Bitcoin Forum

If you follow the recent press, you will have read more and more horror stories about the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining. That's why I wrote this article to look more closely at the actual consumption and the future Bitcoin power consumption:

BTCitcoin miners true energy consumption
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xwCvYBGlne8KbBntFOKnZcvcVhK7YXlOpZfM_zf79Jk/edit?usp=sharing

In a nutshell for lazy readers:
- Energy consumption will go down again at some point
- New generations of energy-efficient ASICS do not help to reduce energy consumption
- A more useful hashing puzzle could increase energy consumption
- The dependence of the power consumption on the bitcoin price decreases fast with time (exponentially dropping)
- …..

Feedback appreciated.
Thanks,
Marco
P.S: German translation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1toHed5wM_nMgO23ktYJTfu5pkvPYCbsHiokXAMs1Zv4/edit?usp=sharing

E = 0.6(f+rp)/k

where
E = Average total hashing electricity consumption of all miners  (not other nodes) to get a new block in the blockchain (kWh, not included is power needed for ASIC production, for Miner’s office, light etc…)
f  =  Total fees paid for all transactions in the block in US$ (transfer fees increasing)
r  =  Coinbase block reward for winning miner (50BTC, 25BTC, currently 12.5 BTC, (This is reducing )
p =  Bitcoin (average) exchange price in US$/Btc  
k =  Average price to buy  a kWh (US$/kWh). (What about other countries Rates Example here 0.1$/KWh)

----
This is formula ...

Average price p = 16000 USd
Average block size - 12.5 BTC
Average Number Of Transactions Per Block - https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block - average 2000
Average transaction fee - 20$
With k=$0.10 follows

0.6(40000+12.5*16000)/0.1 = 1440000 kWh

My assumption is that the ones with higher prices cannot compete long term and will go out of the business. If the price raises for all then the power consumption goes down (assuming the other variables fix)

There is a new thing called staking allot of person who were
doing bitcoin mining are now moving on to staking altcoins,
users doing staking are saying that you can profit allot more
than when you are doing mining bitcoin. The con is you have to
purchase the altcoins token first before staking can happen.

The 0.06 should be 0.6 and then you get 1,440,000 KWh = 1,4 GWh per block on average.
But: The calculation logic is based on the fact that mining is a high competitive business with low profit margins. So to calculate with prices for non competitive countries makes only limited sense, these miners wouldn't survive for long in the business.

If it's 2020 when you have predicted to have the whole world's energy being consumed, I guess we will possibly see it even before the end of 2018.
I have noticed one thing always in Crypto world, and i.e.; whatever we expect to occur in late future, occurs too early that either we get a big surprise or a shock. Miners are already making fortunes out of mining (my guess) if they are trying to establish mining farms (and according to the numbers, big bulls are trying to capture the whole market from all the ends and mining is one of those parts). This way, we will surely see huge spikes in the number of consumption rates that are being followed up by the increased difficulty to solve the blocks.

No, that's not my statement, it's just a quote that I disprove in my article. The power consumption of the network will decrease at some point (under current rules).

In fact, mining is a very small part of energy consumption, and I don't understand why there's always been an article that exaggerates the Numbers, even talking about mining and the destruction of the earth. ???