Bitcoin Forum

So yea... OMG we use a lot of energy for this funny math. Can I repent somewhere?

Its not different from auto racing. Alot of oil wasted on going around in circles.

Some places have extra that is not being used... so you might be doing the power company a favor.  All depends on where you live.

Some commercial on here you see setting up close to electricity centers with extra (one was hydro).  It works out good for all. 

Its not too bad, certain type of gaz we emit, like the A/C gaz multiply the heating effect by thousands vs its watt consumption. So in term of mining heat generated, its pretty ecological in comparison.

If you use A/C for your stuff though, you're going to ecological hell xD

Not if btc moves over to POS. Now there is an idea.

i guess that they can find a way to use all those heat in something productive, they could sue for example a thermoelectric generator, to produce a portion of the electricity spent

and recycle a bit of it, there will be less waste or thye can redirect the heat in the house of the people to heat apartments, although it's not so healthy...

Both mining and racing and make money for somebody. All actions will consume energy. It is difficult to say if the energy is wasted.

At least bitcoin mining stores the consumed electricity as value in bitcoin..
Many other pursuits consume electricity with nothing to show for it at the end :)

I think that your question already been answered with amount of equipment that is running and more coming online. Consumption is already hella high and it is only going to get higher unless the tech gets more energy improved and the GH to KW gets better and becomes more energy effective. Take the S7 Power Consumption: 1293W if that could be halved or even more then that would be a leap in the right direction but even from some of the old S1 rigs first introduced to the market Power consumption has come far since them days and using a lot less. Get the current S7 or maybe future S8 and S9 down to half the power and twice the speeds would be amazing.

And then everybody will run 4 times as many of them. Most people mining are limited by their current electrical supply and heat logistics. When you come out with a machine that uses half the power, they just buy 2x as many new units to replace the old ones.

And think about this. What happens to all the older units that run at half the speed?

Somebody somewhere buys them for cheap and runs them. So now you just have a worse overall power use, not better. This is what is currently happening with the S7/A6 war.

And while eventually the oldest, weakest gear gets phased out, it will be brought back out to play if/when the price spikes. Making things even worse than ever. Remember that usually the gear is turned off before it breaks, so theres plenty out there.

Then there's the mountain (literally) of gear that will need to be re-cycled. But how many do that? And theres the cost of extracting all those metals from open pit mines and the effect on water quality.

I'm not saying were all going to hell, but we do contribute to some bad shit overall. Owning a few miners in your basement doesn't make you a bad person by any stretch. Somebody was bound to do this work once it became profitable to do so mind you. This is a capital driven planet and society. Nothing was going to slow this revolution down, digital money that is.

I heat the second story of my house by mining. My power consumption actually went down compared to using an electric heater.  Guess I am going to power consumption heaven. :o

Or maybe I am going to insulation hell.  :-\

It's time we got away from using electricity and switched to light power. :)

Guys it has occurred to me BTC is being used as population  control in China.

China has huge over population issues.

So how do lower population in a way that appears non violent.

Make really cheap power with dirty coal mining plants.-----  yes

Give people a reason to burn more and more coal. ---------  yes

Watch record bad pollution occur. ------------------------------yes

And btc is a key component for this to happen  as it drives more and more power in China which has some of the worst coal power plants in the world.

The smart one will use air filter, the rest will... choke and die? Kind of sad. And its probably hard to put sanction on China about their pollution because of all the economic/political power they have.

The network isn't consuming that much power... Compared to carbon emissions from cars.

The whole current banking system consumes much more power than the bitcoin network.

at least much of the energy consumed in bitcoin mining is converted into value in the form of bitcoins. When you turn on a light bulb it just creates light & heat and conserves no value to use later.

When you turn on the light bulb, it gives out light, it is what we want. BitFury is developing a light bulb miner, that could create money and give us light at the same time.

Once the hash rate stabilises, probably somewhere between 200B - 400B taking moores law into account, then the math needs to be done on estimated mW consumption world-wide, and impact on the planets eco-system that SHA256 mining will have, and if the results of the study are *bad*, then it begs the question because this idea then becomes yet another form of opulence for which we all must eventually pay the ultimate price.

We are on hydro-electric power.  No sins here.

-D

Go where the clean power is and we all go to heaven. I think the amount of power burnt is pretty offensive considering how few users there are. You can talk all day long about how much banking systems use but it also services billions of people and trillions of transactions. Maybe bitcoin will inspire some revolutionary energy saving some day. The incentive sure is there.

After several block reward halving, the mining income from the transaction fees will domininate, so the total income might reduce, the difficulty rise will not be so high.

Actually that's the idea. Be more proactive on this - figure out what can we do with the heat output. Surely there must be a way we can take advantage of this and make use of it.

That is if Bitmain and other companies will reduce their hardware mining production.

Yes indeed! If there is a source to gather up heat from all the centers or say the heat gathered from every area could be centrally collected to warm up a blast furnace to produce iron from iron ore.A lot of coal which is supposedly an non-renewable natural resource .Furthermore a lot could be done from the heat which can replace solar panels if mechanically engineered.

I think they are increasing the hardwrae mining production. The difficulty is sky rocketing at the moment.

With all the changes I started some new ROI spreadsheets.   My ones from a few month's ago seem to optomistic with difficulty changing so much.

I had not added up till today the past year's electricity.  I was focused on month to month (as my gear channges buy new get rid of older).   Only thing for sure i my new set of ROI spreadsheets is the electric company must love me.

I think the realistic difficulty rise should be at least 15% for the next 6 months. The 16 nm miner will increase the hash quite a lot.

We have no idea what it will do.  15 percent each change is a heck of a lot more then we were doing most of last year - https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty .  Really since November we had crappy numbers for a lot of it.  I'm not sure you can blame right now on 16 nm, it just as easily could be bitmain with current chips.

But yes once 16nm hit the shelves in data centers they will do it fast.   It's hard to tell how bad it will get.  Our main hope is if bitcoin has a big value increase were getting a little bit but not enough in my opinion.   But I think this post is getting off track as it was talking about consumption.

Right now compumption is a lot on last gen gear with normal electricity prices.  I sold all my last gen gear and bought coin's.  I was just not making enough to be worth it. It will go into buying more miners not for sure yet if I want more of current or wait.... I'm torn but I do feel good about selling now on last gen.

I think eventually, the power consumption will be equal to the earnings from the all the blocks rewards+ fees. It does not matter how advanced the miner is.

i don't know about that.  I think there has to be profit for some to continue at this point.  Bitcoin is so big and has a lot of power behind's it's network.  One day the fees alone should pay for the network .. but were pretty far away from that currently.

But always going to be profit or we lose a lot of hash.  Just coming out equal financially will be hard to convince many to keep mining.

Semiconductors will be hitting an area of limited gains shortly and the same with mining technology.  It may not be worth to spend the 2 hours of labor swapping out a unit to put in a new unit for minimal energy savings and possibly new downtime.

Is the limit in the 10 nm range? That is 100 times the size of an atom. The latest chip is about 14 nm as far as I know.

if they are all using s7 for their mining, it appear that the total wattage is around 240MW

200k s7 for 1200w

Ah thanks, you did same math here  - just 2 min before me:)

yeah, it would be curious to know the maximum energy per zone that chinese can use before the needs to move to another location

Yes - I  could also think this will be only a 'near' term advantage until it is noticed & stopped and / or reaches some external threshold.

The hydro power station that is used by HaoBTC to mine has the total capacity of 25MW. That is about 20,000 S7.