Bitcoin Forum

All the electric you use for mining = more carbon in air. Do you feel guilty you are profiting off earths destruction through greenhouse gases?

Bullshit, the normal system with banks, banknotes, coins etcetc pollute much much more. Bitcoin is much greener.

yea but adding bitcoin just adds more carbon into the air without reducing the demand on paper money at all. But if that's the rationale you use to keep you guilt free do ya thing

Not really, I came late to the party (bitcoins) and use energy efficient mining hardware, FPGA's, so I'm using 1/10th the energy most GPU based mining rigs would. When ASIC's come a long I'll be using those for most of my mining eventually, thus reducing my energy footprint even further.

As far as I'm concerned I do my best to move to a more energy efficient hardware, I pay my electricity bill (of course) and do my best to encourage the energy company to invest in greener ways of producing energy. In the UK is historically expensive, so their is a lot of plans in place to encourage both individuals and companies to build wind and solar panel farms, both small and large. It's taking a while but we do have some really quiet large wind farms now on this little island.

Also it's funny to hear you bring up this topic, when you aren't even paying for the electricity you use in your Apartment. The energy companies continuing to use heavy polluting methods of energy generation is a choice of profit. It's not a choice I made, their are alternatives and yes it could be done if they wanted to.

Bitcoin is not such a bad energy consuming method of generating a digital currency, that it hurts the environment and if you want to label it as such their are most certainly worst offends which never get labelled as such. It's advancement in technology it can make use of actually makes it one of the most efficient in the industry.

Interested on what people think mainly. Personally I don't even think global warming is real. The earth goes through a natural hot/cold cycle. But if bitcoins never existed less electricty would be being consumed that's fact.

Not a miner, nor a very green person to begin with, so my views might be a bit biased, but I just cannot see bitcoin mining having any effect really.
Sure if there was no bitcoin, the electricity wouldn't be used to mine bitcoins -- but it surely would be used to some other stuff nonetheless.

if I didn't mine coins I wouldn't be using it on something else

This is precisely counter-balanced by their increased demand for energy pushing up the prices of the fossil fuels that provide the energy causing an increased incentive to develop carbon-neutral sources of energy. All the energy that can profitably be produced by releasing carbon will be. It's just a matter of when.

To make an omelette you have to break some eggs.

Again, bullshit. We use bitcoin so we reduce the demand for all the traditional things. Tell me, how much do paypal servers pollute? How much do all banks datacenters pollute? What about moving money left and right?

Technically their would be less energy consumption if you only excluded the energy now not used by bitcoin.
Bitcoin is however starting to replace for some the energy consumption by more traditional methods of currency exchange, which if you are aware of how the big banks do it and how many computers are involved you'd realise they are far from energy efficient.
So one could say few years from now, if bitcoin adoption for online and global trade really picks up enough, it could save energy by not needed as many computers from more traditional methods of currency exchange.

The entire bitcoin network spread across the entire globe (assuming majority used inefficient GPU's) would be about 2400 MegaWatts a year last time I estimated it. Of course that number will start to go down pretty quickly once adoption of FPGA's and ASIC picks up, which have a 1/10 and 1/100 fold differences in energy consumption in comparison.

The worlds energy consumption is in the region of 20,000,000,000 Megawatts a year. So am I worried about a new method to trade currency, digital created for and by the community, which could make a significant difference to entire world and how it does trade, costing at the moment 0.000012% of the worlds energy. Bitcoin has spread that far, it has had an effect in some small way in every major country in the world. So am I worried?
Nope!

It's a scale thing, doesn't really put much of a dent in it. Also unlike most things as they grow bigger in popularity it's not going to consume more energy as a whole. With technology adoption going to quickly it's going to start declining on the energy consumption front, since ASIC tech is so cheap when mass produced there be no reason to sue GPU's any more. 1 years from now, it would not surprise me if that figure looks more like 200 Megawatts or less for the entire network.

btw for comparison, most of the big banks individually, usually have an total energy consumption which is measured in millions of Megawatts Annually.
Just this year, BOA said theirs was a little under 5million Megawatts annually, with hopes to reduce it by 25% over the next 3 years.

So for arguments sake, the bitcoin network is still obviously showing itself to be far more efficient, since it's still a long way off that.
With ASIC tech I don't see it ever getting that high.

What about people that receive electric from water power generators or wind mills?

Have you recently looked in to coal burning plants? They are becoming cleaner and cleaner with their carbon filters.

Do you feel guilty for shopping at walmart or any other stores? They use semi trucks to deliver their goods that sit idling by in truck lots burning diesel 8-12 hours long. Basically semi trucks are running 24/7. Cops leave their vehicles running entire time they are on the job, same with taxi's.

Fuck you.

I don't care about all the electricity YOU use for watching porn or charging your buttplugs either. Go spout your eco-crap somewhere else.

If troll: congrats, 1 rage point

I'm thinking of moving my GLBSE listed mining company "RSM" over to 100% renewable sourced green electricity.  It will only cost about ~£0.14xxx per kW/h.

To date, nobody has provided any other suggestion as to how to provide transaction timestamping in a secure manner that is not dependent upon a central authority.

If you think you can come up with an alternative, please share.

For today's GPU miners, well more than half of the revenue from bitcoins goes to pay for electricity.  But those using FPGA use a fraction of that.  The reason the GPU miners are still around is because FPGAs are so expensive.   ASIC designs are even more efficient than FPGAs and they can be produced (after paying the fixed expenses for the R&D) cheaply.

So we are probably well past peak electrical consumption of the Bitcoin network even though hashing capacity continues to increase.  At peak, a locomotive train with two engines could create more electricity than all of the Bitcoin mining combined would draw.  A single Band of America building in Manhttan draws more than all the Bitcoin mining combined draws.

Troll?

laststop previously wrote:
"I have been using dual 6990's to mine since the card was released and It's done ok."
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104285.0

Meh.  Some of us don't feel that carbon dioxide is pollution at all.

Do you feel guilty, or a little stupid, to use a computer and the internet to complain about others waste of electricity?   ;)

Compared to ONLY ocean C02 emissions, total human output of C02 is like a small fart.

So to answer your question, no, I don't give a toot.

It's a small fraction of the energy that governments around the world use to keep track of it's citizens with monitoring systems. Now, which is a more pointless waste?

My miner is such a fraction of a percent to what my gaming rig produces...  I guess I need to stop gaming then.   

It would be kind of interesting to see what a true decent mining rig sucks up compared to like an XBOX or PS3 or something like that.   

First off I'm not trolling I was honestly looking for opinions. Of course I'm for BTC everyone here is but even tho I use crossfire 6990's to mine I do wonder sometimes all this electric we are using. And I've only mined 66 bitcoins so I havent used THAT much electric.

Finding solutions for problems is always a more efficient use of energy than worry or guilt.

This is not accurate. See my sig for one example. Another are the proof of stake ideas from Meni and Cunicula. I also proposed a bitcoin-like blockchain that used bitcoin days destroyed or a similar metric to decide which chain is stronger rather than purely hashing power. This could allow for a safe reduction in difficulty without opening the network to attack.

But if bitcoins for example, sell for $1,000 a piece and there are 10 or 20 bitcoins in tx fees each block, there will be competition to see how much people are willing to spend to eek out a profit on mining. Likely it is going to be 90% of the value of the bitcoins or more. So it's either electricity or the purchase of additional FPGAs or ASICs and the effort of repaying those investments. If there are $20k worth of bitcoins each block, competition is not going to allow people who have $10k invested to reap a 100% ROI. If ASICs are ubiquitous, you can expect the ASIC energy output to come close to that of GPUs, there will just have to be a lot more of them mining. If ASICs are not ubiquitous, GPU miners will still have an opportunity to profit above their electricity costs. GPU miners in cheap electric economies may mine long after ASICs are ubiquitous.

That's carbon dioxide. He was referring to everything that involves carbon.

Of course, we are carbon-based.

Today a typical rig costs a thousand dollars for the hardware and consumes $75 / month of electricity.

Amortize that 18 months, and you have roughly 40% of the monthly costs going to the hardware and 60% going to electricity.

A thousand dollars worth of ASIC (e.g., a 1/15th of an BFL SC mini rig) consumes about $10 / month of electricity.

Amortize that the same 18 months and you have roughly 85% of the monthly costs going to the hardware and 15% going to electricity. 

ASIC mining is 7.5X more efficient then (consumption of $10 / month of electricity versus $75 / month) when including the amortized cost of the hardware.

The unknown is how long to amortize.  if it is longer than 18 months then electricity as a % rises.  If it is shorter (e.g., faster ASIC comes out) then the cost of electricity as a % of expenses drops.

So I don't think today's miners will be consuming anywhere near as much electricity (e.g., 7.5X less in the example I just gave) with ASIC presuming they aren't going to increase their investment over what they were spending for GPUs.

1/3 of my power is nuclear.  1/3 of my mining helps with heating. 

I don't follow the ASIC stuff much as I don't mine, but from what I've heard here and there the price of ASICs should drop significantly once competition begins and they begin mass production. Like, really significantly. Chip fabrication costs hinge heavily on the amount that can successfully be produced, so if demand is high enough and the manufacturing process efficient, the price should drop like a rock, just like every other ASIC. And we can only really guess what the real eco-footprint of these devices will be, it can't be hinged upon just how much electricity they use. No matter what, it's still wasteful. The solution to the security of the network needs to be something other than "throw more money at it", or you might start seeing some ironic parallels to typical government policy.

My local energy provider claims to run 25% on solar panels and wind turbines and that number will probably get bigger so, no.

I feel bad because my mining warms up the whole apartment and thus neighbors apartments as well.

Better you guys don't check how solar panels and windturbines are made... green? Ha! Nice joke! Go check how materials for them are mined  :D

I buy 100% electric from wind and water power  8)

Mining the materials is a one time thing for each product, while other sources are used up a certain amount each use each product and sometimes when not being used.

I'm not mining yet, but I generate my electricity via solar and wind.

/  How do you feel about your posts' carbon footprint? /


http://grist.org/series/skeptics/ (http://grist.org/series/skeptics/)
'“How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming'

Grid tie is the answer.

Without reducing the demand for paper money at all? Kidding?

I've practically abandoned paper money. I'm down to 2 months expenses in paper thanks to bitcoin.

The reduced demand for paper is tiny because bitcoin is tiny and so is the pollution.

Also paper money pollutes children's bodies with shrapnel, so there is that.