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One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses As Much Energy As Your House In a Week (vice.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader SlaveToTheGrind quotes Motherboard:
Bitcoin's incredible price run to break over $7,000 this year has sent its overall electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency. An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.
This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
Is the ever-increasing proof-of-work requirement inherent with virtual currency (or even blockchain in general), or is there a more efficient way to make it work?
And this crypto-currency mining....
The energy spent *MINING* a bitcoin is not at all close to the energy spent *TRANSACTING* a bitcoin. Why is this even a metric?
The price of one bitcoin is.. .ugh, $6400 right now. The mining will stop when the cost of mining (hardware + electricity) exceeds the current or expected future price.
In a way it's just like gold, or oil.
It is ironic that in a era where most people are talking about:
* Energy efficiency
* Energy independence
* Emissions reduction
* Green power production
we are racing to consume [waste] tons of energy to produce "currency" which doesn't actually produce any goods or services. Imagine consuming megawatts of energy just to produce currency that could then be used to later buy things like, perhaps, more megawatts of energy. Seems insane.
And this alone ensures bc will never receive a blessing from progressives, who if they had their way would be throwing SUV owners in jail.
I wonder if Satoshi Nakamoto did any back of the envelope calculations on home much energy humanity would have to expend to create all 21 million BTC.
I use bitcoin miners to heat my apartment and my retail location. One has electric heat anyway.
At some point, if the price of 1 bitcoin falls below a certain threshold, it will be unprofitable to continue running the computers to process the transactions, and the entire network will cease to exist overnight.
Yeah, I can't afford Bitcoin, because I have an overwhelming need to eat this week.
Thanks for causing economic inequality, techbros.
This is how Bitcoin is crime against not only the humanity, but eventually against the universe.
Am I the only one being shocked by roughly 900 kWh a month for a normal household in the US? The value is over double the average German usage...
What are you guys doing? x_X
Before or after smart meters?
Average drivers in the tested zone get 3 nails in their tires each week...
After laying nails down all over the roads in the "tested zone". Hey it ain't illegal so we might as well make it a problem so someone has to fix it right?
Other than resulting in something tangible and useful? Yes. Otherwise, it's exactly like when I mine items to make money in my favorite MMORPG.
BITCOIN must be stopped!!
IT is consuming more and more energy and is killing the planet !!
BITCOIN must be ruled illegal everywhere on earth ASAP !!
Am I the only one who actually tried dividing 24 billion by 365 and then by 300000? That's an amount of power enough to run an average electric oven for 3 minutes (which is still a lot)
Digiconomist's less optimistic estimate for per-transaction energy costs now sits at around 215 KWh of electricity. That's more than enough to fill two Tesla batteries, run an efficient fridge/freezer for a full year, or boil 1872 litres of water in a kettle.
Can someone express this in football fields, olympic sized swimming pools, libraries of congress or trips to the moon?
> to create all 21 million BTC
No need to create. All 21 million BTC and many more, supposedly impossible BTCs are already known and printed in a book wrapped in the rawhide of virgins. The elliptic crypto, whose theory nobody yet fully understands in the civilian academic science sphere, has a very peculiar starting value in its BTC implementation. It was selected such that those in the know can generate all the BTC procedurally in polynomial time, using just basic arithmetic.
The clueless have to mine however and when they have converted all the criminals' paper money and gold and old master paintings into BTC, the FBI/NSA will pull the rug under them by simply leaking all possible bitcoins and a lot of "impossible clone" coins, thereby collapsing the alchemy-like BTC scam overnight. The drug crime groups will then start to kill each other owing to the collapse of their ecosystem and society will be automagically cleared of such scum.
Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
Would be 3-5 weeks for other western countries who actually insulate their houses, use modern appliances and lighting.
Given that the average electric bill per household per month is substantially less that $7,000 (price of BTC), its economically viable to keep doing this. The cost to the environment is another thing. Letâ(TM)s just hope that some of those bitcoins are put towards research to mitigate the environmental cost.
I pay my power bill using bitcoins. I noticed that I have to build out exponentially more bitcoin mining infrastructure every month, but I thought that was normal. I guess I should have realized something was amiss when we built the 60-acre data center. Anyhoo, the 3,600-acre data center will be sufficient, I am confident.
We need DIGITAL currency that BTC currently is not:
- has low latency transactions (seconds at most, scaling problem, transaction history drag)
- is eco-friendly = transactions are near free (minimum payment for watts/others/intermediaries/...)
- the price is fixed (to avoid speculations/currency being a subject of trade instead of tool for trade, maybe price fixed to Basket of Goods?)
+ all the cool features that BTC curently has like limited amount of coins (to avoid inflation), security, validability, decentralization, ...
We need a new solution. BTC is a great start but it is not a solution yet.
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
So to break bitcoin, can you code an endless loop that keeps sending bitcoin back and forth between two accounts over and over? would this basically end bitcoin?
The origination and purpose of currency is ... to pay taxes. Gents with the long spears and full-auto battle rifles determined that. Jobs tax attourney bitches at gawd "... and just how does my client expect to cut Pharoah his 10% with all this //Satiin roams the world// metaphysical shit slaughtering bit-sheep ...?" Makes ya wonder eh hoser Do BC pay taxes ?
There is a small benefit to the increasing cost of mining BTC, in that it pushes the technology of high speed computing, including economizing on power consumption.
in other words, humans are so stupid that they can never appreciate or understand anything until they destroy it
please go extinct soon
Each transaction costs about $32.25 just in energy used alone at my peak rates.
What a fucking waste.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yes. Proof of Stake requires almost no electricity at all, as the blockchain is determined by who puts up the largest stakes. The reason Proof of Stake isn't popular is because it's a "rich get richer, poor may as well not play" system, just like capitalism.
No, the "rich" and the "poor" experience the same percentage increase in wealth. The problem with proof of stake is getting started, the distribution of coins from the founders to the masses. In proof of work there is a basis for coin distribution, "work", but for proof of stake?
Also note that "stake" is not simply how many coins you have. The age, the amount of time you have held those coins, is also factored into the "stake". So those who hold coins get a little extra compared to those who just trade.
One strategy may be starting with proof of work to get that "early" distribution of coins and then switching to proof of stake. Bitcoin may have sufficient coin distribution to switch to proof of stake. I believe Ethereum is adopting such a strategy and eventually switching over.
Contrary to a PoW-chain absent a +51% cartel
In 2014 a single mining pool reached 50%.
https://www.coindesk.com/51-at...
As bitcoin mining in increasingly centralized on expensive specialized ASIC hardware, as individual/small miners increasingly host remotely (where they don't have physical control of ASICs) where electricity is inexpensive, bitcoin insecurity is increasing.
Bitcoin was designed with the assumption of distributed mining. With many small players contributing to the blockchain, as in the early days when CPU and GPU mining was practical. That assumption of bitcoin's design has turned out to be false, bitcoin is vulnerable.
The energy spent *MINING* a bitcoin is not at all close to the energy spent *TRANSACTING* a bitcoin. Why is this even a metric?
Mining subsidizes transaction fees.
Mining is sort of like a fixed cost, transactions fees like a variable cost. You have to factor in both.
That 215 kWh per transaction number is out of date, since the power consumption is growing so rapidly. Last I saw, late this week, it was over 250 kWh per transaction. This is a ridiculous amount of electricity to consume per transaction. Sure, bitcoin is an interesting experiment, but the power consumption problem needs to get fixed. At some rough cost of $0.10 per kWh, that's creating a cost of $25 per transaction. Insane.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
It goes just a bit beyond that. It is to allow for the accumulation of the product of others work output by both governments and the rich. In a fully barter society, it is much more difficult for really rich folk to exist.
Bitcoin is 9yo crap. Check out IOTA!
The flip side is that there is a huge profit motive here to actually pursue some of the many ways that energy usage could be reduced. This could create the incentive for someone to take a new approach that could then save energy throughout the computing industry which consumes orders of magnitude more energy than bitcoin mining alone. Many breakthroughs and milder advances spinoff from people madly pursuing wealth. How much of the modern internet would we have without the energy wasted on distributing porn?
From the "I'm not saying it's aliens - but IT'S ALIENS" department:
I recently read speculations that Satoshi Nakamoto is actually an alien space probe, sent to destroy our civilisation.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
It's hard to 'inefficiently' generate heat.
Other than to generate most of it at the power plant and only a small fraction in the residence where the heat is used. A natural gas furnace is less expensive to operate than an electric heater, even though only 80 percent of the free energy in the gas goes to heat (with the other 20 percent out the exhaust pipe), because all the heat generation happens in the residence.
Just because it is tangible and useful doesn't mean that it is valuable. Water is tangible and useful.
I mentioned diamonds and gold because the price of those commodities is far higher than their intrinsic value.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
...easier & more profitable...especially if you sell it for Bticoin!
Hey, pull my finger.
According to this: https://blockchain.info/de/cha...
we have up to 350k transactions per day. (This has similar numbers: https://www.quandl.com/data/BC...)
So we "waste" 350,000 weeks of american households energy, per day.
Where on the planet are the power plants supporting that?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
PoS is ponzi, PoW is money backed by energy.
And this is why Bitcoin is doomed to failure. The idea of a deflationary mechanism, making bitcoins rarer and rarer as time progresses, made it an automatic investment mechanism. But the increasing rarity increases in proportion to ever more computational work. If the worth ever goes down, or probably even appears like there's an outside chance of going down below transaction cost then bitcoins become worthless instantly.
Let's see who has, or rather had two months ago, the intelligence to sell and get out at the peak before the crash.
Finally, Some one is pointing out how much energy is used to simply create an imaginary coin. Talk about green house effect and waste of natural resources you can't get any bigger a waste than bitcoin (small 'b' as it has plenty of "B" in the "BS" department).
Make it illegal to waste energy. Increase taxes on energy waste and get rid of the kiddie/criminal crap factors.
$0.10 ... here in Belgium it's €0.30 / kWh !
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Apples-to-footballs headline notwithstanding, this is one of many huge problems cryptocurrencies as a whole need to solve before they can ever become mainstream. Overthrowing the fiatocracy or whatever is somewhat less of a triumph if the surface of the planet is 500 degrees when you're finished.
Forget about proof-of-blank, why not actually replace the "pointless" cryptographic puzzles that constitute mining with, well, actual work? Even today, we need orders of magnitude more GPUs crunching things like 3D renders and protein folding simulations. Golem, the Render token, and CureCoin all represent a much more sane and legitimately useful excuse to throw electrons at cryptocurrency mining.
You don't think water is valuable? Are you delusional?
Water may not be particularly valuable where you are, but in many parts of the world it is possibly the MOST valuable commodity.
Warlords managed it just fine.
First, I only skimmed TFA but the summary is confusing: it makes sense economically to spend at most x energy to mine BTC, but are bitcoins really mined for this amount of energy? Since there seems to be speculation on the BTC price in dollars, it is not necessary correlated to the cost of mining...Or am I missing something? Second, it could be made clearer if we talk about a house energy consumption, or just electricity, and in which country/climate... Last, I have an innovative proposal for improving radically the efficiency of bitcoin: Use a technology called "Databases" managed by entities that society agrees to consider trustworthy in this area (maybe call them governments, or central banks, or banks that are "too big to fail"...Be creative) and centralize the ledgers. It will be much much more efficient...No?
> This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.
That's just being silly. Imagine a company that has three vice presidents and spends $1 billion per year. I can say that company spends "over $300 million per vice president per year". But, of course, that's nonsense because there's no sensible reason to divide the yearly cost by the number of vice presidents. They can't fire one vice president to save $300 million per year nor would it cost them $300 million to add another vice president. So what's the sense of this?
Similarly, there is simply no sensible reason to divide the energy cost by the number of transactions. Reducing the number of transactions won't reduce the energy cost and increasing the number won't increase it. The energy used by bitcoin mining and the number of bitcoin transactions performed are pretty much completely independent and there is simply no reason to divide one by the other.
You work 8 hours a day. You eat 3 meals a day, at each of which you chew mouthfuls of food an average of 200 times. Therefor, each time your jaw moves requires 48 seconds of work.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Saying "One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses As Much Energy As Your House In a Week" suggests that the marginal cost of a Bitcoin transaction is outrageously high. The article makes it clear that it's talking about the average cost, not the marginal cost.
Seriously, crypto mining has to be one of the most wasteful endeavours invented by human kind. Yes, it is cool, yes it is fun, yes it is nerdy but seriously people. We are wasting a lot of energy which translates to fossil fuel emissions which we as nerds should be working towards eliminating.
Because I didn't RTFA, I don't know if the article and/or headline and/or summary is sloppy in its math or unaware of the difference between a transaction and a block. Or in its estimate of how much electricity a typical (presumably American) house uses in a week. So it would be inappropriate for me to quip: Unless you're Al Gore, in which case it only takes about two days.
Instead, I'll just note that if Bram Cohen's "proofs of space and time" variant works out -- https://chia.network/ -- the cost of at least one cryptocurrency should not have that problem.
And if my understanding is correct, it will cost less and less to produce over time, as the price of storage declines. (Presumably this will be a feature, rather than a bug.)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
"Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month"
WoW!! that is on average 3 times more than European people, and they are not very energy efficient either.....!
WTF are they using this energy for in the US???
There you are spamming amazon affiliate links with yet another fake account, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!
You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.
Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.
How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????
The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!
You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!
When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!
Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!
Bonus:
Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:
The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!
So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!
Signed:
The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!
I have a mining rig...So not my house.
I'm in Ontario, Canada and it's difficult for me to actually say what electricity costs per kWh. It ranges by time-of-use, of course, with about double the cost during peak times vs. off-peak times. Those prices are around $0.10 per kWh. However, delivery is outside that, and typically doubles the cost of the bill. In industry it's completely different. They may only pay $0.01 per kWh but get huge charges for delivery and peak usage. As I said, it's no longer easy to say what electricity actually costs per kWh.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain