Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

First I would like to address the issue:

I think that bitcoin mining as a whole (all the miners in the world) are consuming a lot of power and all we are doing is creating another currency that is going to be so regulated soon that it could be pointless.

Before you say that other things require a lot of power:

Lets take the US dollar. It is not based solely on using your computer/hardware to mine which is consuming electricity rates. It has jobs that you earn the dollar without using electricity or limited like using a computer then doing other stuff.

I do not hate bitcoin and love the idea but I keep getting this idea in my brain that the world is already starting to get more demand for these supplies (fossil fuels) to get electricity. I do not want this to happen but I would like to keep bitcoin alive. I am not a hater but rather someone who looks at the whole thing. Yes the future is going into technology but do you think it would be possible to wait till the world has found a reliable power resource that will generate enough power to feed the hungry demand before we dive into the future.

Main questions
Is bitcoin a big contribution to energy consumption?
Is bitcoin = the amount of electricity used?
Will this be used as a way that people/regulators can shut bitcoin down?

My main hope is that we develop ASICs that are really efficient not per gh/s but for the world or that people find a really good way to use solar energy or other times of energy to power these electricity hungry machines.

I do not hate bitcoin.

Or how about design a system of "mining" that doesn't large computation capacity to do what amounts to "busy work".  If you have a job, and your boss gives you busy work, which is basically work that is being done just to say you "worked", you would probably hate the company and call it inefficient.  Yet bitcoin is based off of miners doing a HUGE amount of busy work.  If that computer power and electricity was reallocated towards actually working towards maintaining the network, well, we would have the fastest most robust decentralized network in the world.  Why not design a system that gives rewards to miners who actually maintain a network instead of doing busy work?

I haven't done the math. I know there is more hashing power than ever and keeps going up. But at the same time, efficiency is going down.

Go blame Alt-Coin miners :

I use 47 KW/hr. between Scrypt and ASICs. My earnings are the same on both.

Scrypt: 42 KW/hr
ASICs: 5 KW/hr

Look Inside America's Largest Bitcoin Mining Operation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CjldZLXiAU)  :o

Well everything consumer a lot of power. Creating decentralized international monetary system is worth it. There are also more cheaper sources of energy.

I quite the the hybrid systems that Ppcoin and Novacoin proposed. The best solution in my opinion is: Mining (and possibly Auroracoin-like "Airdrop") for the initial distribution for 1-5 years, afterwards mining is replaced by POS mechanism. Scrypt / Dagger is prefferable over SHA because it will allow for more even distrubution, giving no advantage to ASIC-like hardware.

Efficiency is cancelled by difficulty increase...

Mining will end in parity where over long term produced coins value is reaching equality to OPEX/CAPEX...

And in near future that might be a rather wasteful state...
 
OFC there is systems to offset the OPEX, like selling waste heat in cold seasons, but that doesn't change the picture much...

True question is energy/coin mined over whole lifespan...

"A lot" is a relative term.  The entire combined power of the entire bitcoin network is "a lot" compared to the power necessary for me to make myself a piece of toast in the morning, but for a secure global currency and electronic payment system it is quite efficient.


That is an interesting statement.  What sort of regulation do you think is going to happen that will make it pointless, and what makes you think that particular regulation will happen?


You are talking about "earning" a US dollar.  You are not talking about "manufacturing" a US dollar.  Bitcoin also has jobs that you earn the bitcoin without using electricity or limited like using a computer and then doing other stuff.  Manufacturing and transporting the physical US dollars uses significant amounts of energy in various forms. Multiply that energy per US dollar by the total number of physical US currency notes that have been created in all of history, and I think you'll find that the dollar has "wasted" MUCH more energy than bitcoin.


In comparison to its value and usefullness?  No.  It is much more efficient than Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, and Bank Transfers. Therefore, if you can replace all of those with bitcoin, you will reduce the world energy consumption.


I'm not sure what you are trying to ask here.  Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.  As such it is both a currency and a payment system.  Bitcoin is a concept and a protocol.  Are you asking if the exchange rate of a bitcoin is equivalent to one-twentyfifth of the value of the electricity necessary for the entire network to mine a block?


How would you shut down bitcoin?  What would you shut down?

I don't think you understand what mining accomplishes.  It is not "busy work" or "wasted".  It performs a very useful function.

thats where solar energy comes in

Look into Peercoin/Primecoin

Let the market decide.

Underlined ones are the answers to some questions. I think that you have basically combatted all the questions but we already have all those payment protocols/ways to pay others so why have another. Its efficient yes but sometimes its not worth it. I have to agree that bitcoin is good but the power cosumption is quite worrying. Its not equal to the rest of the world but it just adds more.

I advise people to start looking into solar panels and other ways to power your machines as well as buy from the companies that are best for the world.

What you guys miss is that even if you use sun power, you spend that energy on something that should not be needed.
If bitcoin used Proof-Of-Stake, the power consumption of the network would go down with up to 95%.
Instead  that energy could be used to replace nuclear power plants for the rest of society.

I am thinking of this idea.
You guys remember folding @ home?
What if we can make a crypto algo which also simulates the folding at no big additional effort?
So you can mine coins and contribute to mankind at the same time (as such contribution requires computer running and consuming power as well)

If we assume the network is heading towards ~1 J/GH then we are looking at 1MW per PH/s.  That puts us at 30 MW or 263 GWh annually at current network size.  Now that might sound like a lot but the human race uses about 150 million GWh annually (all forms of energy not just electricity) making the Bitcoin network a rounding error (0.0002%) on the energy usage of the human race.

How efficient Bitcoin becomes relative to established monetary systems will depend on how large its user base becomes.  There is a non-linear relationship between the number of users and cost of the network.  The hashrate is likely to rise over time but this will be partially offset by increased hardware efficiency (J/GH).  Also as the cost of ASICs decline (and power costs dominate) we may the emergence of energy offsetting applications.  Dedicated ASIC heaters could be built specially designed for domestic heat and hot water applications.  ASIC arrays could be used on a part-time basis as power shunts to soak up excess electrical capacity instead of 100% loss waste load circuits.

miners are fancy house heating systems for some.  they produce as much heat per watt as a standard electric heater. the computing power happens for "free" in a way.

of course if you're running big mining operation in hot climate and using air-con to cool miners then that's quite a folly.

i wouldn't worry about "global warming" the biosphere is hungry for more carbon and it gets gobbled up and integrated into life very quickly. you know that if you grow plants in enriched CO2 atmosphere they thrive. and of course all that oil trapped below the surface wasn't down there all the time you know, in times gone by all that carbon was above ground. some large event must have buried it because in the natural decay mechanism old dead life gets completely used and depleted of chemical energy, think chalk deposits. we do life a favor by re-integrating trapped carbon reserves into the biosphere.

Also dont worry about fossil fuels running out.

you only need worry about our star going out.

the amount of energy incident on our planet from the sun is MASSIVE.

very efficient photovoltaics will happen right around when the fuel tails off, but until then though you best keep paying your taxes goddamit.

hey guys, gridcoin is directing the network-computation to benefit scientific progress
other than PoW-coins it doesnt waste but rewards Proof-of-BOINC.

Define 'big' ?  Given the amount of energy that exists in the visible universe (or even our solar system), its almost invisible.


Regulators cannot shutdown bitcoin.  Shutting down works in server-client architecture, but not in decentralized architecture. To simplify:

You could make an analogy with the government trying to restrict peoples freedom to listen certain music (this actually happens in some countries):
How you can do it? Music can be played everywhere, in a central building, in a home, in a toilet, on the street.. anyone can have portable player. Even if the government tries to take everyone music player, there would still be a black market. And music can be downloaded from the internet, stored encrypted on disks etc.

It will stay.. and likely get bigger. Governments would do better to make investments into btc.
Like they say 'if you cant beat them, join them'


 

1 - there are coins made to use the hash power to useful things, or be more power-sufficient. Example: gridcoin, primecoin, peercoin. Others can be designed to solve hard problems easy to verify a given solution(ex: differential equations)


2 - of course FIAT  system uses lots of energy(no idea how much), they do lots of virtual transactions, and credit card machines are electricity moved. They use also lots of paper, metals and plastic, that are energy-consuming and aggresive against nature. Bitcoin being internet-based results in less consuption of paper, metals and plastic.

3 - ASICs consumes less power to produce hash, and they can be further improved to consume less and less energy

4 - fossil fuels aren't the only option to make energy, there are hydroeletric and nuclear energy too.

Did you know most of the easily accessible hydrocarbon energy on earth was burned away immediately in flaring? 

On the contrary to your thesis, PoW valuation will help us use energy more efficiently.  Once we realize that energy = value = money, we might just stop leaving all our lights on and burning gas to move steel round in circles on parking lots. 

I absolutely hate hearing this argument over and over.
Once I did the calculations on how much roughly the ATMs, in the USA alone, use more power 24/7 then the entire Bitcoin network. It was nearly 2x the amount of power.

Talk about a wasteful infrastructure!

Bitcoin is the least of our concerns.
The benefits gained w/ a system like Bitcoin largely outweigh its power footprint.

also las vegas (just one city) uses more electric. and they trade plastic chips that cant be used on the internet or in any other convenience store on the planet, only in specific places within the city.

?

The sun deposits approximately 1 kW / m^2 of power upon the earth, and somehow it gets used up (growing plants, evaporating water, melting snow, etc).  Since the radius of the Earth is 6400 km, this means the cross sectional area through which the solar power flux passes is:

    A = Pi r^2 = 3.14 x (6400 x 10^3 m)^2 = 1.3 x 10^14 m^2

Since each m^2 has 1 kW deposited, this means the total power hitting the earth is:

    P = A x F = (1.3 x 10^14 m^2) x (1000 W / m^2) = 1.3 x 10^17 W = 130 million gigawatts.  

So how does this compare to all the bitcoin miners?

Right now, when a miner finds a block he earns 25 BTC, blocks are found roughly every 10 minutes and 1 BTC is worth about $450.  So, the miners' revenue is roughly

   25 BTC / block x 0.1 blocks / min x 450 $ / BTC x 1/60 min / s = 19 $ / s

Let's imagine that this revenue goes entirely to electricity and let's assume the cost of electricity is $0.1 / kW-hr.  Then $19 would pay for 190 kW-hrs of electricity.  But this is the amount used per second so the power consumption is then estimated at 190 kW hr / s x 3600 s / hr x 1000 W / kW = 6.8 x 10^8 W = 0.68 gigawatts.

So, the entire earth gets 130 million gigawatts of power from the sun and currently uses no more than 0.68 gigawatts on bitcoin mining.  

Therefore, less than 1 part in 100 million of the total available energy deposited on earth each second by the sun goes towards  bitcoin mining.  

The consumption of energy to ensure the network security.

yeah no asics will alway run as hot and fast as possible or more asics that run cool will be run, its conservation of energy.

use a POS like PeerCoin or NXT, which require minimal or no mining.

The use of 'too' is subjective - what exactly are you comparing it against? I don't have any exact figures but I would doubt Bitcoin mining would even represent 0.01% of electricity consumption of the world. While it might be high for an individual - there are far more who don't mine than do so I would think they would offset that. I'd be happy to be corrected if someone has clear figures.

this is alot more than I thought.....considering, each human could only use about 1 part in 7000 million of the total available energy deposited on earth each second.

as soon as you have "proof of unique human" you don't need mining anymore.

the maidsafe community is trying to figure it out: https://maidsafe.org/t/proof-of-unique-human/167

also if they get "proof of resource" (bandwidth / storage space) to actually work, it would also make mining and probably BTC unnecessary.

My appology for not reading the entire thread first, but I wanted to throw in my 2 cents.

If energy comes from renewable energy, is that so bad? Hydropower plants for instance? That does not contribute to environmental damage, or a windmill or sea wave energy.

Forms of energy that pollute is another issue alltogether.

I hate to discourage this perhaps noble goal but it is unfortunately a bad idea. 

On one side we will reverse engineer your verification procedures (it won't be hard because you have to open source them anyway).  How hard can it be to generate a million unique realistic enough fingerprints?   

On the other side we will have large databases of sounds and data from real unique humans and even call centers filled with unique humans waiting to solve captchas. 

Meet my friend Sybil here from Iceland.  :D 

The total bitcoin network using as much energy as 70 humans is a lot more than you thought?  

If that's too much energy, than you need to grab the next 71 humans you see and tell them all to take it easy - they're consuming more energy than the entire bitcoin network!!!

Another estimate of bitcoin network portion of global electricity consumption goes like this:

5TW * 8760 * .47 = 20 trillion kWh annually, where 5TW is an estimate for total global electric generation installed, and 0.47 is a usage factor used by utilities applied to typical residential usage. 

The bitcoin mining network uses 70PH/s at 1W/GH/s = 70MW, and it uses that electricty 8760 hours annually, which results in 600 million kWh annually.

600 million / 20 trillion is 30 parts in a million, or 1 part in 30,000.

So you'd really have to find 250,000 people (say, atttending an appearance by the Pope) and tell them all, "Hey, slow down!   You're using more energy than the entire bitcoin network!!!"

Total power deposited on earth by sun (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=512208.msg6755649#msg6755649):

   130 million gigawatts

Total (average) power consumed by humans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption):

   16 thousand gigawatts

Total power consumed by bitcoin mining:

   0.68 gigawatts (assuming all bitcoin inflation buys electricity at $0.10 / kw-hr)
   0.07 gigawatts (assuming 1 W / GHash)

So, humans are using 0.012% of the sun's energy that hits earth, bitcoin is using somewhere between 5x10^-8% and 5x10^-7% of the energy available from the sun or 0.0004% - 0.004% of the total energy consumed by humans.  

Don't forget that there are renewable energy resources Like: Wind energy, solar energy, hydro energy.


For example Wind energy.


How much electricity can one wind turbine generate?

The output of a wind turbine depends on the turbine's size and the wind's speed. Utility-scale wind turbines being manufactured now for the U.S. market have power ratings that range from 1.5 megawatts to 3.0 megawatts.

So think of buying your own wind turbine for bitcoin mining.
 :)

Bitcoin is more energy efficient as a mutualized infrastructure compared to redundant, proprietary data centers, office buildings, workstations, trucks, ATM, etc required by legacy monetary systems.
If mining happens at home, the energy dissipated by mining can be repurposed to useful applications (like heating), assuming mining ibecomes somewhat regional and seasonal.
Look how http://www.qarnot-computing.com (http://www.qarnot-computing.com) illustrates my point.

However, PoW alt-coins are wasting energy because the energy consumption each alt-network is adding does not result in a more secure network.
For instance, litecoin is still one million times less secure than bitcoin.
From a security stand point, spreading hashing power over multiple networks is less efficient than concentrating it on the bitcoin network.

Multi-purpose mining à la primecoin is a security vulnerability because it creates conflicting incentives for mining centralization. The more the secondary purpose is profitable, the more likely a mining pool is  to cross the 51% line which destroys the value of the block mining.

More mining power more consuming.  ;)

With ~20% capacity factor, so annual energy out (in kWh) equals power rating (in watts) x 8.760 x ~0.2.

Personally I think providing security to a secure decentralized payment network is more useful to mankind than searching for intelligent life on other planets that probably doesn't exist.

i dont think it consumes too much energy..

Better to buy instead mine.

yes  it a big contribution

bitcoin ≠ the amount of electricity used

can't shut bitcoin down

why? i don't know

The money aspect is only a small part of Bitcoin, other uses include property contracts, business contracts, voting and multisig transactions.  It would be a good idea to read the Bitcoin whitepaper before asking questions so you can familiarize yourself with exactly what Bitcoin is, and how it can be used.

Good Luck!

Remember "You cannot put a price on Freedom"

You must be thinking about SETI. folding@home folds proteins in an attempt to find a cure for Alzheimer's and cancer.

I switched some old GPU miners over to folding in 2012.

Here are some other things that consume to much energy.

Killing people with electricity.
Driving down to the corner.
Watching any reality show.
Las Vegas
The first three minutes of a shower.