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Energy Cost of 'Mining' Bitcoin More Than Twice That of Copper Or Gold (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The amount of energy required to "mine" one dollar's worth of bitcoin is more than twice that required to mine the same value of copper, gold or platinum, according to a new paper, suggesting that the virtual work that underpins bitcoin, ethereum and similar projects is more similar to real mining than anyone intended. One dollar's worth of bitcoin takes about 17 megajoules of energy to mine, according to researchers from the Oak Ridge Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio, compared with four, five and seven megajoules for copper, gold and platinum.
Other cryptocurrencies also fair poorly in comparison, the researchers write in the journal Nature Sustainability, ascribing a cost-per-dollar of 7MJ for ethereum and 14MJ for the privacy focused cryptocurrency monero. But all the cryptocurrencies examined come off well compared with aluminium, which takes an astonishing 122MJ to mine one dollar's worth of ore. [...] To account for the wild fluctuations in cryptocurrency price, and therefore effort expended by miners, the researchers used a median of all the values between January 1, 2016 and June 30, 2018, and attempted to account for the geographic dispersal of bitcoin miners. "Any cryptocurrency mined in China would generate four times the amount of CO2 compared to the amount generated in Canada," they write, highlighting the importance of such country-dependent accounting.
Other cryptocurrencies also fair poorly in comparison, the researchers write in the journal Nature Sustainability, ascribing a cost-per-dollar of 7MJ for ethereum and 14MJ for the privacy focused cryptocurrency monero. But all the cryptocurrencies examined come off well compared with aluminium, which takes an astonishing 122MJ to mine one dollar's worth of ore. [...] To account for the wild fluctuations in cryptocurrency price, and therefore effort expended by miners, the researchers used a median of all the values between January 1, 2016 and June 30, 2018, and attempted to account for the geographic dispersal of bitcoin miners. "Any cryptocurrency mined in China would generate four times the amount of CO2 compared to the amount generated in Canada," they write, highlighting the importance of such country-dependent accounting.
At least gold and copper have actual value for things more than a backing.
Can't speak for ethereum, but in the case of BC this is entirely intentional. Since the computational complexity of the BC transactions grows with time, it's unavoidable that the energy-usage is also going to increase at the same time. This, coupled with a finite cap on the total amount of BC is also what makes BC deflationary by design, which can be a good property for an investment but is overall a terrible property for a currency.
To claim that this is not intentional when it stems from the way the currency & cryptography is set up is just ridiculous.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
The energy cost doesn't fucking matter. The purpose of mining something is not to save energy. The purpose of mining something is to make money, regardless of whether you're mining gold, diamonds, or cryptocurrency.
So, the important fact is not how much energy it costs to mine the crypto; the important fact is does the crypto mining process create a net gain in money? If it makes money, that's all that matters.
How much energy is spent trying to mine gold and failing to do so profitably, or even entirely? I'm guessing most.
The difference is that the average schlub sitting at home mining bitcoin can't use the energy they have access to in order to mine gold, etc. so from their perspective it's a non-starter to even consider producing gold instead. Never mind the additional capital costs of mining gold, unless you're going to pan for it on public land.
...I'll just throw away my rig and buy a gold mine. Didn't realise it was so easy!
All this wasted energy sounds like an argument for some stiff taxes on energy. I honestly see no other way to discourage people from wasting so much energy on these things. I'm all for cheap energy, but if people start wasting it like that, just because it's cheap, maybe the cost for energy should include its true cost, which includes the cost of repairing the damage it cases.
Of course that also means we should then invest those taxes into solutions for the problems created by this energy waste. Either cleaner energy technology, or carbon sequestration.
(Also, how is aluminium mining even economically viable?)
It does not matter if it uses more energy. It matters if the cost is worthwhile. Look at e.g. aluminium. That uses a shitload of electricity to to turn Bauxite into aluminium. Yet people still make money of it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
So the colleges get access to what amounts to a supercomputer
I get some crypto. I was doing this for nearly a decade before they added the crypto so it is either actual money in the future or just another way to keep score.
The last bonus is I had a stack of old machines in the garage collecting dust. A fresh OS install and BOINC and now they are set to wake up at night and crunch numbers to keep the house warm. It doesn't even matter that they are very outdated, any number crunching is a bonus, and the money that would have been spent anyway for the exact same thing. One day when I get motivated I'll rig up a thermostat that turns the software on and off so I can have better temperature control.
What stupid cunts human beings are
Why not just sell the jewels?
VOTE TRUMP!
Yeah, right. Bitcoin miners plug in their hardware and then psychically force the electricity to only come from certain sources.
After the great crypto crash, the world will be left with a lot of usable generating capacity in out-of-the-way areas, such as small dams in rural China. This will bring electric cars, etc., to areas that never contemplated having such big-city amenities.
the people's money.
Hahahaha! It's been around a LONG time and NOBODY uses it as money. What a maroon.
Energy Cost of 'Mining' Bitcoin More Than Twice That of Copper Or Gold
Well, yeah, but fake pyramid scheme "currencies" have more than twice the fake pyramid scheme coolness factor than either copper or gold, so there!
I can guarantee it doesn't take into account all the externalized requirements, set up costs and other expenses to mine copper.
The value returned by selling copper is only a small part of the copper mining business.
If you just base it on copper's value, total set up and mining cost then we actually mine copper at a significant loss. It is only viable because of scale, and its enabled by support businesses and tax incentives.
The list is unending and it requires energy at every level.
Support staff requirements, transport for people equipment and resources, housing , catering, medical staff, safety equipment, safety staff, training. Exploratory drilling, energy running costs, fuel, chemical materials, mining equipment manufacture , maintenance and maintenance staff, all the safety clothing and work tools required.
It is easy to quantify the energy requirements of crypto because there is a meter on the wall, mining copper and gold is a sprawling industry with massive set up and maintenance costs that are hidden. ( energy and financial)
Well duh, what do you expect? Copper and Gold have zero utility in commerce. They are strictly industrial metal that have no value outside of that utility. As a store of value, they are useless. You can't send gold or copper to the other side of the rock in minutes. You can also shave mcgs off of gold and copper ingot.
Bitcoin is actually useful as a store of value since it is fast and cannot be altered.
There is no comparison at all between the two, really.
If mining provides profit then people will do it. If something else is better then people will do that instead.
In effect, the poster is an idiot. Mining profit exceeds the costs involved so people will take it. Free profit is still profit.
Sounds like the more corporatist stance on energy. What about incentivizing and gameifying renewable energy (it's renewable by the way in case that word was lost on you) so that all people can benefit from going clean instead of showing your true colors and trying to shaft all industry out of existence, with no real incentives or gameification and instead just epic red tape and regulation to follow your true agenda and crush the little guy. We need economic growth so we can get more efficient.
'wasted energy' implies there is no benefit or use in bitcoin mining.
Different people have different ideas of what is beneficial or useful - needless to say, many people clearly find mining bitcoin beneficial and useful otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. As a get-rich-quick scheme or for ideological views of currency and traditional banking - either way, people are doing it for a reason.
So who are you to say they are wasting energy?
Future energy consumption should drop for BTC, so that energy cost will probably put it below precious metals. Then people can stop bitching about BTC energy use.
It's 100% efficient in the same way that a Tesla is 80% efficient ... just ignore the Carnot efficiency in the coal plant or gas plant generating the efficiency, and ignore the transmission losses between production and consumption. Your electric heat is at best 30% efficient, compared to close to 95% thermal efficiency from a high efficiency gas furnace.
So, if the countries that have ample renewable power, like Germany f.ex. instead of paying Switzerland and Austria to take the surplus on some days off their hands, they could just mine bitcoins instead, simpler than storing it in batteries or generating hydrogen.
Good luck mining gold from home!
Just wondering.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Who'da thunk scientific progress really does go BOINC?
Comparing mining bitcoin to mining gold is meaningless. When you 'mine' $1 of bitcoin for .05 cents in energy, you didn't just mine some bitcoin, you also processed 1,000's of bitcoin transactions. To even begin to make a fair comparison you would need to account for all the energy currently used in the financial services industry. Energy used to run servers, make banking transactions, process checks, handle cash, etc, etc, etc. Just the costs to deal with cash (security vehicles, guards, counting coins, storing bills) are monumental. Bitcoin is most likely a net savings!
Stupid comparison pulling a chunk of rock out of the ground to running an entire self-contained monetary system.
the researchers used a median of all the values between January 1, 2016 and June 30, 2018
Wait a minute.... Averaging by median starting from 2016 is misleading. The COST TO MINE is not fixed. The cost to mine is a function of difficulty, and the difficulty is affected by hashrate --- how much hashrate people are willing to turn up is based on value but has steadily increased over time.
If you want to "average" the value of a BTC, then you should be doing a weighted average where the weight value is the hash rate: the price of BTC at times when the hashrate were higher are more important for determining the worth ---- or just plain evaluate RECENT values that match up with the recent use of mining power and recent mining proceeds, but anything before November 2017 is too old to be looking at.
Gold makes a fantastic currency, especially if your game of Civilization is just starting out.
Requirements for a currency:
1. Must be scarce, but not *too* scarce
2. Ideally not manufacturable - this means elements are ideal
3. Portable, or capable of being made portable
4. Not overly toxic or dangerous, and relatively stable so it doesn't rust away to nothing
5. Since we're talking elements, it must be somewhat easy to procure - IE you don't have to put ore into a blast furnace to extract it out
If you put these requirements together, you end up with gold, silver, platinum, palladium, etc... Interestingly enough the metals most commonly used as currencies.
Every time I point out that crypto currency is a colossal waste of energy often generated by fossil fuel, I get attacked by hordes of guilty miners.
Privacy and low friction international transactions are the big advantages to crypto currency, but there are other ways to accomplish those goals without destroying the ecosystem and making the fossil fuel industry rich..
Greed is the root of all evil.
Worked at a mine as an engineer. The largest expenditure was personnel, then equipment. You need drivers, operators, managers, engineers, etc and they aren't cheap. When mining crypto currency the largest expenditure is electricity. Comparing only energy expenditure is not a very useful comparison, apples to oranges, but makes a sensational headline.
"So who are you to say they are wasting energy?"
So we can't tell people facts no more?
Editors suck. It's "fare poorly," not "fair poorly."
/. moderation sometimes falter. The same comment was modded informative/insightful just a year ago but today I guess different people are moderating and they find the current economical system viable and our governments impeccable.
They are wasting energy because that's the explicit purpose. New bitcoins are awarded to the people doing the most pointless calculations, which wastes energy. You could award those bitcoins based on something more productive than that.
Nothing wrong with facts. Nothing wrong with opinions. But opinions presented as facts is another thing entirely.
You're missing the point. Using large amounts of energy cycling through calculations is a side-effect, not the purpose. The purpose is using proof of work as the core mechanism to bitcoin's decentralised trust model.
There are other mechanisms that could be used like proof of stake or even proof of importance - but those trade different pros and cons and aren't as proven as PoW at this point.
Using large amounts of energy isn't the problem. Using large amounts of fossil-fuel energy is. Many miners are setting up camp in Iceland where they can take advantage of geothermal energy and environmental cooling.
The solution here isn't "Use less energy because I didn't understand why you need to use so much". It's "use energy more responsibly".
The purpose is using proof of work as the core mechanism to bitcoin's decentralised trust model.
Yes, but it's the proof of pointless work. Nothing useful is being done with that work. It would be very different if all that massive work accomplished something useful.
Using large amounts of energy isn't the problem. Using large amounts of fossil-fuel energy is.
Sadly, at the moment, the vast majority of energy in the world still comes from fossil energy. Energy used to win bitcoins is not being used to heat the homes of the elderly or increase food production in poor countries. If bitcoin miners use clean energy, that's fantastic of course. But if they buy clean energy that could also have been used to replace fossil energy, they are still slowing down the reduction of fossil energy.
I've heard many miners are in China using energy from big hydro plants, which is clean, but thereby also not being used for the many other purposes for which China needs energy. And despite their investments in clean energy, China is still burning a lot of coal.
Yes, bitcoin uses more energy than metal mining, but that is only part of the story:
- Bitcoin miners seek the cheapest energy available so they often use excess energy e.g. from hydrothermal plants in Iceland. Not using that energy for bitcoin mining would not reduce the generated energy, it would just be wasted
- Metal mining has a sole purpose: increasing the usable volume of that metal. The purpose of bitcoin "mining" is not solely for generating more bitcoins but validating transactions. The new bitcoins are a means to gradually and ever more slowly increase the bitcoins available to the economy and an incentive for the miners. The energy they use is required to keep them honest.
- Metal mining contaminates the environment in a lot more ways than only energy use. Per kg of gold, the mining process uses around 150,000 litres of water and 150 kg of cyanide and generates around 1500 tons of waste rock. (c.f. these papers: http://www.thesustainabilitysociety.org.nz/conference/2007/papers/MUDD-Gold-Mining-v-Sustainability.pdf and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652612000947)
I wrote a Dutch blog page about this apples & oranges comparison here: https://bitcoinvoorbeginners.hamal.nl/bitcoin-vs-goud-nl.html