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Nobody Knows How Much Energy Bitcoin Is Using (vice.com)
dmoberhaus writes: A new report published in 'Joule' today claims Bitcoin may use up to 0.5% of the world's energy by the end of this year. We often hear about how bad Bitcoin is for the environment -- it already uses the same amount of energy as the country of Ireland -- but these numbers are usually just the /minimum/ amount of energy the network must be using. The actual amount of energy used by the Bitcoin network is likely substantially higher, but getting an accurate reading on that energy level is hard. The only researcher trying to quantify Bitcoin's energy use spoke to Motherboard about opening Bitcoin's 'black box.'
Especially considering web page scripting running stuff in ways as anti-efficient as you can get, relying on millons of copies to keep up with the Joneses.
Still, if it helps drive green generation, well, that's right in line with supply and demand.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Bitcoin is the same push of technology somewhat comparable to the very early car prototype that actually worked, which is MB model 1886, https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Both prototypes are operational. Both are not really good at how energy is consumed. Both have a capacity that is realy low However, both deliver from point A to B. Also, they both served a prototype, a grandaddy for the future models. MB 1886 still runs they way it has been designed 130 years ago and Bitcoin will run they way it is designed 130 years from now.
I seriously doubt that. Guess what requires energy every time it's spent or used?
how much bandwidth does it consume?
You can always toss some solar panels and a powerbank into your cabin in the woods to mine.
I know there are concerted efforts to thermal map grow sites, and bitcoin miners are starting to be of interest.
The power company knows how much electricity you're using, and they can figure out from your billing information if you're doing something "extra"
You raise an interesting point about current money using a lot of energy and resources to maintain; however, I'd be shocked if it were 0.5% of all energy produced (as bitcoin is being quoted as using). I've no doubt bitcoin uses more. A lot more.
Also, bitcoin is used by what, about 1 million people world wide? Whereas cash is used by... 6 or 7 BILLION people.
1 million- using 0.5% of all energy (and only a small fraction of that 1 million are miners using it), is a disproportionate amount of energy. Imagine if the other 7 billion of us started using bitcoin too. The energy usage would go up.
Yes, it uses power, but so do fiat currencies
Yes, but fiat currencies have a well-defined useful purpose.
Bitcoin is just a vehicle for rich boys to sucker money out of Stupid People.
Electronic banking also takes power, and given how many servers and things in banks throughout the world it's not a trivial amount of power. But even so, the very nature of Bitcoin both in mining and in transactions makes me suspect the difference in energy used per unit compared to traditional electronic banking is huge. It might be multiple orders of magnitude.
As for paper currency is, I'm not sure that is relevant, as that is slowly being phased out in first world countries.
It's not an apples to apples comparison, because bitcoin is not needed in this world or any other world, whereas normal currency is.
Suppose a new fad appears where people are burning big piles of coal stacked in the shape of a giant penis. Say it becomes really popular. Critics then point out that it's a waste of energy and emitter of greenhouse gases. Defenders of penis coal justify this by saying,
"But the CO2 emissions from cars is much bigger than CO2 emission from penis coal. So it's not a problem, cars pollute more than penis coal."
How much power is being saved due to heating uses that aren't necessary? Ultimately a computer turns electrons into heat while doing some useful stuff (like playing cat videos) while doing it. The heat is no less for playing the cat video. So a computer is effectively the same as a resistive heater like a space heater is. So if a computer is a space heater which turns its power almost entirely into heat, it must be offsetting heating needs some of the time and increasing cooling needs other times.
Not just money. How much energy is wasted by people watching funny cat movies, playing games, or any other kind of unproductive entertainment ?
I literally do this all the time. Paying in bitcoin is often faster than cash. If it's taking longer, you're doing it wrong, and either YOU or the person receiving it is retarded.
To be fair, the discussion is how much energy fiat takes vs bitcoin, not how much money it takes.
Unless they are using that burning of penis shaped coal to power cars, the analogy doesn't really work.
BTC, by design, is as expensive to create and operate as possible. It is going to be difficult for anything to be as bad at the same scale of usage.
So what. Why should we care. As long as the power isn't being stolen who cares. Spend your money however you want.
I'd say if you're running your bitcoin farm on solar, then no one cares. If you're running it on coal. The environment cares.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
One way to think about it is that BTC needs to do all the same things in terms of power usage as the current banking network AND large amounts of expensive math on top of it. The power cost for mining is in addition to the power consumed by doing stuff the banking system also does.
A printing press does not use a lot of energy. Hell, even smelting metal for coins doesn't use anywhere near that much energy.
Visa averaged 6kJ each for 111.2 billion transactions in 2017. Compare that to Bitcoin, which at most favorable estimates (only 0.3% of world energy), averaged 3GJ each transaction. That's 500,000 times as expensive. VISA uses less than 0.3% of Bitcoin's nominal usage, and probably 0.1% of Bitcoin's total usage. Yet it processes many orders of magnitude more transactions.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
For 300 bitcoins I'll tell you how much.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm sure Bitcoin seemed like a good idea at the time but the thought of the human race's death being hastened due to a made-up currency for drug dealers and launderers is hard to swallow.
The major difference is that with all those other examples there is no arms race for power usage. The more energy you sink into mining the bigger the payoff you get, and the system can support essentially an infinite amount of energy input. So energy usage will always scale up to match energy cost, while in those other domains energy usage is a cost that only drives down profit.
They're not even able to handle the transactions going on now in any reasonable length of time.
So you're paying huge premiums to have your transaction processed? It requires mining to complete.
That a nifty thought experiment from 2008 now uses a measurable and rapidly increasing percentage of global energy output should be cause enough for geekdom to feel ashamed of itself.
That the end result of this energy use is ensuring we can maintain FSM-knows-how-many simultaneous copies of a rapidly-growing 167 GB file for the purposes of maintaining a fraud-rife, impractical-to-use, and highly volatile digital currency should have us cowering in our basements and refusing to ever show our faces in polite society again.
wait
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
And how much energy is wasted by space aliens flying around Alpha Centauri in their rocket ships?
Oh wait, I think you, I, and the GP have maybe lost sight of anything remotely on-topic or relevant to the discussion at hand.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If you're running it on any relatively scarce commodity driving up prices, the world cares.
0.5% of worldwide power generation?
No amount of dollar bills ever cost that much per year.
No, you set your own fee. I pay about a $0.06 premium for using bitcoin per transaction.
But how much energy is used by other currencies?
That's a lot harder to figure out, since every currency note has to be manufactured, and occasionally cleaned, or burned and remanufactured, there are also the processing of raw materials that went into every currency note. Furthermore, all the human labor and equipment involved in counting, processing, and distributing coins and notes. Even with electronic payments; there is a massive amount of 24x7 server and datacenter infrastructure to run JUST the banking functions, and these applications are closed-source, and not necessarily designed to be efficient in terms of the size and power consumption of the centralized infrastructures required to support them.
It's worth pointing out that unlike other currencies... BTC's not manufactured, so there's not a small number of single locations where energy is consumed. If BTC is using 0.5% of the world energy.... it's not the SAME as a country, because all the energy consumption is NOT in one place. BTC uses distributed mining, and the locations of mines are likely to be in places where there is a surplus of energy resulting in the cost being low ---- as pointed out, Bitcoin can help provide a stable base energy demand to justify construction of more renewable energy production capacity that humans need anyways, and when the NORMAL demand picks up, Bitcoin mining will slow down/move elsewhere, because mining becomes less profitable the more demand there is for the energy.
Pointless, really.
I don't NEED a bank to spend money.
If you want to include the BTUs my body expends trading money with some dude, sure
So let's assume the article is write 0.5% of worldwide power generation, and my local electricity charge of $.20/kwh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption
Says in 2012, WW energy consumption was 20900 TWh.
so 20900 M kwh.
$4,180,000,000
I think I did that math right.
Your assumption is that the money spent on banks and other institutions would NOT be spent in a BTC regime, and I beg to differ.
The costs of using Bitcoin do not scale linearly, and go up the more transactions that are on the ledger. There is probably 10 orders of magnitude more cash (real or digital) than BTC transactions.
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all
Shows a maximum of 500K confirmed daily transactions in BTC.
Shit, this happens in my city of 50K probably every day,
$1B out of the global GDP OF $84 trillion is only .0011% of overall economic activity. Assuming that energy consumption of most economic activities is roughly proportional to cost, you've only accounted for 1/420th of Bitcoin's energy use.
And don't forget that the US dollar is used for orders of magnitude more total transaction value than Bitcoin. Even if you add in the energy use of the portion of the global banking industry that deals specifically with fiat currencies, here is simply no way that they use anywhere near the amount of energy per unit of value transacted as Bitcoin does.
The same with be true with BTC or other crypto currencies.
The physical cost of that money may go away, but the costs of accounting for it and protecting it digitally will not.
The US government is a bit behind the curve. Most world governments have phased out smaller denomination bills and many have replaced larger bills with more durable materials.
Even so, the vast majority of transactions are purely electronic, and those electronic transactions use an almost negligible fraction of what bitcoin does.
Bitcoin's problem is that it replaces centralized trust with proof of awesomeness, and they chose "how many computers can you use to burn how much electricity to do something completely useless" as their definition of awesomeness.
I'm not clued up enough to know if the current 1 million miners could handle 7 billion people's worth of transactions but if they could increases in energy usage would be negligible.
The chain has a fixed transaction throughput no matter how people are mining.
If so many people adopt Bitcoin, then they'll need to be fully using a multilayer scaling solution such as Lightning network for all their transactions.
How does bitcoin compare?
Basically, bitcoin's problem is that it replaced gold's natural scarcity with artificial scarcity produced by imposing a high energy cost to generation and transaction. Consequently, its production and transaction costs are roughly two orders of magnitude higher than traditional currencies. Mathematically, it (blockchain) is a brilliant concept. But it's obvious its developers had little practical knowledge of both monetary economics and day-to-day business economics.
There may have been all of 15 minutes right at the beginning that it wasn't cancerous, but after that it was cancer 24/7/365. Just kill it all off and make it go away.
So I get it, bitcoin is using massive amounts of energy to power it. But how much energy is used by other currencies? Both in the creation and the destruction of the currency? It costs a lot of money to maintain paper bills and coins.
Very little actually, because 1) the vast majority of money in circulation is electronic these days, not printed or minted; 2) electronic money transfers of common currencies are not using some obscure computationally-intensive scheme to survive on the unsecured Internet but they rather use traditional channels which are vastly more efficient at the cost of some amount of necessary centralization to ensure physical safety.
Ezekiel 23:20
writing and reading about Bitcoin...
Should we talk about how much energy is wasted building and maintaining heavily fortified bank buildings that warehouse large stacks of colorful paper? Or why the US is still minting fucking pennies?
When comparing standard currency to cryptocurrency, traditional proprietors of legal tender have zero room to talk about overhead or waste. At least bitcoin doesn't have to exist as physical tender, and we've done fucking nothing to minimize or eliminate the massive burden of printing and minting cash, regardless of the popularity of electronic transactions. The US Mint spends billions every year just in metals and materials costs.
Sure, Bitcoin (especially mining) use a lot of energy, but how does it compare to other currency?
- How much energy are used to print/make money and get the raw materia?
- How much energy is used to store money? (Bank and others)
- How much energy is used to do transaction with money?
- What about Wall Street?
etc.
On a per transaction level? I tiny fraction of what Bitcoin does and with plenty of room to spare.
...Even if you add in the energy use of the portion of the global banking industry that deals specifically with fiat currencies, here is simply no way that they use anywhere near the amount of energy per unit of value transacted as Bitcoin does.
Uh, you had to fracture this down to "amount of energy per unit of value transacted" in order to make it look like traditional currencies is a bargain. Now let's add up all of the extended costs of warehousing physical currency (every bank, bank vault, and ATM we've built and maintain globally), along with the cost to print and mint physical media (the US Mint spends billions on metal and materials costs every year). THEN perhaps we can start actually comparing the real costs between cold hard cash and crypto-cash.
A single decent crypto mining rig running for a year can likely mine at least one bitcoin, currently valued at $8200. Running costs are less than $2K/year, and the currency is made and stored electronically. Now compare that to the costs of minting, printing, distributing, and warehousing $8200 in physical tender.
The US Mint is still making pennies at a loss "per unit". The CFO told them to do what makes sense. Obviously there was some confusion...
6 cents, not 60 cents. Just set your miner fee to whatever you want. It's simple. I'm not the only one... anyone with a half a brain can and does do it. You are an idiot if you use the default fees in your wallet software.
It's simple:
You take the difficulty and current block rate to determine an estimate of the current hashrate (you can also get this info from pools that share).
You could also add 1% or 2% for wasted work (stale shares, for example) and other overhead.
Then you take the best ASIC you can find and get the hash/Watt conversion. Then cut that in half that since much of the network will be powered by older shit.
Then you take your hashrate and divide by your ASIC efficiency and bingo bango, you've got an estimate goin'.
The people that have crunched the numbers insist that paper $1s and $5s are cheaper long-run than coins.
I find it hard to believe too, but supposedly a lot of the cost advantage comes in the gimmick of seignorage, where the paper currency is sold at face value to the Fed, making it quite profitable to actually print paper currency. The seignorage profit is less on coins apparently.
I think there's something about people socking away more coins than notes, which adds to the cost of coins.
What seems weird is that so many other currencies have dropped their small denomination notes for coins; you would think they would have similar kinds of costs and would have kept paper, too.
Proof of work is rewarded because the entire network depends on it. The valuation of the currency is separate from that, and automatically adjusts to what people thing the value of the currency should be. The work also automatically adjusts to keep blocks coming in at a steady pace. But one hour of mining is never pegged to one hour of some other work to produce some good or provide some service. Nor is the more universal measure of one hour of block generation for the entire network (i.e., 6 blocks since the average adjusts to 10 minutes per block).
The US Mint is still making pennies at a loss "per unit". The CFO told them to do what makes sense. Obviously there was some confusion...
Coin production in the US has steadily been dropping for obvious reasons.
The cost of printed money, which accounts for the largest part of cash transactions, is pretty low.
Most 'dollar' based transactions never involve an actual coin or bill.
How to compare I don't know, but its hard to imagine typical currency using nearly as much energy 'per dollar or dollar equivalent".
You would have a point if all transactions were conducted by exchanging truckloads of US penny coins (which should have been abolished 20 years ago, BTW).
But they're not. Most transactions don't even use paper cash.
The US government makes up billions of fresh dollars every day out of nothing simply by writing a few bits to a database. If you think that, like your Bitcoin mining example, it costs the government 25% in overhead to do this, then you're high. It's a small fraction of 1%.
Expensive. I wonder how much of that billion is spent on mucking about with useless pennies.
But still, to put it in perspective: The US money supply is 10,000 billion, making the cost to produce a dollar about $0.001.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has the wonderful property that unless it costs a healthy fraction of the full purchasing power of a BTC to produce a BTC, then the market will break down. So the cost to produce a dollar's worth of BTC should be somewhere between 0.1 and 1.0 BTC, making it at least 100 times more expensive to produce than dollars.
Even with electronic payments; there is a massive amount of 24x7 server and datacenter infrastructure to run JUST the banking functions, and these applications are closed-source, and not necessarily designed to be efficient in terms of the size and power consumption of the centralized infrastructures required to support them.
Yes but this is changing as well. I know one major leading Credit Card issuer for example plans to have no infrastructure of their own within 2 years - it will all be cloud probably mostly Amazon. They are already well on their way. So that massive data-center infrastructure become shared services. All those compute resources can do something else besides just idling while much of the Western Hemisphere is a asleep.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Then again new debt (all fiat currencies) are spent into things which cause environmental damage too.
I'm running the ReddCoin Core wallet on my main computer, an old Core 2 Duo. I barely notice it's running except when trying to optimize PNGs and shit.
#DeleteFacebook
You would have a point if all transactions were conducted by exchanging truckloads of US penny coins (which should have been abolished 20 years ago, BTW).
But they're not. Most transactions don't even use paper cash.
And yet here we are, still minting pennies.
The US government makes up billions of fresh dollars every day out of nothing simply by writing a few bits to a database. If you think that, like your Bitcoin mining example, it costs the government 25% in overhead to do this, then you're high. It's a small fraction of 1%.
It's grossly ignorant to try and dismiss operational costs as a small fraction of 1% when the existence of a centralized government and military (requirements for traditional currency) costs taxpayers trillions every year. You're also assuming that the other 24% of government cost isn't pissed away every day with nothing more than good old fashioned government waste.
Are you suggesting that all those banks and credit card companies will go away if we move to bitcoin? That there won't be financial institutions? Really?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yo' momma.
But seriously:
- nobody knows how much energy street lamps are using.
- nobody knows how much energy idle PCs, servers and related hardware are using.
- nobody knows how much energy mobile phones are using while people scroll through their Facebook feeds.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Energy costs money. Just convert one to the other in the equation.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
We would have just as much government waste and military spending even if all transactions were done with Bitcoin. You can't attribute those costs to the production of currency.
It's like anything involving the Internet. It's magic and new, and very liberating, until it's not, for some reason that wasn't considered.
One way to think about it is that BTC needs to do all the same things in terms of power usage as the current banking network AND large amounts of expensive math on top of it. The power cost for mining is in addition to the power consumed by doing stuff the banking system also does.
One way to mitigate the waste of bitcoin is to have fewer miners. The bitcoin network needs a reasonable number of distributed and independent miners. More miners don't necessarily make the network any more secure, they just increase the power consumption. Matter of fact one could argue that the unbounded number of miners creates an opportunity for an insecure network. The industrialization and commercialization of bitcoin mining is what brought us near to a hypothetical 51% attack a few years ago.
Perhaps mining should be restricted. Large scale miners prohibited. Software could solve this, sorry, you or your region is providing too much hash rate and excess mining solutions will be discarded.
I, and many other people have been guilty at times of finding stuff to keep their computer busy doing. It just seems so living and active and relevant when it's doing something.
At times in the past it involved defragging the hard drive and watching the graphical representation of the 'stuff' being moved around.
Or a screensaver. I remember when I first got AfterDark for my Windows (3) PC. Watching the animations became a pursuit all it's own for awhile. Those flying toasters are random, man.
Going even further back, I remember the first timesharing system I had access to, and writing programs in BASIC to calculate stuff like prime numbers, or what was my favorite for a while, a program that counted the number of digits long that the repeating pattern was for reciporicals.
SETI at home is another example.
Recently, bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies have become a popular form of this kind of computer wanking for nerds. It's not really anything new.
It you are going to include other costs of money, you should do it for bit coin too. Include the cost of each computer the portion of each house taken to store that computer. Security for computers if you are storing millions of dollars on it they too should probably be stored in a safe. Cost of disposal of old hardware. Cost of bit coin exchanges. I would not be surprised combined hardware for mining bitcoin far surpassed that of banks, and probably replaced more frequently, since banks don't buy cheap servers where consumers do.
There are 500,000 (/charts/n-transaction) bit coin transactions per day there are 1,900,000,000 (reports/noncash) non-cash transactions. That is 3800 times more, say we linearly scaled up .5% energy use to cover all transactions leaving out things like creating and storage, cooling of the computers the miners would need to run on. That would be 1,900% of the current power used. I don't care what you throw in to the equation managing money doesn't use that much.
BBC = Big Burning Coal?
Corollary question: how much power is being used by YouTube with no one in front of the screen while it autoplays video after video? How much power has Angry Birds used? How much power has Amazon.com used? Facebook? Twitter? How much power has the NSA used? The US Navy? The Air Force? How much power did they expend sending all the Apollo missions after the moon landing? How much power did they spend sending that CAR auto the moon to drive around with?
How much power have just the lights used for advertising of Las Vegas, Nevada shops and casinos used, to say nothing of the power all the slot machines use... how much power if you add all the streetlights in that city? How much power does New York City use?
Just a little bit of perspective. Is Bitcoin a waste of money and electricity? Sure. But so is Disneyland. Speaking of which, how much power does the Mainstreet Electrical Parade use? Probably less than Bitcoin, but also probably less than Las Vegas. Actually, does anyone know how many watts that big lamp atop the Luxor Casino uses? How many times the power consumed by the typical Bitcoin mining rig is the one light atop the Luxor, I wonder.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
So I get it, bitcoin is using massive amounts of energy to power it. But how much energy is used by other currencies?
Compared to bitcoin, money uses negligible power per user. BTC is using a ton of power and its usage is so small it's not even a rounding error.
You're comparing purchases performed by 7B people (money) to purchases performed by a few thousand. In this case it makes more sense to consider the energy used per person, and BTC is horribly inefficient compared to money.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Oh come on, when all other things are equal...
Just assume the ratio of energy cost to associated cost is the same for both comparison terms, say 2:1 (it doesn't really matter anyway).
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Indeed, the only people who benefit are those who have shares in the power companies.
Why UNIX?
The US Government spends about $1 BILLION per year alone just creating the currency. That's just one government, creating paper money
That's actually not a lot for something that costs pennies on the dollar and lasts thousands of transactions. In fact, it's very little.
Ezekiel 23:20
What about electronic games? Come to that, does anyone know how much energy is being consume simply for entertainment?
Employees, contractors, buildings, associated services and materials require energy too.
#DeleteFacebook
Most fiat currency is never realised as physical bank notes.
Most transactions with fiat currencies are just amending numbers in some ledgers held on a computer.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe