Bitcoin Forum

Just wondering what peoples thoughts are on bitcoin mining.

In a simplified case, say you mine with your pc 24 hours per day you are more than doubling your power usage (increasing carbon footprint) compared to if you used it for 12 hours or for an 8 hour working day.

Nope, it isn't. But then most money comes from trees and a huge industrial process surrounding their production, too.

+1

I suppose because of competition on efficiency, Bitcoin is even more efficient than existing electronic payment systems.


ya.ya.yo!

CO2 is good for trees  ;)

anyway, traditional banking/economic/financial system is much much more inefficient

Fair point, to a newbie it could seem like such a waste of energy to get no physical return.

So as efficiency increases, more devices get used, will power going into mining (globally) decrease or increase ?

lol ;)

The system is not responsible. I agree that typical currencies also have an environmental impact, but with increasing difficulty you need more procecessing power which consumes more energy. In the end the exchange rates regulate the environmental impact.

;D

rofl


ya.ya.yo!

You would need more qualitative data to know for sure. For instance some countries have a high or even 100% green energy. Some individuals use solar power. Some might use off-peak which would otherwise go to waste. etc.

This. Because energy consumption is pretty much the only cost of bitcoin mining, the only way for miners to increase their profits is to become even more energy efficient, either by developing more efficient mining hardware (eg, ASICs) or by using renewable energy sources (eg, solar power). In fact, if Bitcoin becomes widely accepted, it will directly monetise research into new forms of energy production. If the inventor of fusion power says they did it just to get free energy for their mining rig, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

we have to plant trees then

No it's not.

I for one think the process of "generating waste heat without any real use, in order to secure the network" called mining is the creates weak spot of Bitcoin.

Hopefully at some point someone will come up with a better way to make it financially attractive to secure the network.

Imagine all this money spend for "mining equipment" would be used to actually contribute to the network, something like "proof of bandwidth" or something, which would also help to ensure that it could handle increased transactions in the future.

PPC is close, but it's not quite there yet.

"Waste heat" could be used for heating, too.

Maybe in future most miners are located in the polar regions... :)


ya.ya.yo!

I think the impact is only determined by exchange rates.

Increasing effiency will result in higher network speed and thus higher difficulty. And with higher difficulty, you will get less BTC over time.

First CPU then GPU then FPGA them ASIC, but BTC mined remained the same. You only made profit if you were early adopter of new technology or with increasing exchange rates.

So only higher exchange rates make wider adoption possible and thus the environmental impact is higher.

haha... perhaps too much CO2 on earth.

I don't think it's very environmentally great, but then nothing much we do is as humans. Probably the newer tech like ASIC will be more energy efficient which will be good. Factoring the environmental cost properly into the cost of generating power (taking into account the type of power generation i.e. coal, nuclear, solar etc) and passing that cost on to the power consumer is probably the best way for the market to correctly rate their particular scale of mining operations impact on the environment because it will be reflected in the bottom line.

Where I live solar is common and grid power is not especially cheap, so it become more sensible to mine during the daylight hours only and use just the solar power. Though it slows things down considerably, if your power costs are substantial it can make sense.

If you trace back all wealth to its origin you will find some sort of exploitation of the environment/natural resources.
Its the foundation of all economies since the dawn of humanity, its what we do, and a large part of how we determine that something has value, bitcoin is just carrying on in this long tradition. :)

Yes, the number of bitcoins is the same, but the cost (in terms of both dollars and energy) certainly isn't. Which bring us to the next point:

It's not enough for the technology to merely be new. The new technology must also be more energy efficient than the old technology in order to make a profit. Bitcoin gives miners a direct monetary incentive to adopt energy efficient technologies. Sure, everybody can pay less for electricity by being more energy efficient, but bitcoin miners don't just pay less, they actually make money by being energy efficient. That's a much stronger incentive.

I'm not sure it's a fair comparison. The amount of bitcoin in circulation isn't all that much.

Interesting, so depending on the power source, a 12/24 rig could be much more than twice as environmentally friendly (and cost effective) than a 24/24.

To comment on the OP clearly not very environmentally responsible in a direct sense.

According to this article http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-12/virtual-bitcoin-mining-is-a-real-world-environmental-disaster.html the bitcoin hashcash mining function is taking a gigawatt hours per day.

As the inventor of hashcash thats a lot of power I indirectly caused to be burnt.  Personally I am reasonably green minded so I can see  the negative aspects of that.

However an alternative view is that bitcoin is lower financial transaction costs.  And credit card companies, clearing banks, banks have been getting away with charging some rather high fees.  The cost of that electricity is a lot lower than those fees.  Maybe the money freed up by saving those transaction fees.  Global fund flow is measured in the trillions per day.  Depending on the details banks charge 20 - 50 USD or more and a percent of the amount.  Surely would dwarf current mining costs.  Human resources have value too - if banking become more efficient and if people can save money, human resources are freed to invest in and work on more human progress.  Maybe we get fusion power a year sooner, or people can buy more solar with the money saved etc. in the big picture.  Also about half the bitcoins have already been mined.  Though I dont think the mining arms race is barely started.  I think its probable we will see rows of datacenter racks full of 22nm custom chips ultra dense blades in datacenters chasing down the last of it.  ie right at the technology limit tracking moore's law.

Adam

Well its just a guestimate and there are factors pushing towards it being over estimate (FPGA, ASIC, and people having second uses as space heaters, people using mining on systems that were on anyway and not using much extra power or no extra because of it) or an underestimate more people than you'd think still playing with CPU miners, or CPU mining + GPU simultaneously etc.  Who knows!

But another thing is the stat of 982/24 = 40 MWatts sounds less alarming than ~ 1 GWh per day.  You notice how they did that.  However thats still quite a few households eh has to be into the thousands of households range.  According to this stat http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3 that would be like 30,000 households ongoing energy budget. 

And escalating probably as the difficulty ramps up if the price supports the demand.

Adam

I was wondering what the context of this kind of number is vs. say industrial usage. I found this analysis of European Energy Efficiency, including stats for overall european industry: http://www.lbst.de/ressources/docs2010/EP-05_Energy-Efficiency-Industry_DEC2010_PE-451-483.pdf

One key quote was:
.
So in 1990 to 2005 (I don't know about the last 8 years) European industrial sector has used 320 MTOE per year.

TOE is a tonne of oil, with an equivalent energy expenditure of 41.868 GJ or 11.63 MWh.

320MTOE is equal to 3.2*10E8*11.63 = 3.722PWh (peta-Watt-hours)! However, that's per year, so per day that works out as "only" 10.2 TWh (tera-Watt-hours) per day. So, well done BitCoin you're currently running at 0.01% of the energy usage of the European industrial sector!

im newbie XD

Food for thought. We're not all using asicminer just yet though. And do you think the global hash rate might increase once everyone owns an one ? ;)

Indeed it is: How Fossil Fuels Have Greened the Planet (https://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424127887323374504578217621593679506.html&ei=srhvUZ7aOYS7hAeq_YGIAw&usg=AFQjCNGlOg_10L2hqVBoaEftZ7EADor7SQ&sig2=F0QJvcbU6mwGS3xdmEDE9w&bvm=bv.45368065,d.ZG4) (weird, I must click the google link to get through the paywall, the direct link doesn't work)

My electricity is produced by the voice of Bill Withers, and the tears of Orphans.....Its sufficient for now.


BTCHarlemite

What does it cost? We all should ask us what does it cost, if we do not etablish an independend money system.....

Compared to the energy usage of all HFT-trading worldwide its nothing.

I think the question in here is how much energy is spent in producing, distributing and regulating fiat currency. All those articles do not talk about that subject and I'm sure it is spent much more energy in fiat currency.

It would be interesting to see the other side of the coin.

Best regards,

Of course. In what scenario would it be environmentally responsible? It is a waste of real-world resources.

> ...

> this is the insulting robot

> all your lives are a waste of resources!

I think you're right and you could reasonably claim HFT is a stupid zero-sum game, leading to flash spikes when algorithms go wrong real-fast.  The defenders might claim it adds liquidity but traders were trading before HFT and liquidity was fine, and what human needs sub-microsecond liquidity.  People should be investing not speculating by the day, minute or now microsecond!  A bit of short-term speculation helps liquidity and remove exchange differentials via arbitrage and reduce spread via volume, but there need to be sanity limits.

Adam

I'd really like to get solar panels, did anyone here get them just to mine?

Short answer: No.

Is mining gold, silver, nickel etc environmentally responsible?

Bitcoin mining isn't sustainable at all, and this is the reason why it will be overtaken by other better crypto currencies.


Just to give you an example. The M1 money supply in the US, the money "minted" by the FED is approx 2.000 billion USD.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M1/

Each block mined in bitcoin gives 25 coins out of 11049125, or 6*24*25 = 3600 out of 11049125 a day.

That works out to 0.03258% per day.

If we used bitcoin instead of fiat with a total market value equal to 2.000 billion USD, the cost of mining will be close to the energy price of 2.000 billion USD * 0.03258% per day.  That works out to

$ 651 million in energy expenditure per day.

That is almost $240 billion a year.

Now make no mistake, that is simply the cost of reaching consensus on which transactions have happened. Thus the equivalent of this value in goods and services are extracted from the economy.

Instead of going to bankers, it is smoked by computers for the benefit of reaching consensus.

The thing is that there are actually cheaper ways of reaching consensus, and the ppcoin is one such method.  It uses proof of past work instead of constantly doing new work to reach consensus.  Thus the cost of running the network in terms of energy is radically different.  This means that it can scale to cover a bigger economy than what bitcoin can.

I often wonder this! It is quite a waste of computing resources really. What we need is a useful sum! The power is used to find massive primes and that leads to the creation of a new block! Primes are useful!

It is better to reuse proof of work that has already happened.   A bitcoin is proof of work that happened in the past, and one concept that is put on top of this is to count the days since you received the coin, and that is your "integrated" proof-of-work.

Every block, all holders of bitcoin gets one "bitcoin-block" of voting power.  In ppcoin this voting power can be used to reduce the real proof-of-work/hashing required to win.

Bitcoin mining isn't sustainable for a currency but for a digital commodity I don't really see the problem with it. Compared to all the waste in general society worrying about a couple megawatts of electricity mining Bitcoin is far from a concern in my opinion.

The problem is that the electricity requirements of bitcoin means that transactions will have to be more expensive than for competing currencies.

The transaction volume is an upper bound on the goods and services sold in the economy, and with an incentive to do less transactions than in a competing currency, the goods and services available in bitcoin will be less than in competing currencies(*) 


(*) all other things considered equal.  Assume that for everything I say in this discussion.

Just want to add that ppcoin is also broken in other ways, so that's not the end solution either.

ppcoin and bitcoin share another unrelated misfeature, that the barrier to entry increases as time goes on.

This has nothing to do with difficulty and this is important to understand.  It has specifically to do with SHA256 and the fact that SHA256 was never designed as a proof-of-work problem.

/rolleyes media driven narrative for ratings

Big primes can be created easily, so no point finding em imho.

Someone mentioned all the paper used to print currency, and I would mention the administrative work that is required to keep traditional currency circulating; not just the staff, office space, computers, but all sorts of wallets and purses.  Even if purses were still used, we're talking about a lot of extra leather just for the cash slots and for men- if I could get by just using my mobile device as a wallet, I would, instead of all the cards and cash necessary.

To compare, let's think of bitcoin as a product.  How many useless ubiquitous products are on the market that require a large amount of energy to manufacture or maintain?  When I read media about bitcoin being an environmental disaster, I have trouble reconciling how it should receive so much attention, when any other thing that is needed or desired is churned out by factories without a second thought.

I definitely think we should be mindful of resources, and climate change is serious business- but... let's consider how bitcoin could have a positive impact in replacing currencies in the long term.

As fossil fuels get wound down it will become even more environmentally safe then smelting and printing currency

Agreed- and when solar cells are readily available, this will disappear except the cost to manufacture mining hardware- which of course will be great, once the ASICs are readily available at the same price point as GPUs/FPGAs.

Guys, i read through looking for anyone making the most important points that come to my mind and didn't see it.  When i read this article a few days ago it annoyed me because.

1.  Method:  How green your electricity is depends on how you make it.  The world is gradually improving this.

2.  Comparison:  How is this different than all of the thousands of data centers operated by all of the worlds banks which I dare say are probably far less efficient than the mining rigs.  Also the block-chain doesn't require heated and ventilated branch offices scattered every 10 meters throughout every city on earth.  Who's green now?

3.  Future:  Mining has a real incentive to drive efficiency forward and reduce costs.  Traditional banks don't, we all can see how they endlessly keep raising fees to cover whatever private jets they desire.  Miners have no such access - no end consumers for them to rape.

Yes yes, I know the rising difficulty draws more and more power, but keeping things in perspective it's vastly greener than conventional banking when all things are considered.  Plus if the world ever goes full BTC in the far future, you can recycle every ATM on earth into beer cans or something.  Having access to the internet is already as important or more-so than where the nearest bank or ATM is.

if you combine your bitcoin mining device as a space heater and turn off that heater, then sure? :P

It isn't environmentally responsible in my opinion but there are so many other, much bigger, environmental problems in the world that I'd start there rather than mining bitcoins.

I do agree though. In an ideal world we wouldn't need to mine them.

+1

an ideal world exists only in each persons heads.  there is no ideal.

there is improvement though.

But hasn't bitcoin competition advanced the development of efficiencies in power consumption OR doesn't it encourage that? Even before I began mining, I considered how it might do that for both the end user of such hardware and for massive data centers.

Is it environmentally responsible to have lights in your house?  Enjoy a movie in a theater? Drive your fancy new electric car?  Use any device which requires flowing electrons to operate it?  (Which is pretty much every device on earth.)

It's how one makes electrons flow that counts.  Bitcoin miners run on electricity, not coal, so if you then go make your electricity with coal, then I'd recommend you stop.

And lets not forget that the banking / finance sector uses mind boggling amounts of electricity for it to operate and keep all it's branches open, so let's keep it all in perspective now.  Why aren't we complaining here that Bank of America should set the air-conditioners in all of it's buildings 1 degree warmer?  Or upgrade 2 year old servers with new more efficient ones to reduce data center electric bills?  Or or or....  Any one of a thousand small savings could probably run all of the bitcoin miners on earth several several times over.  

Lastly, I've said elsewhere but bitcoin does spur efficiency since running costs come directly from mining profit unlike traditional banking which can dictate the amount of profit it wants to have from year to year.

So we can enjoy the cool breeze from our HVAC (or warmth from our mining rigs) and focus on smarter ways to power things.  As this isn't a green power forum we can just let the matter rest because as far as bitcoin is concerned i think the original article that spawned this discussion was FUD.

Renewable energy ftw.

The problem isn't bitcoin mining, the problem is our reluctance to switch to renewable energy sources because the dirty ones are so damn profitable. Ironically, mining btc probably has the same motivator. :D

I think you're considering things in the right light... a lot of people consider only what they're doing and what media tells them vs. what is currently done to gain revenue.  

I totally understand the environmental impact of energy use, but right now, I'm waiting on my next work contract and sitting at home instead of using a car to travel 20+ miles round trip... would anyone here suggest that shutting down my rig would be beneficial to me financially?

No the efficiency of mining does not influence the energy consumption at all.  It is the exchange price of BTC that drives energy consumption.

Um..   The exchange price draws and keeps miners in the game and it allows them to cash out and pay their electric bills.  But efficiency is the primary determining factor for how likely you are to receive any bitcoins per KWH of electricity consumed.  If you drive efficiency up by continuing to invest in better hardware (hello ASIC's) then you are more likely to earn enough bitcoins to make it worthwhile.

So true, exchange price is quite important.  But efficiency (defined as hash attempts per unit of electricity) is a serious factor if you plan to mine, as are difficulty rates, local utility rates, room temperature, etc... 

Another thought, that often enters my mind, "What if by mining, at or above the cost of electricity, I'm just buying BTC at the cost of consumption?  Every other form of revenue has energy costs, why is media harshin' me?  Not trying to sound over-Libertarian posed, but I find myself hard-pressed to consider what my energy costs are, when driving to work and working on PCs anyways, as a systems analyst...

Its fine.  Think about how much poewr is wasted on computers already.  Remember though, computers are getting better efficiency and so are these ASICS

I don't think you should feel bad.  When bitcoin uses too much energy, a more energy efficient version like ppcoin will outcompete bitcoins.

You are helping advance technology and the energy issue will be solved.  It just might be that it won't be called bitcoin, but it will be crypto currency.

Mining compared to 2 years ago is more "efficient" given that the amount of transistors we fit on a die doubles almost every 18 months, decreasing power usage.

Think of it this way, Quad Core processors upon initial release were running on 125W to 150W (if I remember correctly), and now Intel and AMD are averaging 75W to 95W for twice the power. Now GPU's, given the way that they are developed (and are the primary tool of the current miner), can practically double their transistor count and cut their power usage in half within this time period.

My point in mentioning this (if it wasn't mentioned before, sorry I skimmed) is that even though miners are HEAVY users of power, the efficiency of all hardware is increasing while the performance is increasing as well. Seeing as it is clean, it's environmentally "friendly" if you're not considering every outside source of power production (.i.e. oil, coal, natural gas, etc.).

For many of you, like myself, have no need to turn on the heat during the winter because of all of the hot air my rig blows out!

Wonder if the cost to mine a dollar's worth of bitcoin is cheaper than the cost of printing a dollar

Of course, if you would otherwise use the excess heat produced by your rig, then the energy isn't wasted.   That might have been true for the last months, but not any longer  ;D

But stop thinking about the hashing efficiency.  It has zero effect on the energy usage of the hashing fleet.  When someone finds a way to mine more efficiently, others are forced to do so as well to avoid earning less, but that's the point of this competition.  The energy usage is the number of BTC created per day * USDBTC.

Because I have to pay for electricity (not few), I definitely consider powering a not-too-consuming device partly or fully by solar panels.

No it is not and so is everything else in this world

I understand efficiency does not have an effect on energy usage, however the hashing efficiency makes a gigantic difference on your profit margin which is where the power matters.

But overall I think mining isn't necessarily "environmentally friendly" given that the difficulty is rising quite rapidly and people are burning their cards for longer times to generate the same profit, or lack thereof.

Speak for yourself, not everyone is in the northern hemisphere :)
(Today is the first day all year I've worn a jumper)

i think if u have a eco computer its safe  8)

So, is it not ok to have a computer on 24 hrs a day?

That's not really what I was trying to say. I was trying to look at the scenario where a typical person starts bitcoin mining. I know your average pc user doesn't have their PC turned on 24 hours per day but that may well become the case if they start mining.