Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone,
Today I came across a post https://powercompare.co.uk/bitcoin/ and became wary of potential drawbacks of increased Bitcoin mining to global electricity supply or with its reduced mining because of "caps" on electricity use lead to high appreciation of its value. Because its going to be a concern in coming days if only by 2020 mining will be using entire global electricity supply. Check the article and lets discuss the future of BTC as well as crypto!

I think it is highly unlikely that BTC mining might be jeopardized by a shortage of electricity.
Next generation Miners are more efficient and the worlds power production is also increasing (as you can see here https://www.statista.com/statistics/270281/electricity-generation-worldwide/ ).

Many new cryptos are also moving to less energy consuming algorithms and PoS, so again I doubt that a power shortage might endanger Crypto.

In fact, the electricity shortage has local character. There are regions in which a large surplus of electricity. The problem is that it is expensive to transmit over long distances. Can be ever going to remember about the invention of Tesla? But first, I think that farm mining will move to surplus regions where there are renewable sources of energy.

The electricity and all those things are really going to change in a few years from now, so i dont know why are you really worried about all this problem, because this is just minimal.
And how do you know that the entire world is going to be using the electricity to only mine bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies? it does not have sense, because the electricity is going to be in there anyway, it does not matter if it is by solar panels, solar electricity, or by any other way.

Pathetic attempt to gain attention. Electricity is used and for the regular banking.

Why don't they make a info graphic how much electricity are using all the banks in the world with their workstations and main frames?

Yes it is true banks are using electricity but we should also understand that banks are already accepted worldwide so them consuming electricity is not a question. What he is trying to say is the electricity that bitcoin mining requires for now specially it is not yet on a stage that it is already accepted worldwide.

Humans is the most adaptive species though so if this problem will arise in the future I think people who mines Bitcoin will do such things that will solve any kinds of problem that will occur, electricity is significant in mining so if in year 2020 Bitcoin will use the entire global electricity supply then I think the distributor of different electric power company in the whole world will keep up and build new infrastructure to cater the demand of the people who needs electricity.

There a lot of alternative source of electricity though.

Its true that Cryptocurrency mining requires a lot of power and the demand for power due to mining is increasing exponentially every month.Also due to the increased demand of electricity, the price is also becoming costlier. The only solution is to move to an alternate source of energy like solar or windmills.

While these alternate options are costly initially, but it provides a far better profitability in mining. I don't think the massive use of Electricity will not be the end of bitcoin, but instead it will force miners to move to a different source of energy in future just to keep his mining operation profitable.

Most the places which generates the electricity are either away from habitat. powerstations for hydro-electricity or coal electricity or nuclear electricity are few examples. So even if we say that these farms are moving towards closest possible distance then again electricity consumption by mining is the issue. Only saving done here is the electricity loss in long distance supply. Otherwise power consumption is still same.
New hardware for mining rigs is becoming more and more energy efficient. Thus in future there will be more proficient hardware to reduce the power consumption. To all those who are whining about bitcoin mining gulping electricity should know that internet is also gulping major electricity.

I guess moving to renewable energy like solar energy might be a good move

Sindikat made a few excellent points above ^.

Due to a high number of residential solar panels being installed on homes, some regions like california generate an extreme surplus of electricity which they pay neighboring states to accept onto their own grids. It is known that some bitcoin mining plants in china are powered by hydro electric power plants, which is a renewable source of energy. Russia has proposed bitcoin mining plants powered by nuclear reactors. To an extent the energy debate may not be as critical as some make it out to be due to the supply of electricity greatly exceeding demand in many respects.

Moore's law dictates ASICs and GPUs will utilize increasingly lower quantities of electricity as lithographic silicon fabrication processes adopt smaller nanometer scales. While mining difficulty will inevitably rise, so too will the energy efficiency of future generations of GPU/ASIC.

Quantity of electricity may not be the central issue. Energy efficiency and waste could come to the forefront of the discussion in the future. There could be a point made about Elon Musk replacing 15% efficient internal combustion engines with plug power that can be generated at near to 30% efficiencies by large power plants. The amount of waste in terms of emissions may be yet another talking point.

In software engineering there's a school of thought which says code optimisation is a waste of time. Programmers put much faith in the concept of hardware computation increasing at a fast enough pace to keep bloat at bay. It is possible that a similar argument could be made with crypto. Even if the consumption of electricity can be measured and quantified, growth in energy sectors could easily outpace demand. Part of this could be attributed to decentralized energy production and climate change awareness which incentivize people to install solar panels on their roofs or windmills in their yards.

good point mate power shortage only applies to aome countries but not worldwide in which wont have big effect on bitcoin mining.miners are all over the world and before getting into it they make sure that electricity wont be the problem upon mining.and another thing is some miners now that lives in cold regions use mining to supply heat to their houses so they are making two things earning and saving.so that wont be possible to drop the bitcoin by just some power shortage

People have found ways to use the byproduct (heat) of mining bitcoins to their own benefits. There are areas that are much colder in which people are using mining in order to heat their homes. These innovative ways to use heat will probably be extremely useful when it comes to a discussion about environmental negatives of mining and such. I doubt that this issue will ever cause the true end of bitcoin.

bitcoins require enormous electricity, they may point to nuclear power to suppress the much-needed power needed to mine the vital bitcoin,

Before 2020 many mining tools will be developed that will help in consuming less electricity. I think electricity will not be a problem in future and that is not going to affect bitcoin development. I have see that from Japan to USA many technology are coming up that are going to generate energy without mush electricity.

Other than having "Natural Energy Resources" and "Renewable Energies" for generating Electricity, we should also need to consider the Technology and Arts who are using GPU on their respective field, there is an ample time to create more GPU that can run faster and at the same it is efficient on the usage of electricity.

Technology field is not ceasing to find new solutions to this, and also consider the large business who continuously using Electricity on a daily basis and even Electricity/Energy providers is not stopping to find sources to generate more to support these businesses and also to sustain their business as an energy provider.

In many countries electricity costs are very cheap so do not worry about it. In countries like china the cost of electricity for mining is very low.

That is a very good solution, even though they come in with some huge price. But for someone who knows exactly what they are investing in, that should not really serve as an issue as long as it gets the job done. With that, we will start seeing a lot of mining farms making use of solar, wind etc to generate power. It has been happening already in some places with high rate of electricity and we will just have to see a new huge market for alternative source.

It would really be cost efficient for miners to move to a colder place or replace their old rig to a new one, older rigs tends to heat up more and use more electricity than newer ones.

Its a high for bitcoin ,as electricity is the  ultimate need of hour many organisations are making it from natural resources like solar ,wind etc the electricity is going to be cheap and more over electrical devices coming in future will be more efficient

The world will be switching to renewable source of energy before that happens and coals as source of energy will be gone. With all the talk of climate change, most country will adopt to solar, wind, geothermal or hydro as source of energy. Asics will adopt as well to consume less energy with better output. So i think this is not a problem at all.

No way, technology never remains the same, with the passage of time many modifications are made in technologies to make it better than before ( or many new technologies are emerged). No doubt electricity is a major issue in some underdeveloped countries but it is not critical at all. May be in future we may found a better way to minimize the electricity consumption in bitcoin mining to make it more efficient and cost effective.

the possibility that bitcoin mining is still done until 2020 will require more power, we have to make solar panels or solar power more efficient to get electricity.

on the opposite site, this maybe a potential field to make a business in maintenance, solar / low-cost energy. Anyway our electricity demand is high enough. Though this maybe make the ozon die earlier, lol

I think that they are trying to show the issue much greater than what actually it is.Its true that huge electricity is being used nowadays for bitcoin.But in future,due to technological advance,even nano chips may be used instead of microchips which may reduce the electrical usage for mining.By any means,this issue would be sorted out.

As time goes by, technology becomes far much superior. I'm sure sooner than later there will be rigs which will reduce power consumption while still yielding current averages based on high output.

And do you honestly think there is going to be enough energy from solar and wind for everybody?
Especially since we're going to also drop petrol cars? A single 300 km journey will consume more power than the average households does in a month.

In my country there was a period in February where there was no sun and no wind.
Energy production from "green" sources dropped to 0. We bought energy from the neighbors (guess what they were burning).


And?
The cost will go lower, the profits will be higher , more rigs > more consumption.
Don't you realize that mining in limited only by the amount of electricity consumed vs the reward for mining?
If the daily reward is 10 $ we will burn ~ 10 $ of energy if its 10 trillions we will burn 10 trillions of energy (of course minus the costs of equipment and stuff  but you get the idea)

It will make the price even higher in the future, this is very certain.

Look ethereum, to avoid electricity consumption, they're leaving pow style. They're passing to pos style just to get rid of electricity cost.

I believe future cryptocurrency would slowly moved away from heavy electricity power consumption activities that just bring nothing but profits only to existing cheap electricity miners, the current scenario is focusing only on mainstream crypto like bitcoins or Ethereum, soon or enough new equipments capitalizing on them would be improved in terms of efficiency, i think future cryptocurrency could be just blockchain network maintainable on any computers as longthey had sufficient storage and network, POS, POW should replace some of them thus the problem wouldn't persist that long i believe.

I have also read the information about coming 2020 and the usage of all global electricity for Bitcoin mining. I suppose it may really lead to the situation when each country will simply increase price for its electricity.

Yes I have seen similar article but not this one and in that one the complete estimation of the bitcoin production and USD production was given. And there was not single chance I would have taken the side of bitcoin after reading the article because it is the most costliest thing ever to produce in the market. The electricity cost that needs to print or virtually mine the bitcoin is higher than producing the USD currency and its more than 60% efficient than bitcoin. So this is putting lot of stress over the electricity boards and in the time to come when the bitcoin circulation will be even more and the trisections will increase a lot then this stress might just outburst to create fallen legacy of the crypto currencies. There is no way to save bitcoin in that situation if government finds out that the mining is not enough and nothing can be done for it.

Like anything it's just supply and demand. If the demand for electricity to mine BTC keeps increasing then the price of electricity will go up. Eventually it will be uneconomic to mine BTC and hence the demand for electricity will drop. The only reason that so much power is being used on bitcoin is because so many people are mining and hence the difficulty level keeps increasing to keep the block rate the same. Once all coins have been mined then that will be the end of bitcoin mining.

Yes it could be because the way we are using electricity for mining purpose is insane and hence the global warming is getting aggressive because of bitcoin. We really need to think different eco friendly ways of mining the bitcoin and other crypto currencies or these programs could be shut down very easily by protestor of environment. They are very concern about the heat emission that is occurring from the machines during the mining operation. For them to cool down we are using big HEPA machines which produce ozone killing CFC gases which makes the situation even worst than the previous one. So yeah may be ewe need to be sure that we wont harm the earth environment on mass scale while doing our great trading strategies and investments. Everything could shut at one glance.

I think this is incorrect, and if you compare bitcoin network electricity cost, and the fiat network electricity cost, you will probably realize that fiat is way more expensive than bitcoin itself. Electricity management is a problem for the environment, but every case should be analyzed by it's ratio in energy cost/utility for society. Bitcoin has an amazing potencial, and it's energy cost is justified for it's uses, and like I said, it's probably less than the cost to support our broken fiat model. Renewable sources of energy should be used, but that is important for everything and not just bitcoin mining.

The truth is that those who own the energy they may control the mining power of crypto farms and at that point it will be reflected in the price and volatility of cryptocurrency.

I don't get why you think a massive consumption of electricity would be good in any way for Bitcoin. The less electricity needed the better in my opinion!

You are right that it aint a problem at all because of the reasons you stated. When bitcoin becomes mainstream, there might be new mining devices by that time that consumes energy only equivalent to what a household appliance consumes to solve the problem at hand. Also by that time there will be many improvements to the technology of the world, probably by that time someone will invent a more cost energy source.

You don’t even know what you are saying– banks making use of electricity won’t create any bad effect in any way, cause their usage rate is just like a normal house electricity usage. In banks, you just find the normal working equipment you will usually find in offices just like printer, photocopier and computers.

A miner is different from all these and only a single miner consumes electricity more than they can ever do. Come to think of it when there are lots of miners (a farm)…I wonder how much of power that will consume.

AGREED, if there will be a shortage of power or any kind of issues because of mining probably miners will find a new source of energy and i think not only miners but every business in the world will shift to renewable energy, i just hope technology will become more friendly with nature as soon as possible :)

Maybe no, electricity could not be the only reason for Bitcoin to collapse. There so many factors that can lead to BTC's end, for example the internet. Humans keep pushing forward and keep on inventing new things. If bitcoin was created out of theories and scientific inventions, then we can also assume that their could be an alternative on creating new energy source.

I’d rather they stop or reduce the mining rate for Bitcoin than letting it affect communities negatively. There are more important reasons why we may need electricity, and the most important is hospitals. The government wouldn’t like anything that will affect their country in a bad way, and that’s the reason most of them has banned/stopped bitcoin.

Electricity will not be the reason to bitcoin ceased to exist. If desired, you can increase the block size. This will reduce the consumption of electricity. There are ways to resolve pressing problems. The main thing is to learn to find a consensus within the community and to set a goal. Renewable energy sources will never replace traditional.

Is electricity was supposed to be the end of bitcoins then it should have been the end of human civilization as well but we evolving to create alternatives to tackle this problem..thus we now have renewable sources of energy that are producing electricity and there are countries where 100% electricity is being created from wind electricity thus I think in the future.. bitcoin mining might adopt this norm..well not just bitcoins ! But the whole world will soon run on renewable sources of energy thus I don't think it will be the end ..rather name it an evolution.

There's a critical logic error in the article that leads to the most shocking claim. The article purports that at the current growth rate, Bitcoin will consume all the world's electricity by Feb 2020. That should immediately be discounted as preposterous and impossible; obviously Bitcoin can never consume all the world's electricity. Its is physically impossible. The authors mean to say that if Bitcoin's growth continues, by Feb 2020 it will consume as much electricity as the world currently does. That's not the same thing, and also extremely unlikely.

First, they took one data point and extrapolated it 26 months into the future. Anyone with a little statistics knowledge should be able to tell you the folly in making a conclusion based on only one data point. The smaller your subset, the more likely your data point is an outlier or not indicative of a true trend. Second, as energy demand grows, energy supply grows, so increasing Bitcoin demand for electricity would spur the world to create more capacity. Third, the diminishing return on very large numbers means the growth of electricity consumption has to slow from Bitcoin-related sources. That means it's highly unlikely that the growth rate they extrapolated an be maintained long enough to reach the energy consumption it is predicted to in 26 months, and even if it did, for the other reasons it wouldn't constitute all the world's electricity consumption.

Because they get these basic things wrong, it's hard to take anything else they said too seriously.

Yes, we adapt so fast to situations that you would not even remember a problem ever existed. We will start seeing a lot of changes happening in most place and power issues will end up solved even if they tend to sound more of a problem. Like you said, there are so many alternative source of electricity and if that would end up paying more than using the main power source, it is as simple as making use of the alternative sources.

It's all just FUD. Just think of the massive electricity savings when all the banks close down.

It doesn't really matter about the high electricity consumption, many savvy miners are switching to renewable energy source (e.g. OgNasty), because mining hardware uses so much power the amount of time taken for the solar/hydroelectric/wind generators to pay for themselves is reduced.

the increasing power usage of bitcoin network isn't a problem at all since the world power supply is exponentially increasing every year due to construction of power plants and some developed countries are constructing solar power plants and wind energy plants and also some miners are switched over to renewable energy to reduce energy costs although the exponential increase of mining difficulty is a problem to miners someday. devs must do something to reduce it.

Technology is ever evolving so we'll always be able to improve our designs to cope with the existing problem and that also goes for the tech miners have right now. We can use renewable energy too to ease the total consumption of power in a certain country; it could help with the burden indirectly.

Each person involved in the blockchain mining is looking for alternative energy sources to lower the costs so there is no problem related to energy.

Its not about that it will affect their country in bad way its about their efficiency of not bale to produce the electricity in proper way. I mean there are countries which are able to harness the power from sun and still can do many things without having the power load shading! There are countries which are evolving very fast and they need lots of electricity and they have literally no sources. But they are still harnessing power like crazy.


I think if a country is self sufficient on fulfilling the needs then we don't have to worry about the mining operations and its electricity costs. Everything can be recalled and made into something greener. Im not against the nature or energy stuff or something like that but if we have the platform and sources then why not use it to make the better world. Think.

I don't think massive consumption of electricity will be a big problem for Miners. By the time that we reach that problem, Im sure we've already come up a new source of electricity. Imagine 2140 will be the year in which the last Bitcoin will be mine. Im sure by that time We have created things like Iron man arc reactor. Its bound to happen its just a matter of when.

if forever mining using ordinary electricity will be very expensive and expensive, mining or miners must be able to make their own electricity can easily make solar panels or solar power that can be more efficient.

To my mind the High hype of the alternative sources of the energy is obvious for now even in crypto!
look at the recent growth of the price for example of Power Ledger, Sun Contract end others!
So rise ofthe usage of electrycity will make people faster adopt this alternative and more ecology ways of using it!
This will never couse the crash for BTC!

Maybe it would revolutionize the electricity industry as there will be search for new and cheap ways of consuming energy which can bring the renewable energy into the usage of many countries.

Electricity is the major problem even now as some countries can`t produce it due to high costs and complicated work. There may be an increase in bills or taxes regarding it.

Electricity will not be the issue in future mining as I think that there are already many alternative to power sources and mining can also use on of it. Solar energy is one of the best replacement for electricity and many people around the world have already setup solar plants to supply electricty to there miners and mine bitcoins and others coins essentially and profitably.

I wouldnt be worryed with those atleast not now, since the energy being used into the mining were an energy wich were being wasted or not used, since werent any business for those, bitcoin and crypto mining has allowed some companies and private companies to enter into the market and being able to sell their energy. I do believe dag crypto are the future, and we arent worryed yet with the big energy being spent to keep bitcoin safe as well to mine others coins, the fact is the concept is good for business but not good for Earth at all, but well, into the future i hope and believe better miners will hit the market making those impack to keep stable.

Sure it will be a nuisance seeing such articles that bringing cryptocurrencies down, potential investors will doubt the moment they read it, so what can we do? That's why we are here not only to make profit but also to help on resolving upcoming problems, this was this forums sole purpose, sharing ideas and knowledge as we are stronger if we help each other. There's a lot of way on how we can accumulate energy, but it will take more of our money to do so. More and more problems are coming to the crypto community, might well as think of the regulation and banning of the crypto currencies in some countries.

If the government bans use of electricity coming from the grid to power up a mining farm, there's always another way to get electricity, either you invest in building your own source of power, maybe a solar farm, run-off river or wind mill or if you are a big time mining farm operator, you can ask independent power producer to build a power station near you and sign a contract on how many MW you need per day and for how many years.

Bitcoin mining is considered to be a drawback as it consumes tons and tons of electricity and need for updated technology makes the cost for mining very high for an individual. Why do you think China is popular in terms of mining, that's because there is low cost for electricity. In India also it's cheap but there's a lack of updates technology in all the places in India because of which mining is comparatively lesser. Some governments I heard, are planning to stop users from mining in their country as it consumes a lot of energy.

This was my worry if govt's start banning or restricting mining activities what would happen and just on a lighter note why is China not banning mining of cryptos? ;D

I don't think that the massive electricity of the miners and other type of bitcoin users will result for an end for bitcoin because it is clear that it will just make noise for bitcoin and it will create a scenario where the big name people like the governments and other authorities will notice bitcoin and be one of the adopters of bitcoin.

There is no doubt that Bitcoin does acquire a lot of electricity intake . Many such concerns regarding the over-exploitation of electricity and energy resources for consumption of electricity to perform Bitcoin mining have been shown in the past . The concerns are not wrong but the give a sense of "plotting" and "degrading" the already controversial image of Bitcoin . In coming years there is going to be a maximum consumption and production of electricity via renewable resource .
Major innovations and developments are being made in order to minimize the cost and energy consumption for the process of Bitcoin . Already the advances of technology has gone from CPU mining to ASICs and cloud mining to resolve and support the issue . I think it would be fair to give them some time to further improve and improvise.                                                       

If only it were so simple to get adoption of bitcoin. But that is the scenario OP is talking about and in that case he is worried there would be an electricity shortage. I think in time many cryptos will move to other methods of mining that do not require such an energy input. I also think that in time we will evolve energy production methods so that perhaps electricity production and use isn't such an issue anyway and can come from renewable sources.

I don't really believe that the cost of electricity for bitcoin mining will lead to the end of bitcoin but may likely affect the market value of bitcoin positively in the future.