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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?
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.
Maybe he never expected that much power going to mine them. As far as I understand it, the less people mine it the easier it gets but it still works.
#DeleteFacebook
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?
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.
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.
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
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."
You don't need to generate it, you just need to move it. That's what heat pumps are for. Much more efficient than converting electrical energy into heat.
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!
No. This isn't stupidity. This is exactly the kind of optimization of resources that humans are extremely good at and that nature does through evolutionary trial-and-error.
You'll burn through your coins doing that... you have to pay the transaction costs. If the miners think your transaction payment is too low, they don't have to accept your transaction. If you aren't adding value somewhere, the system will eventually drain you dry.
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.
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.
$0.10 ... here in Belgium it's €0.30 / kWh !
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
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.
> 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.
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.
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
amen to that ... using the analogies of analogies "the car" ... lets say a car is made from a certain amount of matter .. it includes a certain amount of actual manual labour, the transport by the time it gets to the 'sales-zone' need not be included in the original absolute value, all energy spent on the fabrication process from raw material, processing, logistics of materials, manufacturing, labour etc combined would be the absolute value of the car, expressed in energy(-units) .. i'm not the numbers guy and i think its way beyond omega as is to calculate like that, but that way the same car would have the same value ... there could be no currency wars and making money with money would not be an option. But it would give everything an undeniable absolute value ...
... there HAS to be a point where there's no planet left, unless there's a constant input of matter (from whatever meteorites smash into the atmosphere ... burning up does not mean the matter has been nullified, it means its transformed, right ? gaseous, which under certain circumstance can sediment or solid)
where do i go with these question ?
... i thought there was a lot of smart people out there, cos thats beyond my omega for sure
... i dont think satoshis mindset handled the standard normal mindset ... just like the standard normal mindset couldnt handle the satoshi set
energy should be the one and only universal currency unit
anyone feels the callnig to calculate ?
im still looking for the turing-wonderr to calculate how many molecules can be used before the whole planet is made of humans and at the current expansion rate of the population how many years that would give, without going into sustainability, as gedanken exp simply the amount of matter (lets say molecules or atoms to keep it simple available and the average amount needed to build one human
i know i dont go here with them and frankly i have found no one who could even approximate me an answer
bitcoin mining as such will stop when the max amount is reached, however everyone birthing their own crypto nullifies that too
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?