Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
These "Democrats"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body