Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone! I'm trying to learn more about BTC and as I understand, it constantly needs an energy for mining, which sounds not so much ecologically. It's getting popular, so more miners - more energy, right? Is there any ways to reduce this harmful effect? Or maybe create an eco-friendly version of BTC?

This has been discussed before.

The entire network uses less power than New York or Las Vegas, and procures a very, very small amount of any problem that might be present.

Even if mining gets more popular, it won't cause there to be a huge power grab either. I think I read the network takes up 2.6% or something of that of Las Vegas, so there isn't much to justify any ecological problems without first turning off a city.

And some people have been switching to solar panels to save on electricity costs, so there's a side effect to people wantng to earn more money.

So there isn't a lot of problems that will arise from mining for a long time, BTC will be 10% of Las Vegas when we start running about 200 PentaHashes/second, assuming we're at about 40 PH's right now.

Somebody pointed out that the US budget for the Secret Service to stop counter-fitting and the US Treasury to print money exceeds the power costs of all the Bitcoin mining worldwide.  That's just for the US.  if you add all the countries together they spend an insane amount of energy controlling currency.

Power efficiency get's better and better.  (granted difficulty grows).  But each next generation trys to be more efficient.

There is more eco-friendly versions of how to get the electricity though.  A example is a friend of mine who is working with hosting with some hydro-electric power https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=694297.0

So yes solar, water, wind source of power can provide a more "eco-friendly" option.

Not forgetting that home computing (i.e. hosting a 24/7 bicoin node) is becoming increasingly power efficient.

You can put together a nifty little home entertainment PC nowadays that uses under 30 Watts of energy at full tilt and about 10-15 Watts listening to music/watching movies/surfing. This is all capable of being done whilst running a node.

True that bitcoin mining use quite some electricity, but don't forget it enables you to send international payment easily, fast and cheap.
So I think the advantages outweigh the problem. :)

Btw, there are some "eco-friendly" altcoins (eg. with PoS), but I don't think bitcoin should and would be hard-forked for that. :)

Thank you all or your answers! I understood, that BTC is consuming not so much energy as I thought, but is it true, that CPU-mining is more eco-friendly than GPU-mining?

Technically, yes, but that's only because CPU mining is less powerful in terms of hash generation. A lot of miners also overclock their GPUs to taxing conditions to get the most hashing power out of it, whereas most CPU miners tend to reserve some threads so that they can still use their computers for other activities while their miners are running.

Well you have to know that it's not problematic to waste energy, it's problematic how you create it. If you create it from burning forrest for a bad example, than that's not ok, but if you use wind for example than you didn't do nothing wrong. At least i think that is the way to follow. People should consider making clean energy, without burning anything (including nuclear stuff).

btw, I'm not good in it, why graphics cards are often using for mining? That sounds quite strange for me. As I understood from your words, this way is more powerful?

The hashrate of GPU is much much higher than that of CPU.
For example, a AMD 7970 gives you ~700 MH/s while an Intel i7 gives you ~20 MH/s, from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison.

And just for comparison, a spondoolies-tech sp30 ASIC gives you ~6 TH/s (6,000,000 MH/s)

Somebody needs to invent solar powered mining rigs sometime. :P But, seriously, I recently heard that there's an altcoin called Groestlcoin that's supposed to be more efficient for miners or something. (Actually I was mining it on my desktop computer which doesn't have a great hashrate compared to most mining rigs last weekend, and I actually found a couple of blocks!)

But I like that you thought of that. Maybe the people who complain about the high electricity cost of mining should use some of the Bitcoin they earn that way to install some solar panels.

Indeed, those altcoin devs are deigned to try to make GPU-mining less efficient. ;D

There have been one or two posted before in mining rigs post in hardware.

Problem for most is it's a high entry fee to get lot's of "eco-friendly" power compared to regular power. 

If you find that it is a significant problem, there are alternatives you can use.

Read about Proof-of-stake. It's an algorithm which does not require mining, and many coins ie. Peercoin use it.

That's a good point. Ordinary paper money are made from woods. IMO this problem is more important

Actually, dollar bills are usually made of plastic (like in Canada) or various fabrics.

But this is just a minor part of the environmental impact of fiat currencies. We also have to consider the ressources needed to run banks and pay their employees, the armored cars which move the money, the plastic on which credit cars are made, the cash registers, and the waste generated by an economy of planned obsolescence.

Alternate ways like proof of stake can reduce the environmental impact. Still efficient ASICs are developed which requires less power consumption while having a higher hashrates. Most of those CPU and GPU and old ASICs aren't suitable for mining any longer.

I think we can avoid caring about this as the issue it brings up is negligible, the benefits outweigh the problem.

I can see from https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty that the total network hashrate is about 140 PH/s (140,000,000 GH/s) now.
Does anyone know roughly the average power consumption per GH/s of all those existing ASICs?

However, since they are more efficient, they are more profitable, and thus more of them are made and they run at the same time.

So the ASIC's growth in efficiency does not make Bitcoin mining "greener".

You should look into Peercoin.