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Estimates of Bitcoin's Soaring Energy Use Are Likely Overstating the Electric Power Required To Mine the Cryptocurrency (cnbc.com)
From a report: The computer process that generates each coin is said to be on pace to require more electricity than the United States consumes in a year. This bitcoin "mining" allegedly consumes more power than most countries use each year, and its electricity usage is roughly equivalent to Bulgaria's consumption. But here's another thing you might want to know: All of that analysis is based on a single estimate of bitcoin's power consumption that is highly questionable, according to some long-time energy and IT researchers. Despite their skepticism, this power-consumption estimate from the website Digiconomist has quickly been accepted as gospel by many journalists, research analysts and even billionaire investors. That model is also the basis for forecasts of bitcoin's future energy use that remind some experts of wild projections about internet data traffic in the mid-1990s that contributed back then to companies spending far too much for capacity they would eventually not need. "Doing these wild extrapolations can have real-world consequences," said Jonathan Koomey, a Stanford University lecturer who pioneered studies of electricity usage from IT equipment and helped debunk faulty forecasts in the 1990s. "I would not bet anything on the bitcoin thing driving total electricity demand. It is a tiny, tiny part of all data center electricity use."
It's free money and anyone who says different is a rube. I just mortgaged my house and pulled my kid out of college so I could use his tuition to buy more Bitcoins!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Good point. Has anybody even proven the existence of the environment? It is probably just a scam by Big Climate.
... and journalists took the bait hook line and sinker.
Must be another day ending in Y.
"Climate change is a settled science. End of discussion"
-- Al Gore
I mine crypto currencies during the year when it is cold outside. While my electricity bill has gone up, my natural gas bill has gone down. So for cases where the waste heat is useful, should the energy consumption be treated the same?
The exact usage doesn't matter. What does matter is that all crypto mining contributes to making climate change worse. Even solar and wind powered crypto mining causes more climate change because they need lots of fossil fuel energy to manufacture solar cells and wind turbines. Crypto minning may actually be the worst cause of climate change because what's produced is so pointless.
Because it's the new religion, you just need to stop questioning it and believe.
2) Bitcoin miners are co-locating at hydro plants to get cheap energy.
case China and Russia: https://medium.com/@evawxiao/c...
"China has an enormous surplus of electricity that can be harnessed for mining. In 2016, for instance, overcapacity from hydropower stations in Sichuan and Yunnan amounted to a whopping 45.6 terawatt hours. To put that into perspective, the entire US generated 4,100 terawatt hours of electricity in the same year.* By partnering with these power stations, cryptocurrency miners get access to discounted electricity rates in exchange for a cut of the mining revenue.
Chinese miners aren’t the only ones capitalizing on surplus electricity either. A Russian company co-founded by Putin’s internet advisor is doing the same thing to drive down electricity costs, though Russia only has around 20 gigawatts of excess power to funnel into mining."
case Iceland: https://btcmanager.com/gmo-int...
"Japan-based GMO Internet, an internet and technology conglomerate, has officially kicked off its cryptocurrency mining operation. The company has not disclosed the exact location of the new mine but acknowledged that it is based somewhere in Northern Europe. [...]
The publicly listed firm hinted that as of today, the mine is drawing all its electricity from hydropower and geothermal sources."
As green as it gets.
(Also, energy usage and transaction volume are not correlated. Extrapolating Bitcoin's energy usage into the future is highly questionable to start with)
it's in my head
Climate 'science', for example, needs to face far more objective scrutiny than it currently does.
Keep your hands over your ears and go LALALALALALALAL!
PS: climate science has plenty of large corporations busy trying to prove it wrong (and failing)
No sig today...
... use more electricity.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
just like money and video games.
Well at least all those against bitcoins existence have one thing they must thank it for now, as bitcoin has somehow solved all of the worlds energy needs.
The amount of electricity the US generates in a year - and now we somehow generate all of that every 20 seconds!
OK it's not quite every 20 seconds, but certainly multiple times over in every 10 minute period.
But that's hardly important, now that we have 525600 times the electricity we had last year. Who cares if the rounding error is that number or six times that number?
I'd rather question your religion. The main problem here is a view of the world based on the best method we know of understanding it, vs. a faith-based view of the world that denies any aspect of reality that is inconvenient to its beliefs.
Bruce Perens.
Please try to act like a mature, intelligent adult in discussions here. When it comes to science, you don't prove the negative. That is, you prove that a theory is correct. You don't prove that a theory is incorrect. A theory is considered to be wrong by default, and thus has to be proven to be correct. Climate 'scientists' have not yet proven their theories to be correct. They've attempted to provide some evidence to back up their claims, but so far it hasn't been of a sufficient quality to prove their theories to be correct. The rest of us who are practicing real science, in accordance with the scientific method, have no choice but to treat these theories as being wrong until sufficient evidence is presented to prove them to be correct.
Current bitcoin hashrate is about 16E18 hashes per second for the network. Typical ASIC mining rigs do something like 1 gigahash/s for about 0.25 watts (some of the newer ones do a gigahash/s for under 0.1 watt). Do the basic math, that's about 4 gigawatts to power bitcoin currently. Yeah, that's a lot, about 3.5 nuke plants, and is enough power for some small countries like Denmark or Ireland or Cuba, at about 35ish TWhr per year. But that is a far cry from the end of the world, which uses about 22,000 TWhr/year. So bitcoin is on the order of 0.15% of the world power consumption. Given that virtually all this power is used by customized mining rigs, and there are only like 3 places that produce those, the growth rate of power consumption is heavily limited by what those companies can produce, even if the $ was there to drive it as fast as they could ramp up. Its taken about 4 years of ASIC production to get to this point (and 8ish years of bitcoin existence overall). It is disappointing that a forum with supposedly technically skilled people is so chicken little about this whole thing. Is it a lot? On tis own yeah, but not really in the whole scheme of things, and it is evolving so slowly that its not like everyone is going to wake up tomorrow and it will be taking up 50% of all the power produced in the world. Keep an eye on it but stop being so fucking alarmist about it.
Only one thing to know from the article. The numbers are suspect because nobody actually has measured the power consumption. Wild guessing doesn't count.
Once the Democrats give up on carbon taxes, we can go back to having a civilised discussion.
It's like after they lost the civil war it stopped being controversial to say that working black people to death on plantations is bad. Before the civil war, questioning drapetomania was questioning The Science.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I have a theory that climate is unaffected by mankind in any way, and is currently exactly the same as it would have been whether or not mankind existed. Of course following your rules, this theory is wrong by default and has to be proven correct. I haven't been able to do that yet. Thus until we can prove my theory wrong, the only logical conclusion is that mankind is causing the climate of the earth to change.
contributes to making climate change worse
So does your breathing. Please stop.
You have two theories. The first one you present in your first sentence. The second one you present in your last sentence. When we apply the scientific method properly we have to consider both of your theories to be incorrect until one or both have been proven to be correct. We don't just 'conclude' one to be correct. We require sufficient evidence before we come to any conclusion.
"In 2016, for instance, overcapacity from hydropower stations in Sichuan and Yunnan amounted to a whopping 45.6 terawatt hours"
that's almost 20% of the total power generated by all of China's wind turbines in 2016 or the output of nine 1 GW coal plants running at a 60% capacity factor.
Why are they not using that power?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
These "Democrats"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Central planning sucks at anticipating demand / huge differences between rainy season and dry season / China is big and the distances to other regions that would need the energy is too great
Pick one, two or three :)
it's in my head
When it comes to science, you don't prove the negative. That is, you prove that a theory is correct. You don't prove that a theory is incorrect.
You started correctly, but then you got it all wrong. You don't prove the negative (i.e. you can't prove Santa Claus doesn't exist). However, you can't prove a theory is correct (i.e. seeing a Santa doesn't mean Santa is real). You can, however, prove a theory is false if it contradicts the facts (i.e. it wasn't Santa giving me the presents, because I saw my dad buying them and my mom putting them by the fireplace).
Einstein's relativity theory isn't necessarily correct, neither is Newton's gravitational theory. Newton's laws are correct within a certain set of conditions (a slow speed relative to the speed of light, etc). However, when approaching the speed of light the theory falls apart. It contradicts the facts. Einstein's relativity theory, at slow speeds gives similar results to those of Newton's laws. And there may be conditions where it falls apart as well. Newton didn't make a random theory that he then proved correct. He made a theory that correctly predicted what he was seeing.
And if you don't understand this, you're not doing any science...
Of course, since in this specific instance the two theories are just simple, logical statements and one is the opposite of the other, then you are technically wrong: proving either of the two false automatically makes the other one true. Now, one should not pose complex scientific problems in such a basic, generic form: the question should be âoeWhat is, if any, the impact of humans on climate, and precisely what is the magnitude and what are the causes of such impact?â.
However, as previously pointed out, at this point the hypothesis that humans have and have had a non-negligible impact on Earths climate is understood to be a *fact*: we can still argue of the magnitude, and on the causes and even on the potential solutions, but our environmental impact on the world is quite clear by now.
"Much of the mining takes place in China, which generates most of its electric power from coal, prompting warnings that bitcoin threatens to wreck the environment and supersize the world's carbon footprint."
Well, at least we now know who has been artificially driving up the price of bitcoins:
The International Coal Industry Conspiracy!
As the thirst for Bitcoins exponentially expands, our renewable sources of electricity will be quickly exhausted. The only solution will be to re-open the mines and coal fired power plants.
Otherwise, the US could face a Bitcoin mine shaft gap . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
" It is a tiny, tiny part of all data center electricity use."
We're not talking data center power usage here. We're talking the actual fucking power of every piece of bitcoin mining equipment, most of which lies in consumer hands and operates at home. Then to boot there are plenty of other cryptocurrencies being mined which are more intensive on energy usage. Way to hand-wave away something you so clearly do not understand, Jonathan Koomey.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Corruption. Local grid operators want to keep coal jobs and buddy's power plant running (more jobs). Importing power equates to exporting money and jobs.
This question seems interesting so I thought I'd do a back-of-the-envelope number myself.
blockchain.info estimates the total hashing power of the bitcoin network at 14,000,000 TH/s. An antminer s9 can do 14 TH/s. Therefore the bitcoin network computing power could be approximated by 1 million antminer s9s. An antminer s9 draws 1372 watts. So if all bitcoin hashing was done by antminer s9s, we'd need 1,372,000,000 watts, or 1.4 gigawatts.
Not everyone is using the s9; some people are still using the s7, some are using ones by other manufacturers. The s9 is very popular however. Let's assume the average efficiency in hash power per watt is 30% that of the antminer s9. That gets us up to 4.6 gigawatts.
I feel good about not using a number smaller than 30% because there is a strong disincentive not to use inefficient hardware. The while I'm sure there is old hardware still hashing, the capacity of the network skews new. Looking at blockchain.info again, we see that half the capacity of the network came online within the last 5 months, so that'll certainly be newer hardware.
The estimate that TFA says is to high is 36 gigawatts, almost 8 times higher than my estimate. So I'll tentatively endorse TFA's view, dependent on the accuracy of blockchain.info's numbers.
Climate 'science' is essentially a religion because of how detached it is from the observed evidence.
Among scientists who study this all the time, you are in the severe minority here. Why should we think you are right and the majority from multiple backgrounds and disciplines are wrong?
Coming up with conclusions that fit the needs of politicians who want to impose taxes on carbon, of all the absurd things to tax, is contradictory to the scientific method.
You are mixing politics with science. The application of the latter by the former is rarely scientific. Usually more religious, customs, and emotional based. Politics has historically been a subset of religion.
But to counter, there is far far more funding, establishment, players, and status quo for proving Climate Change wrong than there is proving it right. Politically, if there was any concrete doubt in CC, we would not be having this discussion. It would have been settled and snuff out well before it hit the media.
The environment is a scam perpetuated by the Chinese to keep America from being competitive. And you can blame "Big Weather" for creating these recent storms to boost ratings.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
...you prove that a theory is correct. You don't prove that a theory is incorrect.
You don't disprove that a theory isn't incorrect.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Since bitcoin was built so that mining gets harder as new bitcoins are mined, power consumption will rise. If the numbers are not correct right now, they will be correct later.
Except if return on investment on mining hardware vanishes with the rise of mining complexity, causing miners to leave the market. That will halt bitcoin power inflation, but that will also halt bitcoin completely, since the blockchain will not be maintained anymore.
Otherwise, the US could face a Bitcoin mine shaft gap . . .
Wow. For some reason I just got a woodie. Tell me about Lenstra elliptic curve factorization, differential encoding and little endian nonces.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Coal mining => cryptocurrency mining => environment pollution => what about US$ 13 trillion!!!
If you want to reduce the electric consumption then search & buy 64-bit machines based in ARMv8 instead of hot Intel/AMD machines.
Money printing, video games, NASCAR, television studios, golf courses, and so on. You choose yer poision, etc. etc.
When it comes to science, you don't prove the negative. That is, you prove that a theory is correct.
What in the fuck are you smoking??
Even then, the amount of energy it uses isn't the entire point; Bitcoin is less efficient than other payment methods in every way by a large margin, and doesn't actually offer any practical advantages.
>As green as it gets.
No, mining is actually not necessary (ie. random hashes to find arbitrary values is just stupid). You could easily just make the hashing requirements gentle and still verify the chain. You just don't award much for mining. The whole thing is insane.
You mean Republicans lost the civil war. With Roosevelt the parties switched. But research is hard..
https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html
You obviously know nothing about science. Rarely can a theory be PROVEN correct. It's far easier to prove a theory is incorrect.
You could run test after test after test on a theory, have all the tests come up aces, and then one person could run a slightly different test and prove you were full of horseshit the whole time.
By contrast, you could come up with a theory, run a test, and have that test disprove your theory on the very first go.
Take gravity, we have a pretty good idea of what causes it, but it hasn't (and probably never will be) PROVEN. We can only approach the theory with greater and greater levels of certainty. 80%, 90%, 99.1%, 99.2%, etc.... But at any time, someone COULD come along and shoot everything down with a test that proves our current ideas wrong.
Current hash rate 1.2x10^19 Hashes per second (12am EST)- https://blockchain.info/charts...
Best miners - 10^9 Hashes per joule. https://shop.bitmain.com/antmi...
That took 2 minutes to look up and grade nine math knowledge of scientific notation. If you understand scientific notation you won't become a reporter.
You could easily just make the hashing requirements gentle and still verify the chain.
At one point the hashing requirements were gentle, but people put more an more research and investment into doing it efficiently so the difficulty rose, so they put more effort into doing it better, and the cycle perpetuated. The original white paper envisioned mining to be done by individuals, but as it turns out the particular algorithm BTC is based on happens to be possible for dedicated ASICs to process thousands of times faster than a CPU or even GPU can. Frankly even if the algorithms in use were such that only CPU mining was possible, you still need to provide enough incentive for people to mine or you risk a dedicated adversary destabilizing the network with a 51% attack.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
If you want mine your own crypto currency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.
Have you actually posted anything intelligent yet? (Yeah, I could check for myself but I'm profoundly disinterested.)
You just don't award much for mining. The whole thing is insane.
If there was no reward for mining, why would people invest the money to do it ?
Bullshit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Slight correction: "uninterested", not "disinterested".
doesn't actually offer any practical advantages.
A currency not being controlled arbitrarily inflated by a central government is not a practical advantage to at least some people?
Please try to act like a mature, intelligent adult in discussions here. When it comes to science, you don't prove the negative. That is, you prove that a theory is correct. You don't prove that a theory is incorrect.
Science is about both things. Finding out what doesn't happen tells us more about what does happen, by helping us eliminate possibilities.
Climate 'scientists' have not yet proven their theories to be correct.
That, however, is a complete lie.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, you could not. The only reason Bitcoin solves the famous Byzantine Generals' problem is due to the amount of work that goes into its Proof of Work.
it's in my head
Ok, no carbon taxes, they can start paying into everyone's medical insurance then. Something like refunding 20% of all societies medical costs would cover just the health damage done by the fossil fuel industry and their customers.
Then, among other things, we're left with the increased damage from more powerful natural disasters, something like matching the governments budgets spent on mitigating and recovering from those would be nice.
Truth.
Truth.
Truth.
Truth.
I get it though, you're too afraid to admit what the GOP has become in its quest for political power.
Because they thought bitcoins were useful outside of investing in a ruinous bubble. But we all know nobody is ever going to think that.
One thing running an ISP with a small data center has taught me is that it's not just the power used by your servers, it's also about the heat they generate. You need to remove it. So if you have a server than consumes 300 watts of power (typical for a Poweredge server with 6 SAS drives), you are going to use about 300 watts more on your AC removing the heat.
That is, you prove that a theory is correct.
Good luck with that.
Great Scott!
you prove that a theory is correct. You don't prove that a theory is incorrect.
facepalm^10.
(shakes head and walks away)
No sig today...
If you want mine your own cryptocurrency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.
Because they thought bitcoins were useful
I think bitcoins are useful, but I'm not mining myself.
"I have a theory that the Earth is flat. Of course following your rules, this theory is wrong by default and has to be proven correct. I haven't been able to do that yet. Thus until we can prove my theory wrong, the only logical conclusion is that the Earth is not flat."
Except for AGW and Round Earth theory, all of the evidence provably points to AGW and Round Earth.
'Over-capacity' for hydro does not make one iota of sense, why would you burn coal when you can have relatively free energy from the dam.
"amounted to a whopping 45.6 terawatt hours"
They could have burnt that much less coal.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
From TFA:
"I don't think anybody can make a credible claim about the current" electric power use for bitcoin mining "without actually having data from the miners."
The network hashrate is easily computed from the difficulty and block generation rate or you can look it up here:
https://www.coinwarz.com/netwo...
Today it's 13000PH/s
The antminer s9 specifications are here:
https://shop.bitmain.com/speci...
100 watts per terahash is 100 Kw per petahash.
I'm no multiplication genius, but doesn't 13,000 PH 100Kw/Ph multiply out to 1.3Gw ignoring cooling?
The estimate, with cooling, should be within an order of magnitude of that. Anything higher should be viewed with some skepticism.
Confusing incredulity with inflammatory rhetoric because someone else has a completely backwards notion of the scientific method: priceless.
The grid cannot handle it?
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
At any point in time a lot of miners are trying to find a hash for a block. Currently, on average someone finds a solution every ten minutes and thus a new block is formed. The clock resets at that point as previous block is used, along with new transaction data, to form the next block.
All Bitcoin mining power consumption data is based on estimates as miners who fail to find a solution can only be estimated. I think the power consumption is higher than estimated as we fail to take into account miners who did not find the solution but consumed power.
With large miners moving to cheaper sources of power, the rest of the users are pushed to marginally more expensive sources of power.