Bitcoin Forum

Currently, bitcoin network consumes 26 TWh a year or 250 kWh per single transaction and is growing at a rate of over 1% daily (according to this website https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption.)


250 kwh (single transaction!) is now roughly the same to to what an average home/household uses in a month.

Is this really sustainable?

If bitcoin should grow even more, how much power will be used just to run it?

Wow I cant believe it requires so much energy for a single transaction
If I convert it to my country's electricity price, it is around $35 for one single transaction :o

Wow, I had no idea that it was that bad!  The worst part is that it could be run just as well on a few PCs, but it is just cycles of greed that force the miners to invest more and more or razor thin margins, so that they can get their Bitcoin.

I guess that improvements in efficiency will help flatten the curve, but I expect that it will still increase for a long time yet.

I wonder when the authorities will have something to say about the massive amount of wasted energy?

It's a real problem. Even as the mining community moves to more and more efficient ASICs the difficulty also keeps increasing. It's a real argument for moving to PoS but all the miners will resist since they have invested so much money already.

The most surprising stat here isn't really the twh or whatever but rather the 1% growth that is alarming. Right now it's still not an issue because of the fact that bitcoin is still in its early adoption phases, but it's definitely not going to be sustainable if bitcoin goes mainstream.

This has been discussed before but with no avail. The first PoS coin PPC has much decreased adoption, though, which probably means that right now, people don't sense the urgency.

Hopefully, we'll figure this out soon as a community.

there are 100 billion card transactions every year, and thats only POS credit/debit card, not counting all the trading transactions etc which are a multiple of that.
Bitcoin is right now at 100 million per year and uses 0,12% of world energy.
If it were 100 billion, that would mean 10% of world energy consumption just to replace card payments (at current consumption, the real figure would be much more).

I do agree that energy consumption for Bitcoin mining is unsustainable - but we shouldn't make the false comparison of how expensive it is per transaction. The direct energy cost/tx model, if used across various currency or payment methods, was recently used to compare Bitcoin to Visa. But the inherent benefits of Bitcoin far outweight those of Visa and others: the security and privacy to me are the most obvious. The amount of control you have. Swipe a card or enter it and you can never really be sure of what you're spending and to whom. You never know when its data could be stolen and misused (it's definitely seen, tracked and recorded!).

Plus, the overheads for Bitcoin are significantly lower. Sure, mining operations are costly, but nothing compared to the infrastructure and human resource of Visa or others.

But to the point at hand - algorithm changes may very well happen to help address this, but it may be a very long time before that happens. My thinking is that mining cartels fear its effects on price and may once again feel they have a huge say in the matter.

...wow. I knew energy consumption was a problem, but I didn't think it was this alarming. That 1% daily growth makes it completely unsustainable. There's so much money in bitcoin that the community is sure to find a solution though. We'll find a consensus algorithm that works for us soon enough.

soon these mining outfits will be adding solar then this wont be as big as an issue i think. thats what weed growers are doing.

I dont think this really sovles everything. And in fact, solar power is more expensive and mainly used in the developed countries.
The countries that electricity is the cheapest right now and most mining power is concentrated, use the dirties energy possible,

Bitcoin carbon output is really big.

BTC uses a shit ton of energy. If it keeps going this way then BTC mining will be the biggest cause of even more global warning.

this is another obstacle preventing bitcoin from becoming a normal mode of payment, I think.

this decentralization is not as beneficial as it may seem, especially if it comes at this cost.

i have a question: is this possibile, in your opinions, convert in same way btc in PoS? or maybe find and develop a new  algo a lot more efficient?

It seems to me that bitcoin is more expensive and the more it is already mined, the more difficult and energy-consuming it will be. Perhaps Segwit would unload this problem. But since it did not take place or was simply postponed, it remains for us to observe and earn on the growth of the rate of the Crypto-currency.

I guess it was just all about calculations and for me even how the price will go mainstream, the power consumption of the blockchain network might not affect so well to be alarming. The miners equipment who helped the network to run smoothly had their good hardware and it's now having energy efficient capability to handle power losses, so we need not to be worried for it.

This is very worrying. What would the total energy consumption for all the cryptocoins and tokens? This and the fact that BTC is now considered high risk of a bubble, makes me want to decrease my exposure to cryptocurrencies.
The World's Biggest Bubbles - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-07/worlds-largest-bubbles-ranked-algebris-investments (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-07/worlds-largest-bubbles-ranked-algebris-investments)

Bitcoin holds 60% of marketcap, not all other coines are mined as heavily, Id say total energy consumption is about 40 TWh per year, similar to the state of New Zealand.

unless they power the network with solar energy, or fusion energy comes real
then the whole idea  will decline as being not efficient.

all the cards in the world (visa , mastercard  etc) operate at a fraction of the energy  needed for bitcoin mining and even for validating the transactions (if and when mining finish)

1% daily is very high rate . And I think if this rate grow like this , then the price of Btc also going to rise further .

In Long run I dont think such high rate is sustainable .

Woah! I never imagined this has caused so much problem not only in our society but on the whole world! This is a very alarming issue and I hope that the state of every country will help this community if ever needed. It is just a sad truth that there are a lot of greedy miners out there who consumes so much energy and don't even realize the outcomes and the cost of what they are doing.  :-\

I believe, that's will be a problem in the future, but BTC can change, being more efficient energetically, or use a sustainable energy.  But in the future a change is necessary to increase the number of transactions, it is fact.

i think is minimal since the every miner is mining in mining pool to mine a block so, the total energy consumed is distributed among the miners and besides the miners came from different parts of the world so, the energy costs is varying in every country and some miners are using solar energy to avoid huge electricity costs. In fairness they manage to calculate the energy consumption of bitcoin network very nice

In future this will be an issue and to overcome this countries holding the cheap electricity production will be having lots of large scale mining farms. When the consumption increases automatically the transaction fee too will increase. This will directly affect the growth, for which plans need to be made prior.

It's actually exciting don't you think? If Bitcoin will end up replacing money then people will be forced to harness energy in every possible way. Sustainable energy will then be an even more pressing mission. If all the houses in the world have their own solar panels, every river has its own hydro plant and ever mountain or field has wind turbines then I doubt the world will still run out of energy.

it is not miner's fault to be honest
it is the foundation on which btc was build on

With this analysis, there is need to exercise fear concerning the amount of energy that bitcoin production is consuming which if it continues this way will end up consuming the entire power of a community of about a year.

However, this is something that has been envisaged before the entire bitcoin will be fully mined by 2140 you will agree with me that if we are above 16 million bitcoins according to some sources already mined, then going by that trend we should even finish mining before the next five years but because of the difficulty that has been factored into the design, this will then enable bitcoin to sustain to that point which is over 100 years from now. It will then get to the point where 1 bitcoin will not be mined in a whole year and effort will be channeled on those that have already been mined.

Great thinking mate and this will be first development step of bitcoin that it will teach people to be independent and relay on their own energy resources and if this thing will be adopted that every house will harvest his own energy then there will be no power dissipation and bitcoin mining will be more easier as compared to now so hope so this thing will be implemented to give people a lot of eases and profit.

What do you think is the energy consumption of the entire global banking system? I guess you don't know? Why do you call a few Mw 'unsustainable' if you don't know how much your current banking system consumes?

If you start your math, take this parameters as a start:

- Ressources to build and maintain everything worldwide from paper money, coins, banks, atms, salaries and and and etc pp
- Energy consumption of everything regarding the banking system

You will soon realize, that Bitcoin will never ever waste more energy, than the banking system is wasting right now.

ALso you have mining farms, processor factories, wallet companies, etc etc. Bitcoin now with a very low market capitalization of the whole financial market takes up a disproportionate energy share. 5 billion daily compared to 14 trillion just for the US. Bitcoin uses almost 1% of US power and just a 0,001% od its dailz transactions.

Is the calculation there correct? The article mentions 0.27W/Ghash, but modern mining machines, like the S9, are about 0.1 W/Gh. Don't most miners use that nowadays?

Anyway, I think the major issue currently is the transaction rate. If Bitcoin can be made to process x1000 the transactions, the power cost per transaction becomes much more reasonable, though still high. At 10^4 or 10^5 the current rate it will be reasonable, and at 10^6 or more it will become negligible.

Miners often complaint about high electricity consumption...I think this power consumption calculation is of some old generation mining machine. Latest Mining machine AntMiner S9 have power efficiency of 0.098 W/Gh and approx 0.3603 BTC earned per month.

It can't be 0.36 BTC per month, because that would cover the cost of the S9 within a month, no?

Multiplying the current global hash rate by 0.1W/Ghash, and assuming a low cost of 0.08$ per kWh, I'm getting a cost per block/10 minutes of about 13,000 US$. That's more than $5 of electricity per transaction! Do you get the same result?

Assuming 12.5 + 2.5 BTC income per mined block, at current exchange rates 15 BTC x 6K$ = 90,000$. That means at most the hash rate can grow by 7 before becoming completely uneconomical. And there are costs other than electricity, so maybe x5-6. More than that would require more efficient hashing chips, or higher transaction fees.

250kwh per transaction isn't that much if you think that Bitcoin has potential to become a worldwide currency. Cost of maintaining paper money is also huge. You have to print additional money, distribute it and utilize old bills. Not to mention the high possibility of forgery. It isn't possible to forge Bitcoin, it's not even that easy to steal it.

Is a banking transaction will need much the same energy other than bankers branches needed. I don’t know the answer but for sure it is more than a cryptocurrency production does. Then if it is not comparable with that data then this 250kwh is enough for me especially that most country are using nuclear energy that is more efficient and cheap than a coal plant that is dangerous environmentally.

Bitcoin should be compared to digital transfers like credit cards or PayPal.
I don't know what their costs are, but I'm sure PayPal isn't paying $5 per transaction.

The result I'm getting at 0.1W/Ghash is 66 kWh per transaction, so let's assume that instead of 250 kWh.

Based on Wikipedia data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption), 66kWh is the per capita power consumption for:

24 days, based on a global average
4.5 days in Canada (highest usage in the world?)

According to that, if everyone in the world did 1 transaction per week, you would need 3.4 more worldwide power generation.

Wow I never realised it took so much enegery for just 1 transaction!!

Crazy  :-X

The most important and the foremost reason for the energy consumption in bitcoins is minning.
Miners continuously try to get their block done.. and in fact if someone out there is successful in finding " nonce "
The other miners have to accept it and they stop working on their project because it only allows one blick to be mined in 10 minutes .
Now for this gambling 1000's of miners are sitting at their home and running big machines that consumes a lot of power..and then there is also the case of transactions

I think after all the blocks are mined that energy consumption will be cutoff and it will get close to sustainable.

This was kind of worked on with NEM coin's proof of importance (POI) which is a modified proof of stake algorithm, which requires that accounts be used to transact rather than simply hoard to increase importance to enable 'staking' if you will, I doubt the miners would release Bitcoin's POW algorithm so easily... It is very expensive to secure a POW blockchain.

oh so expensive for a single transaction only? i have no idea on that part, thats a big wasting of energy to continue, if bitcoin grew ever more, they need to provide a solar power or other alternate energy source so supply they energy needs and not to waste more energy to be less paid.

Even after blocks stop giving the mining bonus (and that will be years into the future), new blocks will still have to be generated to hold new transactions.

AntMiner S9 is more energy efficient as compared to old mining devices. It consumes about 0.1 W/Gh...way less than .27 W/Gh in the article. So its better to replace a old miner to a new one as it consumes less electricity and hence more profits.

The energy consumption is very large. I heard that the single bitcoin transaction takes a lot of energy. I hope that the lightning network will be integrated soon.