same performance you previously got at about half of the power cost.

Between those two effects, it makes me think that it will still be economically viable to do similar amounts of mining, although by that time we may have moved on to some Bitcoin successor.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[radarskiy]

Mining does not just generate new bitcoins. Saying that users of bitcoin will accept transactions being verified at 1/120th the rate rather than pay transaction fees is ludicrous.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[hjf]

This is very much a problem. Most people see inflation as a negative thing. The negative thing here is the limited supply of wealth. A currency like Bitcoin which can't be devaluated is terrible: it's the end game of capitalism. It will become a game of "winner takes all"... much like most rich countries own most of the wealth in the world. With bitcoin, they literally would.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[tsotha]

This is very much a problem. Most people see inflation as a negative thing. The negative thing here is the limited supply of wealth.

No. Currency is only very loosely connected to wealth. Changing the amount of outstanding currency has no effect on wealth at all; it just changes the amount of wealth represented by each unit of currency. Like any good currency, bitcoins are divisible. It's just a number, so if it costs 1 bitcoin to buy a loaf of bread today and .01 to buy a loaf twenty years from now, that says nothing about the utility of the currency.

Inflation is taxation. It's a way to transfer money from savers to the government - nothing more.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[religionofpeas]

You can also get a higher transaction rate by increasing block size.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[religionofpeas]

It being "mined" by malware these days so the cost gets shifted.

No, nearly all bitcoins are mined by specialized chips.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[MrL0G1C]

Whilst malware does indeed mint some coins, unless it's infecting dedicated bitcoin mining silicon then it's unlikely to be mining more than a small slice of the pie.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[greenfruitsalad]

so much computing power but so painfully single-purpose. it makes me angry we can't repurpose the hardware for something useful when this craziness is over. it sure would be nice if the function these ASICs are built for could be used for something like protein folding simulation.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[MrL0G1C]

For the sake of the environment, they should allow the last 25% of the bitcoins to be mined quicker, I presume that is possible as it seems that these things are decided arbitrarily.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[AmiMoJo]

Even the malware guys have stopped bothering to mine it now. A PC with a high end GPU set to run at 100% 24/7 (as if the owner wouldn't notice the fan noise and extreme slow-down in their games) your 100MH/sec will net you a revenue of about $0.05/year.

The only practical way to mine Bitcoin these days is with a dedicated ASIC miner.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[MrKaos]

Wow, 100 insightful, never seen that before. Everything looks binary.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[bluefoxlucid]

The problem with a non-inflation currency is wealth increases by technology. Technology is simply the discovery of new techniques to produce the same goods in less labor time: we now expend about 1/2.5 as much total aggregate human labor making food as we did in 1950, and Americans spend 12% of their income on food instead of 30%. Essentially, there are fewer people making food per person, and fewer people making food per unit food produced.

That means a currency can only remain non-deflationary if we keep producing new money at the same rate we improve productivity.

So what about inflation? Why is it important?

There are four tiers of technology.

In the first tier, doing something costs so much in terms of human labor time that the world can't afford it. There was a point in time we shipped everything by ... ship ... because overland transportation cost a lot more. During the earlier part of that time, the cost of laying and maintaining steel rails and building steel rail cars (even if you had the technology to build such a thing as a steam locomotive--which they didn't) would have cost so much human labor no Government could afford it. The taxes would collapse human society; and the labor investment would preclude the production of food, clothing, and shelter--everyone would be working to build railroads, and nobody would be making food, and everyone would die. There's a long slide of time where this would just cause wide-spread poverty.

In the second tier, governments can afford it. A large body of people can pay a reasonable tax to pay all the wages of the human laborers involved in building something large. This labor isn't strictly necessary for other things, although this activity does draw from the labor pool and thus precludes other actions which may need said labor. Frequently (but not always), this tier provides some independent economic benefit, but can't itself profit directly. For example: a rail system may require less human labor (and thus less cost) than other shipping methods, but no rail company can profit from it because it's too much risk or too expensive to implement in the first place. Implementation saves more labor than it uses, and the taxes take less out of the consumer pockets than they save by the reduced cost of cheap goods shipped from all around; but the market simply can't build and operate the damn thing.

In the third tier, big businesses can afford it. A business can leverage a technology to reduce its dependence on human labor, thus reducing the cost of its goods. This one's pretty straight-forward: there was a time when only the Government could launch a satellite; now businesses are starting to put their own up there.

In the fourth tier, it becomes a consumer good. We've reduced the labor needs (and laid off enough people) so much that you only have to pay a week's salary for one guy to buy Gameboy, so there's that.

So what about inflation?

There's a consumer good category where the consumer good is large and complex, and becomes desirable well before consumers can buy it. Cars and houses are prime examples: consumers cannot buy cars because they can only spend $300/month on a car. When the car costs $20,000, you have to spend years saving for that car.

That's where debt comes in. Debt allows consumers to buy a good for money now, and pay that money back later.

In a deflationary economy, savings can happen faster, and saving for a $300,000 house might take 10-15 years instead of 30. Debt can't happen, because debt is crippling: the loan payments just get bigger every month, like a 1/1 ARM that keeps increasing the interest rate by 1% every year. Sure, it still says $1,000/month on your bill; but that $1,000 buys a hell of a lot more than it did when you bought the house, and necessarily represents a larger fraction of the per-capita income. For you to stay ahead, someone else must fall rapidly behind as you become incredibly rich.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[azcoyote]

Plus, by the very laws of capitalism it's almost certain that people will continually up their mining operations in order to account for dwindling returns. They will want to make sure that as fewer bitcoins are handed out, they themselves do not feel that decrease. So even though this growth might be offset somewhat by the decline of smaller mining operations, it is likely that larger operations will grow exponentially. (Disclaimer: I base this prediction upon human nature, not upon a strong understanding of bitcoin mining.)

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[Zeroko]

There are transaction fees...if Bitcoin is still around when the last satoshi is mined, miners will still get transaction fees, & miners will keep at it if it is profitable to do so, just like now.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[tlhIngan]

The Bitcoin mining reward halves every four years, making it less profitable in the future. Nearly 75% of Bitcoins that will ever exist have already been mined. Saying that miners will collectively be spending 30x more on electricity to mine 1/4 the Bitcoins they earn now is ludicrous.

That's where the second phase of bitcoin kicks in - mining is required in order to lock down the block chain from modification. So miners are rewarded a certain rate for validating the blockchain - they're not mining new bitcoins, but they're being paid to keep the blockchain in order. A transaction fee, if you will. Because if the miners stop working, bitcoin is dead and the miners are the ones producing blockchain hashes that lock the blockchain history.

Re: Already disputed and debunked

[StikyPad]

Bitcoin may not be divisible enough, though. It takes 2000 Satoshis to equal 1 cent today, but that can only halve 11 times before reaching parity. With deflationary trending of BTC and inflationary trending of the USD, that may happen relatively quickly -- certainly less than 100 years. At some point, 1 Satoshi is worth more than the least expensive items, and then it's utility as currency decreases.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[fsckinhippies]

Trump is here to legalize weed and nothing more.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[fsckinhippies]

No it isn't. It makes life very real. If you cant devalue the currency, you haven't given anything to the people that just want "a little more" in their pay. It is real life... Your value in this world is nothing more than what you can provide to everyone else at any given time. Inflation is nothing more than covering your ass when you say that your product is worth less when you try to charge more. Inflation is a universal tax.Kinda like the lottery but without giving people hope.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[fsckinhippies]

But I will make $15 an hour without ever trying to better myself!

Re: Already disputed and debunked

[fsckinhippies]

There is no money in it. Money is only made by the people that "guide" you to the correct investment. You want to impress me? Bernie/Trump, Trump/Bernie. They are the only people who give a shit about you. Bernie because he wants to give back (noble), Trump because Fuck You (important these days). They are one and the same if we can get over the progressive bullshit. There is a reason they are leading in the polls. I like them both, and I think that as a team the would unfuck the b-rage

Re: Already disputed and debunked

[tsotha]

That's a question of protocol, though, which can be updated without affecting the underlying currency.

Re:Already disputed and debunked

[Reziac]

How much electricity do you spend to mine one bitcoin?

negligible power will be used

[rubycodez]

compared to the energy draw for computation for everything else, it's not worth worrying about bitcoin cycles. Even the draw for the systems that track traditional currency will completely dwarf it.

Re:negligible power will be used

[dbIII]

It sounds like extrapolating a curve instead of considering what the graph represents in the first place. Bitcoin would need to be incredibly popular for that to happen. Of course the price that bitcoins attract from enthusiasts varies based on hype such as articles like these so it is in the best interests of those in the scam^H^H^H scheme to keep up the puff pieces and media attention.

Re:negligible power will be used

[rubycodez]

MW is energy, let's talk power.

The world's information systems pull 1.5 petawatt-hours of power, and banking and financial systems is one percent of that. Compared to 1.2 terrawatt-hours bitcoin use.

Re:negligible power will be used

[delt0r]

MW is power, MWh is energy.

Re:negligible power will be used

[rubycodez]

correct, I converted the MW power assuming 24x7 operation of bitcoin to MW-h

Re:So build out the blockchain on Gridcoin

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing more socially responsible or needed than a decentralized money that exists beyond the control of special interests.

All that energy just to push around electrons

[Anonymous Coward]

You could be using those cycles to crunch the cure for cancer.

Re:All that energy just to push around electrons

[OrangeTide]

Is the cure for cancer a purely computational problem? Do we have the formula and just need to "solve for X" to cure it?

I think you have a weird pop culture idea of how science works, we're not wildly scribbling on a chalk board followed by an announcement of EUREKA!

Re:All that energy just to push around electrons

[SpankiMonki]

For a time, GPU Grid went from folding proteins with volunteer's GPUs to using volunteer's GPUs for mining bitcoin to fund their research. That's when I stopped contributing my hardware for their efforts. Haven't been over there in a while, so I don't know if they're still mining instead of folding or not.

Re:All that energy just to push around electrons

[ClickOnThis]

Using computation to find "the cure for cancer" is putting it too simply.

Nevertheless, one promising approach to treating cancer is to sequence the genome of a patient's healthy cells and tumour cells, and compare the genomes. Determining the difference can speed up the choice of what drugs to use to treat the cancer.

Sequencing systems do not read an entire genome's DNA from one end to the other. They break it into multiple fragments that are tens or hundreds of bases long, read the fragments, and then reassemble the fragmented reads (with overlap-matching) to construct the genome. The last step requires a great deal of computation.

Re: All that energy just to push around electrons

[OrangeTide]

Solving corruption in centralized banking is a topic worth of research. Issues that deeply affect society include not just health issues but can also include economics and monetary systems.

You seem pretty ready to dismiss crypto currency as having a potential benefit, and while Bitcoin probably won't be worth keeping around, the information collected through this rather large scale experiment is likely to end up in future text books.

Re: All that energy just to push around electrons

[OrangeTide]

I see what you did there, you used ad hominem to diminish those you disagree with.

New unit of measure...

[Anonymous Coward]

From now on, we measure power consumption by the Denmark!

Re:New unit of measure...

[Tablizer]

But how many Library-of-Congresses in one Denmark?

CitiBank?

[The Grim Reefer]

How does this compare to how much electricity CitiBank or Bank of America uses?

Re:CitiBank?

[TheGavster]

There are 12.4M bitcoins, valued at something like $400 each. That means that the bitcoin network is tracking something like $5B in value. This is three orders of magnitude smaller than the value tracked by the computer systems of those major banks, even if all of their computing power were needed for the task. In reality, the vast proportion of that power is spent predicting the most effective enterprises in which to invest that value. Even accepting that high-frequency trading is of dubious economic benefit, there are still real economic decisions being supported by the computation.

Re:CitiBank?

[hjf]

let's be realistic: most of the power used by big banks is air conditioning and lighting for their offices...

Re:CitiBank?

[Tokolosh]

The mining industry in South Africa consumes about 3,000 MW. Most of this is for mining gold.

Re:CitiBank?

[SuricouRaven]

At least gold has a few practical uses. It's just too rare and expensive to use for most of them.

The world really needs more platinum. Specifically, I need cheap platinum so I can build a science project involving making lots of hydrogen.

Re:Not much improvement in mining?

[manu0601]

Bitcoin iis designed so that mining gets harder as new bitcoins are found

Re:Shows how much they hate humanity...

[OrangeTide]

You used electricity to post this drivel.

But then again,

[Striek]

It might not. It might consume twice as much, or possibly half. What's the point here, exactly?

Re:So build out the blockchain on Gridcoin

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you serious? Is there something stopping "special interests" from manipulating bitcoin?
WTF is wrong with people?

Beware extrapolation

[sjbe]

The numbers are very back-of-the-envelope and assume a worst case:

Translation: We did a ridiculous and naive extrapolation and then were foolish enough to think it actually means something.

Re:Beware extrapolation

[thegarbz]

Best case I'm leaving work in 20 minutes. Worst case the earth spontaneously combusts and we all die a horrible death right now. Reality will be somewhere in the middle.

Re:Huge Waste

[__aaclcg7560]

Humanity has sunk to a new low of wasteful activity.

That should be reserved for making ethanol from corn. A tax subsidy encourages the production of more corn ethanol, despite the fact that corn isn't a surplus crop. (South Americans make ethanol from surplus sugar canes.) Farmers like ethanol because it raises the price on corn, but rising corn prices also filter through the rest of the food chain from livestock feed to processed foods. Groceries are more expensive to benefit a few farmers and ethanol producers. This is one of the reasons why Senator Ted Cruz is against the tax subsidies.

Offset

[s.petry]

Every other currency also uses tons of electricity. The Bank of London does not hand carry over paper pounds to exchange for paper dollars, this is all done electronically. Banks are constantly manipulating and forecasting, and I don't hear people complaining about the electricity use for speculation.

Re:Offset

[bloodhawk]

Those banks track orders of magnitude higher volumes of currency and yet use orders of magnitude less power than bitcoin consumes. The truly sad part though is they could have actually used bitcoin to benefit mankind, their are all sorts of distributed computing projects that need processing power, they could have simply awarded the coins based on contribution to one of those projects.

Re:Offset

[hjf]

I don't think you realize that banks, DO INDEED move truckloads of cash. If I give you a check for $5M dollars, it's not just bytes moving around in a database. Banks often swap actual, physical money.

They're crooks. And they treat each other like crooks. No bank trusts another bank.

Re:Offset

[duke_cheetah2003]

Every other currency also uses tons of electricity.

Yes, but we have to have these currencies. We don't have to have bitcoins, and they use up way more electricity than already established currencies that're electronically moved around.

Just seems to me to be utterly wasteful and pointless, all around. It doesn't serve any purpose that existing currencies don't already take care of at a much lower cost of use. All the blockchain computations needed for transactions, the continued mining which is increasingly computationally expensive and less return for invested energy. All of it serves no benefit to mankind what so ever. It's even becoming just like "real world" currencies where a small percentage of people who have bitcoins have way more than everyone else combined.

Quite frankly, the only time I hear of bitcoins being used, it's usually people ripping each other off with various schemes (ransomware anyone?), hacks of bitcoin trading sites, bank scam websites that run off with deposited bitcoins or illegal transactions. What the hell is the point of bitcoin if the best feature one can attributing to them is the enabling of lot of criminal activity?

It's completely pointless. And wasteful. Did I say that already? Yeah, because it is.

Re:Offset

[SuricouRaven]

It's not that simple. There are requirements for the computationally-intense function that few tasks meet:
- Must be slow to compute.
- Must be fast to verify.
- Must be adjustable in slowness.
- Must be verifiable without anything other than the block and protocol specification.
- Completed solution must be very small in storage requirements.

Re:Huge Waste

[dbIII]

Yes that really is a good example of taking a good idea of turning waste into fuel and turning it into utter insanity of burning food for the sake of wealth of a lobby group and some votes. See the tariff on sugar for another example where expensive corn syrup replaces expensive protected local sugar that can't compete with either the corn or the cheap sugar from the rest of the world.

It just occurred to me...

[joh]

that BC is perfectly suited to outsource mining into orbit: Energy is cheap there and bitcoins are easily beamed back... A perfect product to manufacture in space. Lol.

Re:It just occurred to me...

[ClickOnThis]

that BC is perfectly suited to outsource mining into orbit: Energy is cheap there and bitcoins are easily beamed back... A perfect product to manufacture in space. Lol.

Perhaps your lol means your post is tongue-in-cheek, but anyway...

There may be lots of sunlight up there (when you're not eclipsed by the earth) but harvesting it requires large collection areas. Not the kind of thing that is easy to put into orbit. Not to mention that cosmic rays and spacecraft-charging (from e.g., solar wind and magnetic substorms) demand robust designs for electronics that are slower and heavier than what you can run on the surface of the earth.

Based on current values for bitcoins, there is perhaps about $2.1 trillion USD yet to be mined. And there's plenty of competition from other miners. I don't feel like running the cost-benefit analysis of installing and maintaining bitcoin-mining servers in orbit, but at face value, it doesn't seem like a slam-dunk.

Re:It just occurred to me...

[ClickOnThis]

there is perhaps about $2.1 trillion USD yet to be mined

DOH! Make that $2.1 billion USD based on the fact that about 75% of available bitcoins have been mined already. Apparently I'm comma-challenged.

These new numbers mean an earth-orbit bitcoin-mining server is definitely a non-starter.

Re:Not much improvement in mining?

[SpankiMonki]

Really? I'm pretty sure mining difficulty is based on mining capacity - i.e. the more computational capacity on the network at any given time the harder it is to mine a block. This is done to keep mining blocks at a constant rate. Mining difficulty changes periodically with network capacity, not how many coins are actually mined.

Re: Have after. To what issue will this come?

[BlckAdder]

A lack of mod points doth make Anonymous Cowards of us all.

Denmark electricity

[rossdee]

I thought Denmarks power all came from renewable sources anyway.
Wind, solar, hydro...
and of course tidal. If you stuck a dam across to Norway or Sweden you could use the Baltic sea as a huge source of tidal powwer.

Re:Denmark electricity

[ClickOnThis]

Good for Denmark (seriously!) but that's not the point. TFA is trying to point out the large energy-footprint of bitcoin.

Re:Denmark electricity

[BlackPignouf]

Denmark has a really good PR department.
They can only afford to have so many wind turbines because they also have a lot of dirty coal power plants, and when they produce too much electricity, they sell it at a loss to Sweden and Norway (who have many hydro power plants). Denmark has a pretty bad CO2/kWh electricity footprint.

Re:Denmark electricity

[xonen]

Denmark has a really good PR department.
They can only afford to have so many wind turbines because they also have a lot of dirty coal power plants, and when they produce too much electricity, they sell it at a loss to Sweden and Norway (who have many hydro power plants). Denmark has a pretty bad CO2/kWh electricity footprint.

This is a very inaccurate sketch of reality, and almost any statement in this sentence is untrue.

* Wind power turbines can be started and stopped with simple procedure, in contrary to a large gas, nuclear or coal plant. Wind energy is actually actively used to steer energy supply based on the demands.
The idea that you `need` coal plants to adjust for varying winds is more than a misconception. In reality, it's the other way around - large plants are monoliths that are not usually actively adjusted in output power based on the demand. Wind energy parks are capable of adapting output to demand in real-time.

* Hydro plants are are very nice solution, both for varying demands. When not used, they actively can store energy. There's nothing wrong with hydro plants. There's also nothing wrong with (high voltage / DC / bidirectional) undersea electricity cables that, once installed, help a continent create and distribute more electricity efficiently.

* Denmark produces about 50% of it's energy needs with wind power. That makes an excellent CO2 footprint per kWh.

Please stop your blatant lies and fud. Renewable energy exists, is flexible enough, greatly reduces carbon footprint, and is economically feasible.

The only reason to object renewables is if you have many stock interests in some oil-based company.

-- On-topic: I do agree that bitcoin in it's current form is mostly a waste of energy.

Re:Denmark electricity

[BlackPignouf]

Thanks a lot for all the interesting points.
My analysis was based on 2009 figures, and Denmark has shut down coal power plants since then and installed even more wind turbines.
Good point for common heat & power comparison to the UK.
Final thought : "half that of Singapore" is like saying that you're only "half as fat as Michael Moore". You're still fat ;)

Denmark use 3-5 GW, not 14 GW

[Anonymous Coward]

Denmark has a power usage around 3 GW at night and around 5 - 5.5 GW during work hours.

I'm not sure where the 14 GW comes from, but it seems way off. Granted it says power production capacity, but it still seems quite wrong. The powerplants are not that powerful and the grid would not be anywhere near handing that huge amount of power. Granted there is a growing number of windfarms, but still even during a storm they deliver "only" like 3-3.5 GW. It happens occasionally that Denmark produce more power from windfarms alone than the power usage at the same time, but it's still far from 14 GW.

I'm not linking to the source for the current power production (I suspect the live updating server wouldn't cope with traffic from a link here), but the power usage is currently 3125 MW, quite far from 14 GW.

Speaking of Denmark and running on wind energy. It's not possible to shut down the powerplants even if the windfarms can deliver enough energy. The reason is that a strong generator at a powerplant has to deliver 50 Hz and then secondary power supplies like small powerplants and windfarms adapt to that. A windfarm without a clear external 50 Hz voltage will not be able to produce power as it can't figure out what 50 Hz is on its own. This is one reason why Denmark once in a while produce wind energy and export it for more or less free without shutting down powerplants. Another reason is capacity issues in the high voltage grid. The windfarms tend to be on the west coast and far from the cities needing the power and they are actually better connected to Norway and Germany than to the eastern part of Denmark. Windfarms is more than just "getting enough" once they take up a certain amount of the power production. The problems can be fixed, but not for free.

Re:slashdot. stop.

[ClickOnThis]

i know dice bought you, but seriously. click bait that is this bad? do you want to go the way of Digg?

Where have you been? BizX bought Slashdot (and SourceForge) from Dice on 2016-01-27.

Re:On the bright side (sort of)...

[ClickOnThis]

...maybe all this Bitcoin mining will ultimately lead to civilization developing and deploying a Dyson sphere.

I think there's a Douglas Adams novel here...

I've been to paradise

[JeremyWH]

But never been to bitcoin (or Alaska for that matter)

Re:Not much improvement in mining?

[delt0r]

It is both. The amount per block changes becoming less over time. The block rate is adjusted to be more or less constant even if there is a big increase in mining capacity.

Re:So build out the blockchain on Gridcoin

[FlyHelicopters]

There is nothing more socially responsible or needed than a decentralized money that exists beyond the control of special interests.

Please pass whatever the hell you're smoking...

Lets see:

1. Feeding hungry children.
2. Curing terrible diseases.
3. Stopping war and violence

Gee, that was hard thinking of something more socially responsible or needed than decentralized money.

Re: So build out the blockchain on Gridcoin

[Burz]

Right. It's just like the other content that reads, no one will accept 1/120 of the value. Seem /. Users aren't that smart, don't understand economics, and fail to see what happens when governments declare bitcoin illegal.

Can't spend it? Can't use it. What good is it too accept a currency you can't spend in real life.

Um, you think bans are the conduit for making bitcoin corrupt? The real threat is and always was the formation of cartels. And as far as I can tell, bitcoin is 98% there.

Seriously, all financial institutions have to do to control bitcoin is to swamp its matrix with processing power. And finance specializes in processing power. Idiots!

Easy solution

[tandavanadesan]

Denmark should drastically reduce electricity consumption

Re:Huge Waste

[Burz]

No. Ethanol at least reduces smog (it is a replacement for MTBE). Bitcoin produces smog and greenhouse gases and little else.

Re:Huge Waste

[delt0r]

Let me introduce you to the internet.. Oh wait your already here! Carry on.

Re:increasing block size

[religionofpeas]

it's also in the big miner's interest to keep the currency attractive. There's no point in mining, if you can't sell your bitcoin to pay for the electricity.

Re:Huge Waste

[religionofpeas]

Bitcoin produces a useful service, just like ethanol.

Re: So build out the blockchain on Gridcoin

[religionofpeas]

Seriously, all financial institutions have to do to control bitcoin is to swamp its matrix with processing power. And finance specializes in processing power. Idiots!

Traditional processing power is useless for mining bitcoin, especially financial processing power which is more optimized for sustained I/O bandwidth rather than CPU power. For bitcoin mining you need special SHA-256 hashing chips. Of course, anyone with deep enough pockets can buy and/or develop these chips in sufficient quantities to disturb the market, if they wanted.

April Fools' day

[bluegutang]

Just saw a comment modded "(Score:11, Funny)"

I see it's April Fool's day, and the moderation goes to 11.

(though I suspect it's supposed to be 3 in binary)

Re:April Fools' day

[MrKaos]

Yeah - have a look at the UID and story ids they are a string of 0001111001010101

Re:April Fools' day

[MrKaos]

I just converted some of the binary - I think it's unicode but I am so tired my eyes are falling to take it any further.

Re:So build out the blockchain on Gridcoin

[AmiMoJo]

The problem right now is that BTC prices tend to be ridiculous. Vendors set the price by converting to their local currency plus some percentage to offset risk, which IME tends to be 200-300% or more.

What about banks?

[sad_]

How much electricity do all the banks in the world need to operate?

Re:What about banks?

[brxndxn]

I know Chase bank has multiple skyscrapers.. I wonder what their footprint is compared to Bitcoin.

Re:What about banks?

[JcMorin]

Add all the employees who got to works, they burn fuel too... Bitcoin security is not involving as much people. Most mining farm have a 1-2 guys watching a lots of computer.

Re:What about banks?

[houghi]

And what about the banks in Denmark?

We wonder

[m76]

Why humanity is doomed.
Wasting this much energy and resources on literally nothing.

Re:So build out the blockchain on Gridcoin

[Anonymous Coward]

How about not wasting energy to generate imaginary money? that seems pretty socially responsible. Trying not to ruin the world that we live in for all eternity. that i believe is more socially responsible.

Bitcoin is not socially responsible its irresponsible and wasteful.

Re:So build out the blockchain on Gridcoin

[thegarbz]

There is nothing more socially responsible or needed than a decentralized money that exists beyond the control of special interests.

Yep. It's a shame that Bitcoin didn't solve that problem.

Adaptive Economics

[SMACX guy]

Humans : correct in making the leap from wealth as currency to wealth as energy. But logic failure : wealth ultimately is extension of desire, fluctuating with emotions and state of mind. Desires : when all are supported in purely adaptable system, true wealth is achieved."

- Usurper Judaa Marr, "Human : Nature"

Re:So build out the blockchain on Gridcoin

[GLMDesigns]

1. How about producing less children.
2. Agree.
3. Agree.

But if we're going to have free people on this planet - why is decentralized money not important?

Yes a constitutionally limited government is MORE important. But decentralized money is still important.

Re: So build out the blockchain on Gridcoin

[Burz]

Yeah, special hashing chips that only grow between the unwashed toes of bitcoin bros. LOL