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'Bitcoin Could Cost Us Our Clean-Energy Future' (grist.org)
An anonymous reader shares an article: Bitcoin wasn't intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators envisioned it as a replacement for money itself -- a decentralized, secure, anonymous method for transferring value between people. But what they might not have accounted for is how much of an energy suck the computer network behind bitcoin could one day become. Simply put, bitcoin is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. What's more, this is just the beginning. Given its rapidly growing climate footprint, bitcoin is a malignant development, and it's getting worse. Digital financial transactions come with a real-world price: The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created an exponential demand for computing power. As bitcoin grows, the math problems computers must solve to make more bitcoin (a process called "mining") get more and more difficult -- a wrinkle designed to control the currency's supply. Today, each bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to power nine homes in the U.S. for one day. And miners are constantly installing more and faster computers. Already, the aggregate computing power of the bitcoin network is nearly 100,000 times larger than the world's 500 fastest supercomputers combined. The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge -- an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.
Depending on the denomination ,the cost of printing a US dollar note is between 5.4 cents and 15.5 cents:
https://www.federalreserve.gov...
Sorry, no, that's the equivalent of coin MINING. We are talking about the TRANSACTION costs right now.
.000125 house-days per transaction. The numbers I have access to indicate that each BTC transaction uses 8.5 house-days per transaction.
USA Today fluff piece indicates that a Visa payment processing center uses 50,000 house-days of power every day, but they use that to process 400 million transactions per day. That works out to
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
If it creates a worldwide non-government controlled currency, it will be worth the struggle. A day when no government can create or destroy money is a win for the world.
Its not really on a path to do so. Yes it was designed to do so but designs often lose to reality. The reality of bitcoin is that we do NOT have decentralized mining.
In 2014 a mining pool reached 50% of the hashrate, IF they made it to 51% and had bad intentions there could have been a successful attack on the blockchain.
Today Chinese mining pools control 70% of all the hashrate, that seems vulnerable to the wishes of a single government.
Bitcoin was designed so that individuals and their computers did the mining. Instead we have mining performed by exotic and expensive ASIC hardware that it under the control of only a few. Even when individuals "own" the hardware they often have it colocated somewhere where there are inexpensive fees and low cost electricity. Their bitcoin mining rig is not really under their control and may be in a different country.