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One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses As Much Energy As Your House In a Week (vice.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the magic-and-energy-intensive-internet-money dept.

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.

13 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. Bad Math by freeze128 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The energy spent *MINING* a bitcoin is not at all close to the energy spent *TRANSACTING* a bitcoin. Why is this even a metric?

    1. Re:Bad Math by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The energy spent *MINING* a bitcoin is not at all close to the energy spent *TRANSACTING* a bitcoin. Why is this even a metric?

      What metric should be used and why? The purpose of currency is to provide a means to conduct transactions, so in that sense it seems reasonable as the metric is tied to the purpose.

    2. Re:Bad Math by SlayerofGods · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes.
      Bitcoin has two contradictory goals. On the one hand it needs everyone to have the same information. The network couldn't work if I think I have 10 coins and you think I have 5. The way this classically works is you just have an authority keep track of it, the bank. You can simply ask the bank how much money you or anyone else has in the account.
      But bitcoin doesn't want a central authority so how can it keep track of who owns what and whose paid who? It uses a consensus based on whatever group has the most computing power. And they're rewarded for this work with a few new bitcoins and that reward is called 'mining'.
      So 'mining' is simply the act of gathering up all the transactions the network wants to do and 'signing' it with your massive computer power and pushing it out to the world. You can't have transactions with out mining.
      However bitcoin scales directly to the mining power on the network, so if everyone just closed up right and only you were left you could run all the transactions on a general purpose CPU if needed. So there is no reason it has to be wasteful, but the way it works is the greater the reward for mining the more it encourages people to waste electricity.

      --

      Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
  2. Irony by markdavis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Proof of work by m00sh · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  4. Re:Proof of work by LordKronos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    Because we know that with Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work system, it's the poor that can afford racks full of ASIC miners, right?

  5. I pay for my house energy usage in bitcoins by hxnwix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Proof of work by mschwanke97402 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because Bitcoin isn't ANYTHING like that.

    Oh wait.

    Exactly! BitCoin is the most ridiculous, sketchy snake oil that has ever been peddled. Now we find that it is extremely wasteful of energy as well. The day bubble bursts and everyone's money has evaporated into the cloud can't come too soon.

  7. Re:Proof of work by mschwanke97402 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You mean just-like-Trotsky-ites ... pimping the pauper with the words THEFT-AGENDA substituted for the word RICH.

    Or just like the fascists selling a middle class tax cut on the tired old theory that when we give the lion's share of that tax cut to the big corps and the 1% that it will all trickle down to the middle class, eventually. Yes, Trump's economic adviser, Gary Cohn, used the phrase trickle down in an interview just a couple of days ago.

    When the rich run the system, Trump's promises notwithstanding, they rig the system to make themselves even richer, so, yes, you could call it a theft agenda.

  8. Re:Proof of work by Troed · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, the reason PoS isn't popular is because it's provably insecure.

    Contrary to a PoW-chain absent a +51% cartel, it’s mathematically proven that it is impossible to determine the “true” transaction history in a PoS blockchain without an additional source of trust. If a source of trust is always needed, a potential pandora’s box of attack and centralization scenarios is opened. This is a seed of truth behind the joke that Ethereum plans to use “proof of Vitalik”.

    (follow the links for the actual paper)

    https://medium.com/@tuurdemees...

    --
    it's in my head
  9. Nothing theoretical about Bitcoin's insecurity by perpenso · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. It's over 250 kWh per transaction now and growing by RobinH · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  11. Re:Proof of work by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Now we find that it is extremely wasteful of energy as well.

    “Now”? As if we didn’t know about this, all along?

    --
    #DeleteChrome