Bitcoin Forum

Today i saw a paper reporting that Bitcoin will eat all the electricity of the world , when it will be upgraded to mass level.  Although i think  Bitcoin may not be a total environmental disaster, the Earth would certainly be a greener place if the Bitcoin network didn't consume so much electricity to process a relatively small number of transactions. I think there are still something to develop.

There are few ways we can try :

• Right now there are basically three ways this could happen. One way, i got in this forum, is for Bitcoin's price to decline. Because the way of mining Bitcoin needs huge power costing , may be that is one of the reason of price hike. I actually wants Bitcoin as a stable currency rather than gambling.
• Another option would be to reduce the network's 12. 5 bitcoin-per-block reward sooner than the scheduled 2020 reduction. But that's easier said than done. Bitcoin mining companies are not going to go along with this willingly, and Bitcoin fans are likely to oppose such a move as well.
• A third choice is change the Bitcoin mining process fully. Bitcoin's present mining calculation depends on figuring a super massive number of cryptographic hash capacities. However, different digital forms of money have been investigating options and other ways. Bitcoin Gold is an as of late made variation of Bitcoin that uses a "memory-hard" mining calculation that may turn out to be less power hungry—however it would even now devour tremendous measures of juice. More fascinating mining calculations exist that could drastically decrease control utilization.

Government are helpless
Government authorities can also be are often powerless here. When any country tries to force a change, mining operations would simply flee to another jurisdiction. Changing Bitcoin by regulatory fiat would require a coordinated global regulatory effort, which does not seem to be  happen any time soon.

Changing to an elective mining calculation would likewise be questionable among traditionalists and would be unequivocally contradicted by mine workers. It would wipe out mining organizations' multi-million dollar interests in custom mining equipment. Such a stage isn't outlandish, yet it appears to be probably not going to happen at any point in the near future.

In short, you want a fork? What you had read was just a speculation. They based it on today's source of electricity. We don't know what improvements will come along the way before we mine the last bitcoin on 2140. Its long enough to find new and better source of energy. We'll just have to wait patiently.

I have wondered about this as well. I have been following https://www.envion.org/en/ which is an interesting project and maybe a step in the right direction.
I don't know however if this is a viable long term option.

maybe by focusing on using,other sources of energy, making regulations about this.

I don't think that there is a way for that to happen. The difficulty of each Bitcoin block is just too high and the need for electricity from the power hungry GPUS are necessary for the network to run. Like, we could use renewable energy, however i'm not sure any individual can possess that much power as to own an entire enrgy rig made up of solar panels. If you truly want Bitcoin mining to be more renewable, try asking people to try forks for mining and alts because there is NO WAY that any implementation plan can affect BTC's energy use in the long term.

Reducing bitcoin reward for newly mined blocks (it happened twice in the past, 50->25->12.5) never had the effect on mining hashrate whatsoever. So why do you expect it would have its effect now?

To make my post more constructive, let me suggest something:
Maybe we as humanity should work on getting to better sources of energy, instead? One such option is to produce the energy with solar panels on Earth's orbit and the energy would be beamed using microwave technology to Earth's surface. This work is well advanced, you know, and it would really be green energy.

I have since moved away from BTC and other PoW based coins.

IMO the future is with the coins that do not require mining, such as NEO, which is also quantum-resistant on top of that.

Obviously the energy consumption for bitcoin mining is a real problem, but you are assuming that in a near future this could not be improved with less energy consumption of bitcoin mining hardware or even by the use of green energy (which need to be improved too). Bitcoin by herself, is not the main problem here.


That's one of the keys but one of the main problems here are the higher taxes that governments want you to pay for the use of green energy, also the elevated price of hardware made impossible for some users to use it.

Hi,

I guess that the issue here goes far beyond bitcoin. The problem is that we are wasting natural resources. Electricity is a good example. We are using highly dangerous materials, enhancing each day the level of pollution... and no one really cares. Companies, because they make profit, people because they have comfort and governments because they keep power.

The fact that bitcoin uses a lot of electricity would not be such an issue if we though about alternative ways to produce and store power. The sun is a great source of power but for the moment we don't know how to use it efficiently. And sadly enough, research on the matter are not making so much progress... because thy don't get financial support. Companies making profit are oil companies, not green ones!  :-\

Can we reduce Bitcoin's energy use? Sure, since proof-of-work essentially is a process that converts energy into something of monetary value, we can reduce energy use by lowering the value of Bitcoin. There are lots of things we could do to lower Bitcoin's value, though I am not sure that is something you'd want to do unless you were against it.

I think that by using renewable source of energy is essential for bitcoin because it is cost effective and it is green energy without losing the value of bitcoin.

In my opinion Bitcoin is not eating up the mass amount of electricity , The article is well written and you have put some real issue. Yes it will diplomatic if i go for both. But thinking about long term vision , We should think again . I am sure it is possible to run Bitcoin Mining in low electricity consumption.

Yes that what I am saying, if we use renewable energy for mining ,it will solve the problem easily.