Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin needs mining. Mining costs a whole lot of electricity. Electricity still mostly comes from fossil fuels.

Ergo, bitcoin isn't green.

Any thoughts about this?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Bitcoin_mining_is_a_waste_of_energy_and_harmful_for_ecology

Think with a broader perspective.  How much electricity is required to operate the Fed, investment and commercial banking system?


:)

That's not really an argument (or, to broad a perspective for me to see clearly).
I kind of like Economic Argument 1 from the link, but it still means electricity companies make the most off of mining. Right?

Compared to commercial economy, Bitcoin is greener.

The mining cost per transaction (http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction) is currently around $6. Assuming miners are operating at a small profit, perhaps $5 worth of electricity is being consumed for each transaction. That means around 50 kilowatt-hours, or 180 MegaJoules, per transaction.

That's a lot of electricity! But as the number of transactions per block rises, the electricity per transaction will drop.

You mean that when I send .1 BTC from one wallet to another that costs $5 of electricity? Wow..
But if the total number of transactions rises that could drop to how much? It has to get much lower or else there wouldn't be enough electricity in the world to keep the whole thing running...

Naturally them bitcoins aren't green - they be golden, silly.
They might get green-ish when they lay around for a while, like the bacon in my fridge :D

To be sure, there must be a good reason why miners get VIP customer status at their power companies and some of them even lovely thank you letters attached to the boxes with the invoice print-outs, but on the other side the miners are also the only people I heard of who have calculated the energy consumption of their entire households and seriously contemplate the idea of shaving off a few watts per year by removing the status LEDs from all devices.
Even the most miserly of Scots don't get that far - they are entirely satisfied with disabling the fridge light bulb.

https://i.imgur.com/TxU77.jpg

Seriously though, we're talking of quite possibly the most innovative project since the damned TCP/IP protocol, man.
A project that could very well integrate the financial system and the Internet very tightly without the need to trust any third party.
Surely, mining looks far less wasteful in this context, doesn't it?

The electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network is much the same whether or not you send your .1 BTC payment, so there's no incremental cost. But if you divide the total electricity consumption by the current level of transactions, it comes out around $5 of electricity per transaction.

Therefore, if you had ten times as many transactions, each one would only be associated with approximately $0.50 worth of electricity.

In the longer term, the electricity consumption will vary according to the hashing power of the network, which will be driven by the exchange rate and also by mining fees. But in the short term, more transactions equals less electricity per transaction.

To see this, consider that the block reward of 50 BTC is worth over $200. So miners would be happy to spend up to $200 of electricity to mine a block. If the block contains 40 transactions, that comes out to $5 per transaction. Sure it's not quite that simple, for example because people pay different amounts for electricity, but that's the rough idea.

Nice! So, do you have any better idea? What, no?

Good explanation I would also add that the rise of FPGA, sASIC and ASICS will mean more hashing power per watt and lower the electrical consumption per tx.  So hypothetically someday the network could have an electrical consumption 1/10th compared to today despite higher hashing power.  If tx volume was also 100x higher then combined effect (less consumption and more tx) would put the electrical cost per tx below 1 cent.

Once after FPGA comes online, it'll be lower

No thoughts at all, OP. ;D

It will be way lower soon.

I think that everything is not green if We don't have green electricity.

Windpower and solar energy are becoming cheaper, and in a few years We will have more green energy.
Hydropower is another interesting energy, because there are lots of small sources that could be used without a expensive cost, there are lots of small dams on rivers or canals that are wasting energy.

A small example:
http://maps.google.es/?ll=41.958597,-4.977837&spn=0.034083,0.055189&t=h&z=14&layer=c&cbll=41.958493,-4.977831&panoid=bCr2PMWPCqJ_QGsOIu_Gwg&cbp=12,65.15,,0,-2.59
 - Power line: yes
 - Dam: yes
 - Water: yes
 - Electricity: NOT. :-[

What currencies are considered green now?

it's okay bitcoin, I'm not green either :(

Energy economics is a difficult field to wrap your mind around.  Don't assume that ASICs will make the number lower.  A large portion of every dollar spent on mining hardware ultimately ends up being consumed as energy as well.

Every last economically-recoverable bit of fossil energy will be burnt with or without Bitcoin.

Think of the level of waste due to mal-investment, for instance, in maintaining Dollar hegemony or the global derivatives market.  Bitcoin is insignificant in comparison, and always will be.

Bitcoin mining with GPU/CPU's isn't green, but mining with FPGA's is XD.

What isn't green?

Producing electronic like the computer we use or FPGA is not green. But once produced FPGA is greener than GPU.

@ OP.  ^ was exactly my point.  If Bitcoin becomes what it was intended to be the energy cost would be minuscule compared to the large financial institutions.

So, Bitcoin, potentially, is massively greener by comparison, so worrying that is not green is obtuse.

No, it won't.  Well maybe for a few people, for a while as FPGAs distribute through the network.

The network adjusts difficulty, and miners buy more buying power until the block cost equals the block reward.  The technology used is, I'm afraid, not a factor.

Cost per transaction will go down as the average transactions per block goes up or as the reward per block goes up (measured in dollars).  Nothing to do with the hash rate.

What we do get is a more secure block chain for the same cost -- hurrah.

BTC will have a new green option in the future www.greenbtc.com (Coming Soon)

I can rephrase that, and play with words all day as well:
Bitcoin needs mining. Mining costs almost no electricity. Electricity can come from microwave lasers from solar satellites orbiting our Earth.

Ergo, Bitcoin is space age and the future!

Now the facts:
Bitcoin needs mining. Mining uses electricity. Electricity comes from energy.

Ergo, bitcoin is energy.



Your logic is flawed.

well, HUMANS and everything they do isn't green. The problem is that this energy must be used to decipher the SHA256 hashes, which is how the btc supply is naturally regulated. If only there was some other low-power activity we could be doing instead this would be great.

How about every time you plant a tree you register the tree and get 1 btc...or something. Someones would figure a way to scam the system, the value will decimate, and people will lose faith and stop using btc. And anyway who is gonna issue you that 1 btc? The central bank of btc? I think alot of people participate in btc because its decentralized and anonymous, and the environmentally unfriendly methods we have now give the currency the unique qualities that make people want to trade in some of there dollars for it.

Slavery is pretty low-power.  You should try that.

I heard Chinese people are good at math and have low hourly wages. Just saying.

Bitcoin mining probably uses like 0.000001% of the worlds energy. Who cares if its green or not?

Once mining becomes unreasonable(er) it will be greener. Why? No electricity except for the transactions.

Ok... ???

silly "go green" hippies

The US dollar needs paper from trees & cotton, and printing presses, and a mint, and employees, and security trucks to move it around, and computers to count it all, and banks to hide it in, and construction of banks, and more employees.  All of these activities require electricity, and material resources, and human resources.

Ergo, the US dollar isn't green.

I always heard that green currency was the US Dollar. Maybe I got fooled, dunno.

If you're worried that Bitcoin is a sin in your religion, why not just go to the Catholic Church Al Gore and buy an indulgence carbon offset?

I'm more of an environmentalist than almost anyone I know, but I feel the same way that the green movement is looking more and more like a religion. Anyways back to the regular discussion...

Well, once one of the founders of Greenpeace comes out and says that Greenies are screwed up for rejecting the science on (carbon free) nuclear energy, it's past the cult stage.

Let's hope we'll always have miners wasting electricity; we need them to protect our coins.

http://adventurecolorad.hubpages.com/hub/Dollar-Coins-Saving-The-Government-Money


Bitcoin has a current market cap of around $43 million (http://www.google.com/search?q=8803000+unit+*+4.95+dollars+%2F+unit).  It costs about $15,000 per day (http://www.google.com/search?q=8+megawatts+*+8+cents+%2F+kWh+in+dollars+%2F+day) to maintain.

An equivalent amount of US one-dollar bills would cost over $3,500 per day (http://www.google.com/search?q=6+cents+%2F+24+months+%2F+unit+*+43+million+unit+in+dollars+%2F+day), in printing costs alone just to replace worn bills.  That doesn't even count transport and handling costs and all the energy wasted by the banking system, which, believe me is substantial.  In fact just the energy used by ATM machines would probably dwarf the Bitcoin network.  The energy used by the corporate jets owned by the largest banks would probably dwarf the Bitcoin network.

But it actually gets much better.  Because the current Bitcoin market cap could grow by a factor of 100 with only, at most, a doubling or tripling of energy consumption.  That would make it a 4.3 billion dollar market cap supported on less than $45,000 per day.  The equivalent in dollar bills, say ten-dollar bills on average, would cost $35,000 per day, just to print replacement bills.

And 4.3 billion dollars isn't even that much in terms of a currency.  There are 9.5 billion one-dollar bills in circulation alone.

The reason why it costs so much to mine is because Bitcoin resembles commodity money, similar to gold mining. The value of commodity money, assuming competing suppliers, is equal to its marginal cost of production.

On the other hand, fiat money such as the US dollar and the euro, commands a value far higher than its costs of production, which raises the risk of severe mismanagement by their monopolistic suppliers.

The good thing is that in Bitcoin, it is likely that its marginal cost of production will mostly go to Research and Development to build more energy efficient and faster hash generators. So I believe Bitcoin occupies the green scale of commodity money, in comparison to gold, silver, etc.

I don't follow this logic. If the market cap grows by 100, all other things being equal (very unlikely), the price per coin will multiply by 100. Only 2 or 3x people will start mining and everyone else will leave the 33-50x profit to miners?

You answered your own (implied) question.   Bitcoin has a potential velocity rate several orders of magnitude faster than what is possible or common with fiat currencies today.  Increases in velocity tends to suppress the market trade value of bitcoin.

Four things.  One, the block reward halving will make mining more competitive.  Two, there are only 8 million out of 21 million Bitcoins mined so far.  Three, newer mining technologies will produce a 10-20x reduction in power usage per hash.  And finally, eventually the price of Bitcoin in dollars won't be particularly relevant anyways, assuming things go well.

Bitcoin mining fueled by solar and wind power.  :o

Mine with FPGA is green here.