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.

Comments

Re:Proof of work

[m00sh]

There's proof of space proposal from the bit-torrent guy. https://www.coindesk.com/proof...

Re:Bad Math

[SlayerofGods]

Not really. Since bitcoins specifically ties mining activity to confirming transactions it's fair to link them. Now could it cost a lot less energy to confirm a transaction? Easily, but the design of bitcoin ensures that people will 'waste' as much energy as economically feasible to mine them and thus ensures the energy cost will remain high.
This is epically true since bitcoins whole purpose is to conduct transactions so it would be fair to consider all the computers, network equipment, man hours, etc in the entire system as a direct cost of conducting those transactions.
This wouldn't be any different then looking at all of Visas equipment and energy costs and dividing by the number of transactions it conducts per day to arrive at a 'cost' of swiping your credit card.

It's over 250 kWh per transaction now and growing

[RobinH]

That 215 kWh per transaction number is out of date, since the power consumption is growing so rapidly.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.