Bitcoin Forum

Source: https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/888535/bitcoin-environment-destroying-planet-fossil-fuels-energy-electricity-Denmark-US-2020

Source: https://grist.org/article/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-clean-energy-future/
(August 2019 update: wrong, "Recent published estimates of bitcoin’s electricity consumption are wide-ranging, on the order of 20‑80 TWh annually, or about 0.1-0.3% of global electricity use" (Ireland is 26TWh) - source (https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2019/july/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-the-gap.html))

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30177-6
(seems correct nearly 2 years later according to iea.org article linked above)

Source: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Other person thinks digiconomist numbers are wrong and power consumption is much lower:
Source: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-mining-is-not-wasteful/
http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/

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I am asking as a non developer looking for the links to project or the timeline of developing solutions to this problem. Thank You
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

Bitcoins short life so far has been eco efficient compared to any other currency in the world.

I do not believe we will see any major changes any time soon about mining. Mining is huge business on it's own and it would not be easy to try to tweak the code there, I am sure many people will lose faith in bitcoin if it for some reason switch to some other consensus such as POS. Problem is real there, that's for sure and with popularity of bitcoin gaining more attention of the public, more people will try to mine it which means the network will consume even more energy.

Number of miners are increased in huge amount from the past 1 years but they are not mining the bitcoin I guess. You may find the ASIC for the high price and not supported for the various mineable coins still.
So investing on mining with the GPU cards will be better and more over difficulty of mining bitcoin will be increased so you can go with the GPU cards and mining ethereum means it is profitable to you bro.

When it comes to profitability/ apparatus cost / changing mineable coins then i would hands down for GPU since this thing can give you out the chance to jump into one coin to another depending into your decision where you can able to view that you can make profits which is an advantage.ASIC is away more expensive that GPU but still there are lots of people who do make engagement with it.When it talks about energy efficiency it would be more enhanced as it upgrades when boards used up smaller nanos.

Energy efficient Bitcoin is hard to see in the future but there will be many other coins which will be energy efficient. Take a look over cybermiles it is a very good coins to invest now.
It is 100 times faster than ethereum.

With the price starting to creep up again do you think it's a good time to start selling some of my investments or do you think it's worth holding on for a while longer?

We all know how temperamental the market can be but do you think this is just a short term spike?

Proof of work relies so much energy on electricity when mining coins. Just consider the difficulty level to mine one block for bitcoin . So its logically impossible for bitcoin operation to be more energy efficient.

Yes if the miner tech changes (unlikely)
Yes, if bitcoin code changes (proof of stake) - unlikely
So probably - never :)

With the fast growing in number of miners around the world each year, can i say the energy requirement increases relatively? The mining is designed in such a way that, as more miners join, the difficulty level in mining a single unit of Bitcoin increases. With this more sophisticated machines are then required which are power-hungry and consumes a lot of energy. Practically, it looks quite impossible for the bitcoin mining industry to be energy efficient.

While I understand how extrapolating causes projections such as this, I have to say I believe that this level of energy consumption to mine Bitcoin is very unlikely to actually occur.

I can think of a number of reasons that would slow the amount of energy used to mine Bitcoin.  For example, if Bitcoin were consuming that much energy, the cost of energy would increase because the supply would become limited for all other purposes.  At some point, mining then becomes unprofitable, so effort would decrease, increasing the supply of electricity, etc.  Supply and demand dynamics.  Also, mining effort is likely to diversify further into other cryptocurrencies.  ASIC's cause many (and certainly nearly all serious Bitcoin miners) from having an easy ability to mine another currency at scale, as they are not able to be repurposed to other algos, unlike GPU mining.

Other factors come into play, such as the next halving of the block reward as well as difficulty decreases if mining effort causes the average time between blocks to lengthen past the target.

I just don't see any way possible that by 2020 all of the world's energy (as is used today) will be devoted to Bitcoin.  We don't grow electrical generation capacity fast enough to keep up.  So something will give.  I don't see the electrical generation side giving unless Bitcoin miners are going to start building power plants.  I mean large, industrial-scale power plants.  (For all I know they already have done this somewhere.)

I guess we shall see.  Certainly, energy consumption of mining is a concern to the extent that it provides a negative talking point about cryptocurrency.  It is also a legitimate concern with respect to the use of energy.  However, Proof of Work is a useful concept to slow the rate of coin emission.  I see coins that implement "proof of useful work", distributed computing work units, as a worthy way to mitigate this problem to some extent.  However, at this point at least, I would never recommend that this is implemented in Bitcoin.  The type of distributed computing work units are too diverse and more work should be done in this area (other technical and practical problems to confront and resolve) before it would ever be something I'd advocate for in a currency as important as Bitcoin.  This is an area that interests me and that I hope to spend some R&D effort on.

Best regards,
Ben

Edited to add: Currently, the incentives to mine Bitcoin cause a feedback loop where more mining effort is added to the network (energy usage increases), difficulty increases (due to more effort finding blocks faster).  Over the long term, this feedback loop will confront the realities of global energy supply being limited and/or cost of energy being priced out of profitability.  So this is a short-term phenomenon in my view.  If it became necessary, there are ways that software changes could change the economic balance, such as artificial difficulty increases or other changes to how difficulty was calculated, adjustment of the 10 minute/block target, etc.  I don't think anyone involved with Bitcoin wants it to consume all of the planet's energy.  And as I stated before, even if they did want that, I don't think the world would let that happen.

How much of the mining are done with Hydro, Geo-Thermal, and Wind sources? Did they bring that into the calculations when

they compiled this article? Did they consider the improvements that were done, since mining was done with GPUs and CPUs?

ASIC technology is very energy efficient, because it is specifically designed for mining Crypto currencies. We have no guilty

conscience, because we are using energy efficient technologies.  ;)

Even graphic cards will consume 200 watts at least per card. So you will not find the safe way in mining. There is electricity issue everywhere whenever you go with mining the coins on GPU or ASIC hardware.
Since ASIC are very hard energy consumable one. If you does not have the cheap current nothing can be done. Electricity board should not give any trouble on minjng with this hardwares.

Bitcoin energy consumption went up so much because the price went up 2000% last year. If it would have continued for 18 months after December, 1 Bitcoin would be several million dollars by next year.
Now take several million dollars times 12.5 Bitcoin every 10 minutes, and you're talking about tens of billions of dollars per day that can be spent on electricity!
Obviously, the statement "if the currency’s growth continues on its current trajectory" has no basis other than creating a dramatic headline.

Based on this logic, by March 2020 is will consume more energy than the entire world. Trust me, it's won't :P

I'm pretty sure the hash rate won't go up much if the price doesn't go up. Long-term, smaller block rewards and (hopefully) lower fees will reduce the amount of money miners can spend on power, leading to a lower energy consumption.

Well, I do not agree with your view or conclusion, mining is a profitable business and there is considerable progress in the users of this field over time, despite that mining is expensive in price and it is consuming a great energy. Furthermore, I am pretty sure that the users of bitcoin will stay confident in Bitcoin, despite all the crises in value and different problems.

Furthermore, it is true that If there will remain a development in mining users will lead to large energy consumption, but there are always a solution like, alternative energy (solar energy) and other ways, and believe me, the era of Bitcoin will continue and with a big evolution, especially, if many governments will recognize it in the near future.

The trend has already been started. new consensus mechanism such as proof of stake and hybrid of POW and POS is already created that will not require much energy in order to mine Bitcoins. moreover, the energy efficient hardware especially made for mining has already started production and one of the prime example is ASIC hardware. may not now but in future, if not bitcoin other currency sure will be easy to mine.

This is one of the two major problems with Bitcoin right now. Scalability is obviously the other one, but that one is currently being worked on. What can be done for Bitcoin to be more energy efficient? POW is far too valuable for it to change. Hardware will become more energy efficient as time goes on, but still BTC will be using a significant amount of electricity. With that being said, I do think its possible power consumption would start to stabilize/flat line after the next halving and more efficient hardware.

It is too sad to see the predicted statistics is getting worse, Bitcoin is dirty. The lightning network is being developed, and claimed should improve the Bitcoin scalability issue. We know that Lightning network is transacting and settling off-blockchain. Does that have anything to do with those growths?

bitcoin energy consumption has never been a big issue and it will not be an issue for many many years. the consumption is not even high enough to raise any worries. the numbers are being quoted just to scare the public opinion. and unfortunately this tactic has started recently and probably to push some new agenda on bitcoin and so far we have been seeing the FUD side of it. we will soon find out what the real reason for it is though.

I don’t think that this is very much big issue to be worried about because in my opinion I don’t that bitcoin takes that much of electricity that is hyperbole in the post . Bitcoin only uses internet for its operating and there is nothing to worry about this that it will create electricity problem in the future and to be that much that it will consumes more electricity than the entire world consumes right now, I think this is the work of bitcoin haters who does not want bitcoin to be legalised world wide.

I hope that Bitcoin will be more efficient in the next few years. Because Bitcoin could not accept the whole world yet. Some countries have adopted and some countries have boycotted. Moreover, there is a shortage of development in the case of Bitcoin security, slow down speed, etc. By fixing these, Bitcoin will have to wait several more years to be powerful.

While the market is dominated by negative sentiment, traders are in no hurry to buy bitcoin. investors are afraid of another market collapse, which may occur after the publication of the results of the investigation of the US Justice Ministry about manipulating the prices for coins from the top ten of the rating.

There are many theories about what factors would have a positive effect on Bitcoin's energy savings. None is obvious in one hundred percent, but the most likely solution to this problem seems to be the change in algorithm but it's not possible today. We can only guess how the situation would change due to such circumstances.

If you look at the ICOs on the market you will see some energy efficient ways of mining such as solar power, natural ice as a cooler, and even bio gas for energy. It will be cheaper to mine bitcoin - if you use green alternative fuel

 When will Bitcoin be more energy efficient?
   
       Based on what i heared in news, social media on about mining. It is too high energy consumption so we cannot suggested to do mining in the Philippines because of high energy cost.But in other country that was low energy cost you can do mining.
     

Bitcoin is not wasting any paper, unlike paper money. Bitcoin only need electricity to be mined, i think it is efficient enough.
Paper money requires more resources like electricity, tree log, and other waste product.
Maybe bitcoin will be more efficient when it change to PoS coin.

Yes, there is a possibility for market manipulation but still its probability is low and maybe we should think that its a part of coin volatility, and moving forward with the question about bitcoin's energy efficiency then I think the world only needs to change to a environmental friendly energy source like solar power and other green energy source because we all know that bitcoin always needs to mine for every transaction of million nodes around the world, we should change our power source and not the system.

Bitcoin energy is issue because of mining that needs electricity, all we know other country was not accept bitcoin. Bitcoin will be more efficient when it change to PoS coin.

it's right to work on the efficiency of bitcoin, it's a true problem. With new green energies, we should be able to cut this issue further, also I'm hoping for miners that can be more eco friendly either.

This is just a Fud once again.
OK, yes, Bitcoin does use a lot of energy but so does the FIAT currency.

People often doe snot think of what it takes to sustain FIAT currency system.
You have to take in to account a TON of things, in order to sustain FIAT you need to print it which takes up a lot of resorces further how much resources to take to collect and destory the old fiat notes? How much resources are poured in to fighting counterfeits? We can extend this much further like how much energy is used to transport FIAT.

If we calculate all these things, the BTC network wont be so far off.
Also How much BTC mining is done in New Zealand where energy does not do any harm to environment.

I think bitcoin will never be energy efficient because the nature of blockchain technology required many computers to solve one mathematical equation.

I have found a trustworthy project for investment. It is called Hello Gold Foundation. They are heavily vested in blockchain technology and focused on expanding the availability of products that are targeted at helping the underserved and unbanked. By supporting in this project it is possible to support much more startups that will reside grants from HelloGold foundation for their development. If you want, you can learn more #HelloGoldFoundation

I think it is up to the cryptocurrency stakeholders to act upon this issue. If we do not take rapid and effective steps, then our whole energy generation system will be compromised. We need to promote solar energy generation for Bitcoin mining.

All types of alternative energy are not effective. You need to spend a lot of money to provide your home with enough electricity but you will have to constantly save power in order not to stay in the dark. We must admit that all modern technologies have no prospects. Those who buy solar panels will never pay for them.

I doubt it will happen because miners will oppose this idea, the network may be vulnerable if the transition is not done properly, the community can break up unless there is strong reason. to change the consensus method and make sure another string-division happens.
Investors are concerned about the collapse of the market, which may occur after the publication of a US Department of Justice investigation of price adjustment.

bitcoin energy consumption has never been a big issue and it will not be an issue for many many years. So i think it is up to the cryptocurrency stakeholders to act upon this issue.

Bitcoin is still one of the most energy-efficient, and investors are concerned about the market's downfall, which may occur after the Justice Department's findings on the adjustment. price for coins

Miners secure Bitcoin network, they compete with each other in order to earn bitcoins. That's why they are so many of them. Bitcoin will continue to use more and more energy and it's not going to change. We would how to change PoW to something like PoS which obviously has many disadvantages. What would miners do with their useless hardware? ASICs are designed only to mine Bitcoin.

Found interesting claim from CoinShares. That most Bitcoin is mined using electricity generated from renewable sources.

This article (https://www.theblockcrypto.com/2018/11/30/coinshares-report-renewable-energy-accounts-for-77-6-of-total-bitcoins-energy-usage/) contains following text:
CoinShares estimates that Sichuan has a 43.2% share of global bitcoin mining renewable energy usage, the remaining relevant Chinese provinces have a 5.7% share, relevant western regions have a 27.8% share, and the rest of the world has a 0.9%. Adding these up, CoinShares concludes that renewable energy makes 77.6% of total bitcoin mining. These estimates all assume that the renewable energy penetration and global mining market share are accurate. CoinShares states, in the report’s disclaimer, that “the information presented in this document has been developed internally and/or obtained from sources believed to be reliable,” and that the firm does not guarantee “the accuracy, adequacy, or completeness of such information.”

coinshares whitepaper: https://coinshares.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Mining-Whitepaper-Final.pdf

it gives to me an impression that if that is true, that there is massive mining in Sichuan, maybe in that area is some renewal sourced electricity surplus and so it is cheap and someone taken an advantage of that. That is just a guess, is possibly wrong. Is there any thorough article about the mining in that area?

In general, hydropower is the cheapest form of energy (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/hydropower/), and Sichuan has many high capacity hydroelectric plants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_stations_in_Sichuan#Hydroelectric), thanks to it's four rivers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichuan#Names). Unlike heavy industry, Bitcoin miners can easily move to the area with cheapest electricity, so it makes perfect sense they end up close to hydropower plants.

I get the feeling people think about solar panels when they read "renewable energy". Hydropower has a large impact on the landscape by flooding valleys. There's also a study that show Hydroelectric dams emit a billion tonnes of greenhouse gases a year (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/nov/14/hydroelectric-dams-emit-billion-tonnes-greenhouse-gas-methane-study-climate-change).

if bitcoin converted to solar energy then we can expect bitcoin mining will be environmentally friendly hopefully after 2020 we may expect bitcoin is depending on solar and wind energy based electricity for mining

The mining machines can be built more energy efficiency but i can assure that they are going to be way more expensive so it is probably not worth it at the end. I have seen some good projects from the Canadians and other countries that seem promising tho...

 Bitcoin energy consuming is the latest talk now a days in the public . Bitcoin is certainly using more power and there is nothing to worry or get panic Bitcoin mining is exploding more where there is more supply of energy and power is supplied cheaply like place Pacific North West where energy is produced by hydro power. In Iceland in  .Europe  is becoming famous for Bitcoin running since this  nation is having abundant supply of geothermal and hydro thermal The consumption of  global  power energy is  grown  high   so the miners are shifting towards more energy available countries and cleaner part of the world so there is no need of blaming excess usage of power Bitcoin mining ..

Making bitcoin more energy efficient isn't that easy, it needs to be provided with the adequate supply of power. It can be done through some conventional sources. These setups were highly profitable for the large scale mining farms. With small scale farms using of normal power or else with a generator seems efficient.

We know that electricity is the main source for using bitcoin like running your cellphone or computer, and we know that electricity is included in a resource that is environmentally friendly, especially if electricity is generated from hydropower or sunlight, we don't need to worry about this actually

bitcoin will be more efficient when it will be adapted, regulated by a third party like a government. This is why we should push through so as to possobly get a good results especially in marketing or utilizing bitcoin and other crypto in the market.

Bram Cohen, the inventor of torrents and BitTorrent is working on it with a crypto name Chia.

Bitcoin's energy consumption will continue to rise as the network grows, and the only way to counter this trend is by emphasizing the use of renewable energy to mine and secure the network. I am hoping nations will be proactive in promoting alternative sources of energy to tackle this problem.

every day the growth of bitcoin often increases. but sometimes the increase only occurs temporarily. but even though it's temporary but the situation is always increasing as the bitcoin journey is in demand by many people.

Bitcoin isn’t used physically virtual money. So It only needs electricity to be mined.
İf it supported by eco-friendly energy, a serious saving is achieved with bitcoin. Most importantly, hundreds of devices are the source of electricity for mining.

Energy is what runs the mining of bitcoin process.
And this bitcoin mining requires a huge deal of energy for the transcation to go through. I don't think that bitcoin energy would be lesser

Perhaps in the future bitcoin will be more energy efficient, but so far a lot of energy is spent on its production. Mining has not effective for a long time and all bitcoin mining is concentrated in large video card holders.

https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2019/july/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-the-gap.html (https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2019/july/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-the-gap.html)

(as of November 2018)
https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2019/july/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-the-gap.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2542435119302557

https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2019/july/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-the-gap.html

Ethereum and Litecoin are more energy efficient:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0152-7

Oh, so you think the production of solar panels is both cost efficient and eco friendly? Solar panels aren't the permanent solution. They are expensive, prone to damage, need to be maintained (cleaned) and replaced after a while because they tend to lose some of their efficiency over time. Old panels will maintain only 30% of their nominal output. There are no buy and forget solutions in this industry.

If Proof of Works survives and becomes very environmentally friendly, it'd probably be because we began to:
— Mine Bitcoin with renewable clean energy. And not really non-renewable clean energy.

— Mine Bitcoin with cheap and easy-to-manufacture hardware

— eliminate monetary rewards for miners to decrease the tendency of centralized mining. Instead, reward miners with other forms of incentives like rank upgrade, loyalty reward, and with points that can only be used within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Such points could be traded peer-to-peer, used for buying limited products and services.

Consumption of energy to mine Bitcoin is probably rather big. Still the number of mined Bitcoin is limited so energy consumptiom for mining will not last forever. Also, I don't think that currently Bitcoin is representing the biggest problem when it comes to energy and environment saving.
Still some alternative energy sources could be the solution for more efficency although I'm not sure if that is feasible.

This doesn't take into consideration how much more secure Bitcoin's transactional network is compared to Ethereum. Ethereum needs several days of POW to match the same level of security of just one day of Bitcoin POW. Saying that Ethereum processes more transactions with just a third of its electricty consumed (as in it being unnecessary to consume more electricity) is shortsighted.

If we look at how much on-chain transaction activity there was in the last 24 hours, dollar wise, then the stats speak for themselves;

https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/ $5 billion
https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/ $244 million

There are articles now that says that bitcoin's energy consumption isn't that bad. And at the present day, people are on the trend of mining in the places where there is cheap electricity, low carbon resource, and the availability of a strong hydropower. But like in China where 60% of the countries' power is from coal, it is going to be an issue and the carbon footprint produced from it as well.

Increase the block generation interval to 20 minutes, that should slow things down. :)

there's a lot of fear mongering about coal-powered bitcoin mining in china, but looking at the big picture, i'm not sure it's well founded. consider this study published a few months ago (https://www.vox.com/2019/6/18/18642645/bitcoin-energy-price-renewable-china) which found that a significant majority of bitcoin mining is powered by renewable energy sources:

Simple logic says - no , it wont become more energy efficient because hash-rate will continue to increase , and costing more in energy perspective.

But all this means nothing, the main question is what sources of energy bitcoin uses. If they are renewable - no one cares.

Mining BTC is very energy efficient. The only problem here is greed.
With more and more people getting into mining, it's taking more and more energy to mine.

The only way to reduce BTC's global energy consumption would be to reduce the number of people mining.

it's important to note that bitcoin miners are not always consuming electricity, but rather are often using excess electricity that's already been generated. the rational mining incentive drives miners to find the cheapest energy sources. that means industrial miners seeking out load balancing arrangements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_(electrical_power)) with major power generators, where miners take all excess power beyond actual demand at a deep discount.

it also means that renewable sources like hydro, solar, and wind power are now backing the majority of the network, as renewable energy becomes cheaper and cheaper (even without subsidies).

The answer to your question is easy: Soon. Everyday this gets closer. Why? Because mining is becoming unprofitable at any electricity price. You will see this unfold in the next decade or so. As both asics become efficient and mining rewards lowers down the drain, most miners, especially the big ones will leave.

What these guys doing these charts never consider is how mining has slowly becoming more and more unprofitable, you you need to spend more and more to mine and those others doing the same lower the profitability overall. There is something like a worldwide cap that is about to be reached.

Bitcoin price will NOT compensate for mining at the same rate, the rate at which mining has expanded is different to the bitcoin price curve, compare both and you'll get the answer. Bitcoin price increases will slow down more and more, while mining profitability slows down more and more, faster than what the bitcoin price is.

As an Austrian school economist would say: The best thing to do, is do nothing. It IS fixing itself by the market. The time for mining is ending, even if a couple of Asic generation come it is getting to the point where nobody will buy them anymore. This market will contract so much that, if the likes of Bitmain are unprepared, they might as well close doors.

While certain other altcoin wants to do this by force, it is naturally occurring to Bitcoin. Just wait.