Bitcoin Forum

Hi all, yesterday it occurred to me that we are all wasting a lot of resources on mining bitcoins, in a way that shows more than a little similarity to the prisoner's dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma).

I wrote about it here: http://www.colorfulwolf.com/blog/2011/05/31/resources-are-being-utterly-and-completely-wasted-on-mining-bitcoins/
Would love to hear your thoughts.

My writer have the opposite thought: http://bitcoinweekly.com/articles/the-wasted-electricity-objection-to-bitcoin-part-i

In short, it's not being wasted.

If all the miners used a mining daemon that limited itself to 1%, not only would someone come along and use the full GPU to profit themselves, but it would make it easier to attack the network.

Bitcoin is designed to operate without trust.  As such, it assumes that everyone will be trying as hard as they can.

Since there is no way to know how many failed attacks there have been on the bitcoin block chain (i.e. rogue miners trying to out-hash the honest miners) there is no way to measure how much waste there has been in computing the hashes that secure the chain.

Ever stopped to think what resources are consumed by 'normal' money?

I totally agree.. I was thinking about this issue of waste. I realised that putting energy and cpu power into a defensive system is a great idea. Once you combine the concept with a distributed system it basically turns miners into a defensive crpto army that is voluntarily paid for by the transaction fee. Almost like armies defending trade routes of a traditional trade system.

I just wrote something on it

http://servanlog.blogspot.com/2011/05/infostate-and-colour-of-money.html

I imagine that all the energy required to produce the nation's bank vaults, from mining the iron to forging the steel to shipping them to their installation at banks, is more than the energy 'wasted' on the Bitcoin network so far.

edit: I originally said "less" when I meant to say "more." Whoops.

I imagine the same kind of waste of resources took place during traditional gold rushes. It's all meaningless though -- the bitcoin network isn't threatened by the bad decisions by miners because of the self regulation.

Your essay answered it's own question. Why is all this energy being "wasted?"  It's not being wasted. Large energy use makes it hard to attack the network. If we all used 1% of our computing power instead of 100%, it would be substantially easier to attack the network. Simple concept, and rather than a great prisoners' dilemma example, it's a great example of Smith's "invisible hand." All us miners, in our selfishness, compete against each other to solve more hashes and earn money. By so doing, without conscious intention, we are making the network substantially more difficult to hack.

Energy use for energy use's sake would be silly. Energy use for security's sake is valuable, and thus not a "utter and complete waste" as you claim it to be.

Then you have no idea how much energy it takes to just refine iron.

My thoughts are that you are just another newbie who comes along after hearing a little bit about Bitcoin and then jumps to the conclusion that you, and you alone, have discovered the Great Bitcoin Flaw (tm).

Perhaps there needs to be a new rule, that newbies cannot post until their account is at least a week old.  Of course, that wouldn't have helped out here, but still...

The definition of 'waste' is subjective. Just because the world is not doing what one thinks the world SHOULD be doing, does not make it a bad place (well, maybe a bad place to you)

OP has updated his blog post admitting that he was wrong, so we might as well just close this thread now.

Yes, because the raw coal used to fuel forges for HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF BANKS ACROSS THE WORLD is less pollutionary than 1 years worth of mildly increased electricity usage.  Not to mention the pure GAS GUZZLERS that are required to carry massive amounts of steel and specialized machinery required to produce such secure bank vaults.

Quit this purely conjectural bullshit and show some actual numbers.

There is 39.3 kJ/g energy from combusting coal.  It releases 2.0 grams CO2 per gram of coal. (source (http://www.wou.edu/las/physci/GS361/Energy_From_Fossil_Fuels.htm)
Using this (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png) graph, and finding an approximation (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x^10%2F5000000+from+0+to+85.134) on wolfram alpha (notice that 1*10^12, or 1 thash/s lines up at a relatively easy to judge spot on the curve, and i'm going from 0 to 85.134 where the graph is equal to 4*10^12, or 4thash/s, the estimated value right now), we find that the average value (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average+x^10%2F5000000+from+0+to+85.134) is 363.637 ghash/s over 2 years.  Using the calculation here (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=10411.0),

31.42 billion MHashs/day (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28363637+units+per+second%29+in+units+per+day) * 0.024 kWh/day per MHash = 754 million kWh (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=31.42+billion+units+times+0.024+killowat+hours+per+unit) or 2714000000 megajoules (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=754+million+killowatt+hours+in+megajoules)

Considering steel requires roughly 8,000 MJ/ton (http://www1.eere.energy.gov/industry/steel/pdfs/theoretical_minimum_energies.pdf) of steel to produce, the entire energy used in the bitcoin network could produce 339250 tons of steel (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2.714%C3%9710^9+megajoules+%2F+8000+megajoules%2Ft).

Considering there are a staggering number of secure vaults (In the hundred thousands across the world), each of which is several hundreds of tons, 300,000 tons of steel doesn't seem like much.  And that's not even accounting for the mining, shipping, construction, the energy used by security systems, etc.

EDIT: Dear god I spent way too much time on that.

I mixed up my words. I meant to say "more" not "less."

Seeing as my miner hasn't generated any coins in the last half hour, I went back in time half an hour and changed the target address. I just changed it back right now.

Happy?  ;)

For comparison, right now the Bitcoin network uses about the same amount of energy as the Bank of America Tower in New York.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America_Tower_%28New_York_City%29
http://www.solaripedia.com/13/173/1728/bank_of_america_tower_cogeneration_diagram.html

=(

It doesn't matter if you're moving dirt to find gold or solving puzzles.  Work is work.  Work is money.  Time is money.

At the risk of getting yelled at by the experienced members...I would agree the resources are being wasted.

Would you not get the same outcome if the hashing difficultly remained fairly low but the generating of blocks was throttled by dispersing real work to miners some how? Some sort of hybrid bitcoin/folding@home project. So as more miners come on line more folding happens and the blocks keep coming in a the same rate. I would imagine someone would even pay money for such crazy processing power. Just throwing that out there without a full understanding of how this works.

Hmm... interesting.


Oh, now I see.

The work is essential to securing Bitcoin transactions, and thus Bitcoin itself. It has to be lots of easily verifiable busy work so that someone who wants to cheat the system has to match the entire system's strength worth of busy work to even attempt to break the system. Read up on it, interesting stuff.

This argument has traction only if racing to solve useless hard problems ("waste") is shown to be essential in securing distributed currencies.

While I won't deny for a second that 'Satoshi' had a deep insight, his method is not by any means the only way to achieve Byzantine fault tolerance for the coin database. The literature contains extensive proofs for algorithms that can withstand up to one third traitor nodes without use of PKI, and unlimited traitors with PKI. These algorithms might not be practical from a communication overhead stand-point, but they don't lead to a wasteful arms race.
The second claim for the need of waste is to provide artificial scarcity. It's easy to envision a system where scarcity is generated by a central bank which digital signs monetary tokens; the challenge would then be to either distribute such a system in the absence of a central bank, again with Byzantine agreement on the number of minted tokens and their initial owners.

As it is, the waste should be accepted as a challenge of the current Bitcoin implementation, not embraced as the only imaginable solution.


3 hundred thousand tons of steel ?! For a toy internet currency that, aside from being a vehicle of speculation/investment, is only accepted by a few hundred tiny sites ?
Maybe some scale is required. A phrase from 'Satoshi' in the initial version of the FAQ:


Let's assume Bitcoin becomes hugely successful and manages to displace the US dollar tomorrow. The total quantity of dollars that make up the monetary base (http://libertyledger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/M2-and-Monetary-Base-Image.png) (the most liquid money that bitcoin would replace) is on the order of 2 trillion, so if their value is substituted with  bitcoins, the 12 million bitcoins generated in the next 10 years (6 million -> 18 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_bitcoins_over_time.png)) will be worth today about 1.3 trillion $. If we equate that value with the price of electricity as per the quote above we get 26 trillion KWh at current wholesale prices. That's more than the entire energy production (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electric_energy_consumption) of the world in a single year ! During the ten year period, minting bitcoins would require 70% of the electricity production of the United States !

While I agree Bitcoin will not replace the dollar, and it will certainly not do so tomorrow, using the correct scale shows just how bad a design is. A smaller Bitcoin is not less bad, just bad on a smaller scale, a local toxic spill as opposed to a full blown Exxon Valdez.

Mind you, I have ignored the hardware requirements which will likely dominate mining and that have more important impacts on the environment than the electricity consumption. In a real scenario, the electricity consumption will be lower, while the environmental impacts will be higher (manufacturing is more damaging than electricity production for a given revenue level; electricity can come from nuclear, hydro, etc. while copper can't be extracted without carving up some mountain).
I challenge anyone to reflect on how all this compares with the current financial sector, and prove how Bitcoin can be seen as an improvement.

Tosh. Your numbers are all to hell. Probably a troll. I can't be bothered anymore.

Edit: okay, couldn't resist, currently running at around 2.6 MWatt ... 1 big wind turbine, (measuring energy in weight of steel is sign of a quack). At high enough BTC value, capital cost will be less than energy cost and FPGA will take over ...

@BubbleBoy

Your arguments don't even merit a response.  You don't even understand of what you are speaking.

Until there is a better solution, waste is relative. It's quite easy to suggest that the Bitcoin network is wasteful. Designing and implementing a less wasteful solution to achieve the same ends, on the other hand, probably isn't as easy. I'm not sure anyone was suggesting the current implementation is the only imaginable solution, but perhaps they were.

As it stands, the Bitcoin network is a working solution. I hope you don't mind if I use such a terribly wasteful solution while I wait for some bright fellow to implement a less wasteful solution?

Not in the least! I hope you do agree however there exist a minimal threshold that a technical solution must meet before we can agree it solves a problem. The Wrights kite, albeit a glorious technical achievement, was not good enough for passing the Atlantic - but who am I to stop you from spending your New Years Eve in Rio ? Happy new year 1904 ! :D

First, you're omitting the colossal amount of waste engendered at every level of the debt based we are enjoying right now, due to the very nature of the this economic model.

Second, your point about maximum energy expenditure is irrelevant. As long as energy is available, mining will race to hashing power. If Bitcoin becomes so dominant that mining will suck the majority of the electricity produced in the world, then it'll turn into an energy race. Note too that worldwide electricity consumption is but a small portion of global energy expenditure. France is the country with the most nuclear power plants in the world and yet electricity is only 17% of its total energy expenditure. Also try to think about how that would change the portion of electricity within the total energy expenditure, while keeping in mind that electricity in most of the southern hemisphere can be produced 100% green.

Lastly, how do you propose a decentralized, p2p store of value achieves high enough levels of security to serve its purpose properly without the use of intensive and aggressive concepts such as proof of work? What do you think is more wasteful, to produce wealth and have it consistently weaseled out of your hands, or spend energy to maintain and protect a proper currency? Resources spent to protect wealth are just a fact of life, deal with it. And be happy that there are stores of value out there that won't lose in value on top of costing you to protect and store them.

That would be the United States. Unless you meant per capita ;)

Oh yeah, my bad. France is top per capita, 2nd by count.

The economic model promoted by Bitcoin is a different issue than the costs of the technical implementation itself. Even if you are right in that changing the economic model will more than make up for the waste of Bitcoin itself, it still leaves open the question of whether a less wasteful 'Bitcoin-like' system is possible. I conjuncture that it is, although as rezin777 points out, creating it does not seems like a trivial task.


A race for energy is ultimately a race against the environment. We know of no way to generate electricity without impacting the environment, the so called green electricity means for example huge wind-farms made of steel, aluminium, and copper that barely break-even in term of energy and resource costs to build them.
This is the main point of the 'waste' topic, what's being wasted is the limited potential of earth to sustain us. It's misleading to say electricity is negligible in the energy mix. Creating electricity is hard and polluting because of basic thermodynamics, and in no way can you compare the 1KW of burning gas with 1KW of electricity.


Currency is a medium of exchange, not a store of value. As a medium of exchange, it should have the minimal costs possible, ideally free (while in limited supply). There's no concise evidence that maintaining the value of a currency in the general sense entails energy expenditures. Maybe distributed internet money are different, and then again maybe not.

This economic model is deeply tied to Bitcoin, since the only guaranty that a currency won't be meddled with by the force controlling it is to decentralize it, and the only acceptable method for decentralization that I can wrap my mind around is 100% distributed, public data, which, by its very nature, requires higher means to secure it than centralized systems. It's like the difference between a population that is forbidden to own and wield weapons and an armed people. Naturally less resources will be spent buying guns and ammo in the former, but you're at the mercy of your government. On the other hand, an armed population can ensure it's own liberty, naturally at a higher cost, but you have to factor in all the wars your government won't get itself involved in thanks to that. I understand that you are not arguing about the need for freedom, rather, the point you are arguing is that there is no need for guns to ensure one's freedom, and that it's just fancy shit that a fist can replace for much cheaper. I'm arguing that your stance is unrealistic.


First, metals can be recycled easily, rotten dinosaur carcasses, not so much. Second, I wasn't thinking about worthless photovoltaic cells that can't even repay their production costs, I was thinking of newer, more efficient methods with low upcost, such as CSP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power). This is why I was speaking of southern hemisphere countries mainly. And yes, this technology is on its way to become as efficient as fossil fuels.


I thought it was beyond the need for discussion that a proper currency has to be a proper store of value to begin with. Unless you're willing to discuss it, of course