'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.

Comments

Is there a way to do real work?

[drinkypoo]

Lots of computing is done, and few people complain about the energy consumption. It's only when it's computation for the sake of expensive computation that it becomes offensive. Is there any way to do some kind of real work in the process of generating this data, or would that inherently compromise the security of the system (or render it impossible?)

Re:Is there a way to do real work?

[Bing Tsher E]

You can always do your cryptocurrency computation only in the winter, in a northern climate, and use the heat to warm your house.

Re: Is there a way to do real work?

[tipo159]

An air-to-air heat pump basically becomes an electric heater (the air is heated in the air handler using resistive elements) when the temps drop below 35-40 deg F.

Rube Goldberg is Astonished

[sycodon]

More and more people are using Rube Goldberg logical arguments to derive some kind of statement that X is Bad.

The argument usually has an excessive number of premises, each premise depending on the previous, and bordering on, if not explicitly, being a non sequitur.

Somewhere, someone probably has created a proof that shows that the likelihood of an argument being correct diminishes with the number of premises it requires.