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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
That's 1 degree on your thermostat.
But my thermostat is digital
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!
I can transfer money from my bank to anyone else in the UK with a bank account quickly and for free. I can withdraw cash from thousands of cash machines for free. I can buy from millions of merchants for free.
Bitcoin - Free? Fast? Energy efficient? Decentralised?
No, no, no and no (blockchain size).
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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.
Fiat money saved Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram from closing.
It's amazing how with gold-backed coins, wars and suffering were only myths.
No photographic evidence, only fairy tailes like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Hanging_by_Jacques_Callot.jpg
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!
Then try transphere money from UK with your bank, and then the same way back, and check how long that takes _in days_ and how much it costs. ... or bitcoin.
There are reasons for moneygram western union and transferwise
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
> 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.
I can fix this problem with just 1.21 gigawatts and my flux capacitor.
Dude, if you have a time machine then you don't need to mine cryptocurrency. Just check the stock market one year from now. Or maybe that's what you meant when you said "fix this problem?"
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
> 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?
Bitcoin is as fake as the economy it is based ion.
Bitcoin is fake BECAUSE it is not based on any economy!
For any currency that is based on an economy ("fiat currency") , its value as a currency is as good as its central bank is good at figuring out the total value, month after month, of the goods and services that currency trades for and adjusting the money supply to match. Bitcoin is not working as a currency because now that all coins that are mineable with realistically available amounts of energy have already been mined, its supply has become fixed. This has caused it to disappear from circulation as people use it as a virtual investment rather than a currency.
This means 75% of all food he eats is imported, which in turn means
the GBP he pays for the food must be converted to EUR, for which someone pays the bank 4% which means
3% of his food bill goes to the bank AND
the country has to export the value of that food (mostly through soliciting foreign investment in over-priced property and the bank takes 4% of that to convert the EUR back to GBP - SO
The bank gets 6% of the value of the food he eats ON TOP OF the 2% it takes when he pays for the food.
And the clever thing (from the bank's point of view) is: this also applies to pretty much everything else he buys except the rent - but of course, if he has a mortgage, the bank is probably taking about 5% of that as interest too.
But never fear, the government is probably taking 20% VAT on most stuff he buys AND 30% in income tax and national Insurance on what he is paid.
So, in summary:
If he lives in the UK, he is (financially) stuffed, regardless of Bitcoins! (Takes one to know one). But, don't worry, it will be way worse after Brexit, when he will pay WTO tariffs of, on average 50% tax on anything he even thinks of buying. Get the facts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svwslRDTyzU&t=3s
Disclaimer: If I was a Russian troll, all the above figures would be even worse!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Bitcoin is as fake as the economy it is based ion.
Bitcoin is fake BECAUSE it is not based on any economy!
Any currency is worth what you can buy with it. And therefore, Bitcoin is most definitely not fake, because you can indeed buy stuff with it, including other currencies on Forex. It is harder to find vendors who accept Bitcoin, but they do exist.
Once I heard an expert on NPR say that Bitcoin is a collective hallucination that some abstract concept has some kind of value. But he then pointed out that all currencies are a collective hallucination that some abstract concept has some kind of value.
For any currency that is based on an economy ("fiat currency") , its value as a currency is as good as its central bank is good at figuring out the total value, month after month, of the goods and services that currency trades for and adjusting the money supply to match.
I think you're confusing monetary value with monetary policy. Central banks control money supply by printing or removing currency from the market, or adjusting interest rates. They don't determine the value that money trades for in goods and services. The market does that.
And fiat currency is based on the faith and credit of the issuer (i.e., the central bank) not the economy in which it is used. That just means a $100 bill printed by the government will remain worth $100. What that $100 can buy for you can, and does, fluctuate.
Bitcoin is not working as a currency because now that all coins that are mineable with realistically available amounts of energy have already been mined, its supply has become fixed. This has caused it to disappear from circulation as people use it as a virtual investment rather than a currency.
You have a point. Bitcoin, unlike other currencies, is not being used to nearly the same extent as other currencies for investing and commerce. Nobody is issuing stock certificates, bonds, mortgages, or other financial instruments denominated in Bitcoin. (There is a futures market for it, but even that's in USD.) Rather, Bitcoin itself is the investment. But it is also true for all currencies that only a fraction of outstanding units are exchanged regularly. The remainder are sitting somewhere, in bank accounts, business equity, real estate, and other assets.
Disclosure: IANAE. I welcome correction.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
Bitcoin is constantly disappointing its fans as a currency because the wildly fluctuating daily price dissuades merchants from using it. A currency is supposed to buy about the same today as it did yesterday. Long-term changes in value are acceptable to currency users so long as the day-to-day fluctuations are reasonable.
Other cryptos attract some merchant interest in their early stages, when new coins are easy to mint. But as soon as the mining effort required starts ramping up, users begin hoarding the coin because it's "going up." As soon as his happens, merchants stop taking it as currency.
Now for the big picture: after this happens to Bitcoin and then the next two or so popular replacements, merchants initially interested in crypto find themselves right back where they started: an endless proliferation of new currencies whose value is God knows what. Why bother with crypto for transactions when there is no single standard that works well and has a constant value?
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
He's referring to the UK, where all banks provide fast domestic transfers and atm withdrawals...
Most consumer bank accounts are also free, so chances are this guy is not paying anything for the services he describes.
Business bank accounts often charge fees, and there are some premium accounts which give you additional services for a fee, but the basic standard bank accounts are free.
Merchants paying a fee to accept cards is normal, taking cash is not free either... It costs money to have stocks of small change, it costs to transport your takings to the bank, plus the risk of theft or losses. In many cases, the 2% card fee is actually cheaper than the cost of accepting cash and there aren't many alternatives to these two. It's a cost of doing business.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
If you're paying a monthly subscription for your bank account, that's your perplexing choice. There are tons of credit unions who'll pay you interest every month to open a free checking account.
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Less, because they are nowhere near as resource intensive.
You are really dumb enough to believe in the ponzi scheme that is crypto?
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 ]
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
Bitcoin is actually useful as a way to transfer funds. Sender buys bitcoins and immediate transfers them, recipient immediately sells them. Volatility usually isn't an issue as neither is holding bitcoins for any non-trivial amount of time.
A merchant accepting bitcoins is usually a PR stunt. The merchants usually never see or touch a bitcoin. A payment processor handles the exchange rate from the merchant's USD/EUR/etc price, the payment address, the validation and then credits the merchant's account in USE/EUR/etc.
Significantly less, if you normalize it by transaction volume.
Ezekiel 23:20
4% Get real, I pay 1% currency spread+fee, big businesses will pay far less. And I try to purchase locally grown food. Your figures are pie in the sky.
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Ps, when I want to look at exchange rates I look at:
https://www.oanda.com/currency...
That's inter-bank rates, look at the spreads. Big businesses will get closer to this than anything you mentioned.
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/thread
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.