Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
It is worth pointing out that aluminum is eminently recyclable, too. In fact, it takes only 5% as much energy to recycle existing aluminum than to refine new aluminum from ore. Because of this, most of the aluminum produced in the history of humanity is still in use. One could think of that energy as a one-time cost, unlike cryptocurrencies, where there is no end in sight.
Most of the energy cost of refining aluminum comes from the fact that aluminum, unlike gold, is bound up in various oxides. To break the oxides and purify aluminum metal requires massive amounts of electricity - it's a lot like a battery in reverse. Until we had access to large amounts of electricity, the alternative means of purifying aluminum were so costly and time consuming that aluminum was treated like a precious metal. Napoleon III had aluminum tableware to flaunt his wealth and power (which is just laughable today, especially when you consider how soft pure aluminum is). The tip of the Washington Monument in D.C. is aluminum. At the time (1884), it was the largest chunk of aluminum in existence.