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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.'
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.
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."
To be fair, the discussion is how much energy fiat takes vs bitcoin, not how much money it takes.
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!
The problem with BTC is that it is designed to use as much power as possible, with an arms race of whoever is willing to throw more power at it getting a bigger slice of the cumulative pie. It can not get any less power intensive because there is a financial incentive to out spend your competitors.
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.
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
$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.
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.
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.
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).
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%.
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.
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.