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Bitcoin Mining Now Accounts For Almost One Percent of the World's Energy Consumption (theoutline.com)
It is well-established established that Bitcoin mining -- aka, donating one's computing power to keep a cryptocurrency network up and running in exchange for a chance to win some free crypto -- uses a lot of electricity. Companies involved in large-scale mining operations know that this is a problem, and they've tried to employ various solutions for making the process more energy efficient. But, according to testimony provided by Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, no matter what you do to make cryptocurrency mining harware greener, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall network's flabbergasting energy consumption. From a report: Instead, Narayanan told the committee, the only thing that really determines how much energy Bitcoin uses is its price. "If the price of a cryptocurrency goes up, more energy will be used in mining it; if it goes down, less energy will be used," he told the committee. "Little else matters. In particular, the increasing energy efficiency of mining hardware has essentially no impact on energy consumption." In his testimony, Narayanan estimates that Bitcoin mining now uses about five gigawatts of electricity per day (in May, estimates of Bitcoin power consumption were about half of that). He adds that when you've got a computer racing with all its might to earn a free Bitcoin, it's going to be running hot as hell, which means you're probably using even more electricity to keep the computer cool so it doesn't die and/or burn down your entire mining center, which probably makes the overall cost associated with mining even higher.
After the upcoming cryptocurrency crash, small energy sources all over the place will be freed up for local use. Graphics cards are already becoming available again.
Haha. Funny.
lol
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APK
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The pretend alarm over its energy usage is the most amusing.
"It is well-established established that Bitcoin mining -- aka, donating one's computing power to keep a cryptocurrency network up and running in exchange for a chance to win some free crypto -- uses a lot of electricity." Not quite. No one is using their computer to mine bitcoin. That hasn't been profitable in many years. People are using dedicated highly specialized hardware that can do nothing else except mine, ASIC, application specific integrated circuit. This isn't really donating your computer power since these ASICs can do absolutely nothing else. "Computing power" implies something a little more general purpose.
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First: "Gigawatt" is not a quantity, it's a rate. You don't use "gigawatts each day". You probably mean GWh (gigawatt-hours).
Anyway, there are really two inputs to the mining equation. The first is electricity cost per hour of mining operation and the second is cryptocurrency value produced per hour of mining operation.
Making mining more efficient will *increase* mining activity, at least until the market adjusts. (Because, the value of cryptocurrency produced per hour is directly influenced by how much mining hardware is in use network-wide). More efficient mining equipment reduces the electricity cost, therefore mining is more profitable, therefore it is done more. In no way would making mining equipment more efficient make the network use less electricity.
Besides, there's a fundamental limit at work here... the reason that mining is electrically and computationally expensive is explicitly intended. The only reason the network works is because it is expensive and time-consuming to mine. That's the security mechanism that makes the thing work, and the core concept behind the blockchain.
People are starving as people grow tulips instead of food. Meanwhile in crypto land precious rare earth metals have been wasted producing gpus and asics to feed the money factories, which will be useless when the difficulty rises again.
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APK
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If the world got its energy as cheap as the BTC miners must be getting it for, the whole world could run on the budget of CA.
Narayanan estimates that Bitcoin mining now uses about five gigawatts of electricity per day
I've been searching all my life, and I have yet to find a single news article from any source that manages to discuss the fundamental physical concepts of energy, power and time without erroneously jumbling them all together.
What does this mean?
It uses 5GW? Or it uses 5GWh per day?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
After the upcoming cryptocurrency crash, small energy sources all over the place will be freed up for local use. Graphics cards are already becoming available again.
Graphics card have not been able to mine bitcoin for many years. GPUs are only able to mine some alternative cryptocurrencies. And as these "alts" get popular they sometimes follow the bitcoin path and end up being mined by ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) hardware. GPU mining is relatively insignificant compared to bitcoin mining.
The "other" significant cryptocurrency, ethereum, one that GPUs were able to profitably mine this last year, is planning on moving from a proof-of-work scheme to a proof-of-stake scheme for maintaining its block chain and rewarding the miners/forgers who do so. This is in part to avoid the power demands but also to allow ordinary users to help maintain the blockchain with ordinary computers.
Right now bitcoin has deviated from its design and its security has been compromised by not having ordinary people maintain the blockchain with ordinary computers, by no longer having a decentralized system. By evolving to an ASIC system mining has become more centralized, both in terms of large commercial operations where a 51% cartel is more plausible and geographically by have the vast majority of mining located in a single country. A country not known for a hands off approach to economic matters.
That's 1 degree on your thermostat.
Electricity is not the only form of energy....
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin
vastly more energy needed than visa. vastly less transactions than visa.
Mmmm global warming to create nothing.
In a given pace of hardware, performance does not scale linearly with electricity consumed. Higher clocks consume progressively more energy. So a producer will pick a clock such that the performance boost of the last bump exactly matched the marginal increase of electric consumption. However a sustainable operation needs an average marginal cost far below that to pay for fixed and capital costs.
And this also ignore difference proof systems a crypto can use.
If Climate change wasn't a worry the this topic wouldn't even be worth discussing. Unfortunately it is and cryptocurrency mining is just making things slightly worst
Really really?
I mean I mean really really?
Most gold that is mined is not used. It's just stored.
What resources are used to mine the ~80% of gold which is not used?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
How much does traditional banking use combined? That's a lot of debit machines running...
because there's nobody we can trust. What a sad, sad commentary on our society.
Making computing more greener or efficient can't change fundamentals for competition to get the next few coins. Ditto if same model is used for transactions, though maybe not the same.
Same with any other cryptocurrency using similar distributed model becoming popular!
Greenland Ice is already breaking apart. Irreversible damages are happening each year that now passes.
Can we round up all the journalists who cannot keep "energy" and "power flow" straight? Actually, find out which ones actually understand the notion of "first derivative", and to be really squishy-soft generous, they'd only have to get examples of change-over-time, which are most of them in journalism. Economics is riddled with them, and then there's climatology.
Anyway, round 'em all up and redirect them to a more appropriate profession, perhaps shoe sales or real estate development. Because if you can't understand that "five gigawatts" is a rate of energy flow (per second) and cannot be combined with the words "per day", you should not be writing for newspapers.
Oh, and you can't comment on climatology issues in any way unless you can explain "second derivative" clearly, and not just with time-based examples. This would not rule out lots of people on the other (wrong) side of the debate from myself, but it would mean at least the debates were not hopelessly stupid.
... you can't send tulip bulbs over the Internet.
How about comparing the wars and suffering financed by bankers with this magic fiat money?
Fiat money saved Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram from closing.
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APK
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Impersonating me? Get a life already, freak!
APK
P.S.=> Unbelievable anyone wastes their life & time the way you do impersonating me & for what? Does it STOP me from posting?? No... apk
Impersonating me? Get a life already, freak!!
APK
P.S.=> Unbelievable anyone wastes their life & time the way you do impersonating me & for what? Does it STOP me from posting?? No... apk
Do the math
What the hell is "five gigawatts per day"? Is that like 120 gigawatt-hours?
I'm curious if anyone has compared the cost in energy to mine an equivalent amount of gold from the ground til it's minted as a coin to the amount to generate an equivalent BTC. Or Platinum. Or Silver. That's ignoring that Gold has uses besides as a store of value or even lesser as a means of exchange. Just converting all the digging and processing work to watts makes my head spin (I barely passed Algebra). Any numbers out there? thx!
Creating an artificial resource that is based on an actual resource or resources where you need more and more actual resources to produce a smaller and smaller amount of artificial resources is self-defeating.
> If the price of a cryptocurrency goes up, more energy will be used in mining it; if it goes down, less energy will be used
Block difficulty is already used to self-regulate the timing of blocks. Difficulty correlates with energy use, and it's a proxy for the market value of the coins themselves. So if the effective difficulty is double, that means the value of the block reward in $USD is roughly double, tracking the energy needed.
This suggests an interesting secondary regulation level - the block reward could be inversely proportional to the difficulty. What this would mean is that if the energy needs double then the coins per block halves, so the total $USD value of each block is always about the same.
The layers of regulation therefore would then work like this: as the coin value increased, mining becomes more profitable, and more people mine. This then causes blocks to be generated too fast. So, the block difficulty is raised. However, the new part here is that the block reward also drops now, so that profitability drops as well. That means miners reduce their amount of mining (or inefficient miners are pushed out of the market). This then slows block production, so the difficulty is lowered again, erasing the energy-sucking effect of the coin price spike. With the right parameters, such a system would head towards equilibrium with a fairly predictable amount of power usage no matter what price the coins hit.
Well they complain about 1% of energy used by bitcoin but do not recommend people to stay at home because tourism uselessly spends 8% of energy.
You just have to say "gigawatts" period. A gigawatt is a rate of power consumption. Saying "gigawatts per day" is like saying "miles per hour per day" - it makes no sense and it's not clear whether you mean gigawatts, continuously, or maybe you mean gigawatt-hours per day.
1%, think about that, of 7+ billion on earth it's using 1% of the energy to generate itself, and it's not like it's solving or doing anything, just junk math to award a digital token. Distributed ledgers will change the world and are great, but this is senseless waste when an equally secure non-'mined' digital currency could be made with all the same qualities(finite, independent, uncorruptible ).
> Bitcoin mining now uses about five gigawatts of electricity per day
5GW/day is about 57.9K Joules per second per second, which represents a rate of change of power consumption. If this is true then by the end of the year most of the worlds electricity is going to be used for "mining" Bitcoin!
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
It's hard to imagine a more ridiculous waste of energy. There is an energy business conspiracy theory lurking here somewhere.
Greed is the root of all evil.
It should be variable. Bitcoin inflates over 10 millions dollars a day in new bitcoin (1800 bitcoin) and almost 4 Billion Dollars a year of new bitcoin. All this article tells me that 10 million dollars a day buys 1% of the world's energy consumption for the day.
Is there any human invention that will not be used to mess up our planet?! Even effing space exploration, the most noble of pursuits, is descending into an extreme sport for bored billionaires.
Much more energy is used for porn distribution, storage and consumption. Plenty of other non-essential human things too.
bitcoin doesn't matter; if the energy wasn't used for that it'd be used for something else
except you'll note that article states a much smaller amount of electricity used by Bitcoin than the sensational nonsense of this article.
Claiming 1 percent of is bullshit, a lie
the overhyped energy consumption claims against bitcoin have been debunked already.
it's a fool's investment vehicle, and very il-liquid so not a "money", and I wouldn't waste the power mining since it could go to near zero in a heartbeat...
but it doesn't take that much power, IEEE spectrum article decrying the waste says it might take as much as Denmark by 2020...
tiny power consumption
I wonder what the upper bound is. 1% is not bad. A small price to pay if it really frees us from financial tyranny. Let's not pretend that there's not cost to fiat currency. Please. Everything has cost. Let's be honest. I still think decentralized and independent is way better, not tied to national interests. But I should let the naysayers keep going. That way I can buy it up on the cheap.
Greedy fucks that donâ(TM)t mind screwing the rest of us.
Anyone can see real value. How does it feed you when hungry.how many tomatoes can it be traded for.what value (other uses does it have?) Does it give you pleasure like a new car?
Bitcoin disapers without power .
Ask rothschild how much bitcoin he has.
Fiat dollar can be traded for gold and silver? The Wiz floats dollar on myth.
FUD
I feel like most of these comments / responses are probably from trolls, either to be inflammatory, or perhaps funded by traditional reserve banks. Yeah, gold. But the first comparison I thought of was: traditional banks. There must be tens of thousands of them globally, and many of them probably have multiple data centers, they definitely all have many office spaces and branches. I really doubt bitcoin consumes a tenth as many resources. I saw someone mentioning GPUs being available 'after the crash'. I thought ASIC chips have been used for like 5 or 7 years? Bitcoin is a great idea compared to gold, and especially what people think of now as 'cash', even if it ends up using as much energy as both - though it's certainly far from it. The 2 major concerns I have about bitcoin are: 1) the transaction fees got way too high. 2) finite number of coins(so actually there is NO [technical] inflation{what those people are incorrectly observing is dollar inflation}). I've seen talk about a 2020 fork that will double the number of coins. I feel like those couple of bitcoin derivatives, like bitcoin-cash, were like testing the waters of forking. They seemed to fail. I don't see how you could ever get such a decentralized crowd to form a critical mass of accepting any particular fork. And have a feeling the lack of inflation(due to finite number of coins) could end up causing a problem.Pretty sure inflation needs to be built in - it's at least like a flat tax on rich people (better than no tax, and better than what happens in reality {expensive accountants that actually find ways for them[rich people] to pay a lower percentage of tax than not-rich people}).
not a real article
Good. To break the consensus algorithm, an adversary would need to gather more than 1% of the planets power consumption, as well as the hardware to run. It is utterly infeasible that anyone could do so. Bitcoin is the safest store of value humanity has ever conceived of.
No commodity that constantly rises in value can be used as a currency.
Cryptocoin don't constantly rise in value, they constantly jump madly around like giant random number generator (due to a too weird and completely unregulated market - that last part is the whole point of their decentralized system).
This make them hard (or more precisely: risky) to hoard, as in keeping them as an investment.
This don't prevent them to be used as form of payment (more precisely: a payment-over-internet-without-a-central-autority <- the whole point of their invention).
You use which ever way you want to convert you stable fiat USD into bitcoins (e.g.: you might be using a coin processor like bitpayment, but you might as well be trading them on IRC), and the marchant your buying stuff from will use which ever stuff he wants to convert them into their local stable EUR (usually some payment processor. Let's say coinbase this time, for the sake of variation).
You use only stable USD.
The marchant only use stable EUR.
the volatile BTC are only used during the transaction.
The fact that these BTC were valued at some completely different exchange rate yesterday, and will tomorrow exchange at yet another completely random rate, depending on the ups and down of that crazy market doesn't absolutely affect neither of you.
It only concerns those who are into actually trading them (payment processors, exchange platforms, traders that inversts into them, etc.)
It's still useful as a payment system over internet, and unlike old-school internet payment, there isn't a single or a few company that act as central chokepoint (unlike Visa, MasterCard, Paypal), in theory there isn't a central Bitcoin Inc. (though in practice, some mining pools are dangerously close to be able to achieve that).
It's a bit similar to what systems like SEPA/IBAN have achieved between banks (and the various system that rely on that, like the swiss Twint) : as long as both endpoint follow the same protocol, you're free to choose any endpoint of your liking, and so do the merchant. (You don't need to both be registered at paypal, or both use MasterCard).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
People who want to use bitcoin as MONEY have no problem, there's no need to invent a new coin for that.
Thing is close to no one is interested in actually using bitcoin (or any other crypto coin) as currency outside of certain people doing activities that are by and large illegal. Virtually all the interest in bitcoin is speculation in one form or another including a healthy dose of pump and dump and other fraud. Bitcoin isn't widely used as currency and is in no obvious danger of that changing any time soon.
Looks like poor retarded Alexander Peter Kowalski is mad that someone is reposting some of his antisemitic rants.
In the days of solar power and renewable resources are we really wasting THIS much energy just to make fake money? How much lazier can we get as a species? Get off your dead butts and actually EARN a living. Quit sitting around and letting everyone else do the work for you, ditch this crypto mining and use that electricity for other things that actually produce something worthwhile for society. I mean imagine how many stupid people we could sterilize with that....
The voices in my head don't like you
Have you tried to buy a GPU lately? The shelves are bare. Perhaps the big guns are using ASIC, but joe hacker is building motherboards with six nvidia cards.
... With the right parameters, such a system would head towards equilibrium with a fairly predictable amount of power usage no matter what price the coins hit.
Read up on control theory... It is equilibrium or oscillation (bounded or unbounded).
(Admittedly a complete guess. I haven't attempted an expected return calculation where for instance a a one in 50 million chance for a $100 million lottery has an expected return of $2)
I have friends that regularly buy lotto tickets. I wish they would do something else with their money. Buying crypto would probably be better than lotto? How about stock options since they are just throwing their money away? How about that inflated normal stock that keeps growing because of "greater fool"?
A friend who has bought lotto for 30 years at the rate of $10 a week / $500 a year would have saved $15000 (without interest) in 30 years. That could be $50,000 with even a low return like an S&P index fund.