Bitcoin Forum

I know it has been discussed often with many hardliners on both sides about the energegy consumption of Bitcoin and its CO2 footprint.
For my opinion as crypto technical forward payment option we should not close the eyes to it when many people try to lower their CO2 footprint to do the same.
For my start i use the data of https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption to say that BTC needs minimum of 38 TWh up to 63 TWh a year with an annual footprint of 30216 kt CO2 (!!!) Everyone can expect what this means.

So my question is: Should DEV-team focus on a enviromental friendly main bitcoin fork? We have big knowlege in that team so we possible have a secure solution. Can be POS but need not to be.

And we should have in mind that Bitcoin itself is still not a payment system. It needs off chain ideas like lightning network to pay your food with bitcoin at a supermarket.

Some standart argues for POW hardliners I like to say something in the beginning:
1) We can use green power for mining
Green power is an illusion. Even windmills or dams pollute the enviroment

2) Any other consensus algo makes centralisation
Bitcoin is central already with 4 mining pools get all the blocks with mainly global players like Bitmain

3) We will have new hardware for more easy mining
Ok. And the old ones are trash? Even bad for enviroment. And this will continue

4) Algos like POS makes the richer more rich
Now the people who can buy big miner farm get richer. And even when not, maybe its a bad pill we have to take

5) The banks consume energy, why we should not
Pointing with fingers on others is like in kindergarden

Maybe I forget somethink. But again I think we should wake up and do somethink. Whats your opinion.

Old subject...

Pos was not tested in a big network such as bitcoin. Not even ethereum tried it yet. And bitcoin must be more conservative, as a change in the algorithm could cause lots of unexpected problems. Let other shitcoins try first...

Peer coin and other cryptocurrencies which tried are very small and barely used..

Also, pow is working fine. Why people care so much about bitcoin energy consumption to secure the network?

How much does the whole banking system consumes? How much energy does christimas lights worldwide consume?
Bitcoin energy consumption is necessary, as it keeps the network safe and secure against attacks. We should focus in reducing energy costs in less important activities, such as christimas or old lamps with high energy consumption

its obvious your a PoS fan. but PoS has no upfront cost to create new coin. thus most of the PoS fans real motivations are purely to grab coin without upfront costs. rather than some environmental desire.

but lets deal with the stats first.
right now hashrate is 55exahash. and with asics at upto 55 terrahash. thats 1mill asics of T17 at max capacity 55thash
 1mill using 2.5kw = 2.5gw/h
now imagining if all them asics were running non stop for a year and the hashrate stayed the same for that year
thats 22tw/year. but hashrates declined in winter 2018 so the tw/y would be lower
lets do the same for older gen asics. the s9 at14thash and 1.3kw
4mill units with 51gw/h = 44tw/y
and as i said hashrates were lower so tw/y would be lower than 44tw/y
so the whole 38-63 stat is actually more so UNDER 22-44tw/y

anyways

1 asic today is the equivalent of 30,000 GPU so because we are not using ~30billion GPU' the environment has already benefited
think about it power wise a motherboard with 3GPU and a PSU of 600w .. 10billion systems
which at 600w compared to an asics 2.5kw =~2.5 billion asics PSU's..
but the reality is more so 1-4mill asic PSU's so efficiency has already occured. and continue

secondly
your 5 points at the end.
1. anyone can turn anything into sounding like a environmental disaster. even vegans make animals look bad for the environment

2. firstly hashing a block and using electric has nothing to do with consensus. asics have no hard drives to validate transaction rules
secondly theres more than 4 pools.

3. many people sell old hardware to altcoiners

4. PoS is already centralising. many people are syndicating their take(pooling it) to get higher threasholds to get more reward chances

5. not so much pointing fingers at other worse currencies, such as the massive quarries/holes dug in ground for gold. but more some comparison that bitcoin is not as bad as others. did you know more electric is wasted to keep pepsi bottles chilled per year

Yes its old topic but for my opinion need to be discussed until solution

Its again pointing with finger on others about chrismas lights and so on. By the way normal lamps in europe are forbidden, only energy saving lamps allowed.

You could run big testnet, need not to be from one day to another to see if the algo (i said need not be POS) works. And there are coins working good with POS.

But there need to be the will of changes. And you see its not there....

Yes I am POS fan, but not in all kinds. Maybe the good bitcoin developer have a complete other idea

HASH rate rises with ASIC and every new ASIC. But we dont save energeny with that

1) I dont say you dont need energy to run the system, but should be less as possible.

2) BTC. com says last 24 hours pool statistik correct 6 pools run more then 70% of network https://btc.com/stats/pool?pool_mode=day

3) how many actual altcoins where is reasonable to run with old Antiminer with sha256 you know?

4) Yes ok, you can pooling your POS chance? What is wrong?

5) Still we say in germany "Look your own nose first before ruling others"

Is there nobody here say: team of btc DEV should work on a solution?

old S9 work out as ~100w for 1thash
new T17 work out as ~50w for 1thash

also many mining farms facilities set up their warehouses in regions where hydro/thermal/solar/wind is available. which is a co₂ saving

compared to the GPU mining 55exahash via ASICS uses 1000x less power
should we go back to GPU mining?.. or be happy the network is less than 40pw/y instead of 40pw/y

first you said 4, then 6, but the pie chart shows 12, and also those 12 are not 12 facilities but hundreds
they are just grouped together for easy display. even antpool as one 'entity' have multiple facilities where each facility
has their own management, some like segwit, some dont, some like empty blocks, some dont.

with bitcoin at $9k a coin miners can afford to buy new asics at $1500+
with crapcoins no one will spend $1500+ on a new asic when they can a second hand buy an s9 for $100
what do you think happened when new gen of asics was released winter 18. crapcoins like bitcoinSV bought the s9's

what is wrong with pooling asics..
same answer applies to both (the pool/syndicate/club/group get more chances and more wins)
it was you that was trying to insinuate that pooling was bad and only had only had 4 pools

its not about pointing fingers in other directions. its recognising the bitcoin network has made efficiency savings, and simply showing the energy us of bitcoin is not as bad as other industries

no matter what DEVs come up with, users will find work arounds.
EG imagine dev's implemented that no pool can go over 8% of hashrate or more simply a pool cannot make 2 blocks in a row
pools will just proxy their IP's and make it look like their pools are more than 1 pool
if devs changed it to PoC (hard drive sizes) people will just fill warehouses with thousands of external hard drives all needing electric, eventually exceeding electric of GPU which is then less efficient than ASICS

in short if a currency is popular/useful people will find a way around it to get greedy

I'll keep it simple: no, nobody will say that devs have to work on a solution. Why? Because there's not a problem.
Bitcoin has more urgent problems to be fixed and they are working on that direction.

Energy use, CO₂ footprint... those are issues for which you should not be ask the consumer to handle (you won't get useful results).
Why don't you ask Las Vegas stop wasting electricity? Why don't you convince USA or China stop the coal based industries?
Bitcoin mining goes mostly of hidro and solar electricity. And this makes it much cleaner than some wants to make you believe.
So back to the start. It's not an issue, so no solution is needed. At least not yet.

They all say bitcoin community run the coin. Its property of no one. And as member of community its not wrong to make it better or make suggestion.
And even if I am customer I want improvement. Not waiting 3 hours for TX because no block found..... but thats not my actual topic.

1) it keeps the same. The HASH rate rising does not save energengy. And it makes the network not more safe because all people have acess to same miners

2) You want to turn my argument against me. No problem. Lets centralise some more and save energy. You can no really mean BTC is decentral at its current mining market.

3) No one will spend any Dollar for buy ASIC for crapcoin. If i really want to mine it, I rent some HASH rate thats much cheaper

4) see point 2

We have 17 Mio of 21 already mined. A really comfortable situation for e.g. POS. Let the big player get their blocks. And let the wourld know we are able for changes

The efficiency of the mining equipment is irrelevant. Miners with efficient equipment will increase their capacity. Whether miners are efficient or not, they will consume as much energy as they can in order to maximize profits.

Here are some ways to reduce the carbon footprint of mining:

1. Reduce the amount of fossil fuels used in power generation.
2. Increase the cost of energy.
3. Reduce the value of the mining revenue. Note that the halving reduces the revenue by almost half every 4 years.
4. Switch to an algorithm that does not depend on consuming energy.

I would add proper scaling (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5109561) to the solutions from above.
With tens of thousands transactions per second CO2 footprint will have a practical application unlike ~5 transactions per second that are used now mainly for speculation.

this topic is about developing bitcoin to reduce CO₂
which is basically point 1

again yes the hashrate rises
under the assumption that where something rises. the cost/effect rises. there would be no way for it to decrease, but only to be controlled/reduced how much the impact/cost grows alongside the rise

now lets go back in history. back to mid 2013
hashrate of say 200thash for the network. now imagine without asics, the network continued to get popular from people buying up GPU.. yep thats right ASICS never happened(OMG i changed time)..
imagine the exponential growth of hashrate still occured but stayed with GPU technology to achieve it
ok? got that image in your head?... now fast forward to 2019.
we are at 55exahash but warehouses are GPU filled

the heat alone in these warehouses is far higher
the electric is 40PETAwatts/year
the amount of units(equipment) are about 10billion GPU
imagine the raw material needed to manufacture the gpu's
imagine that with 10billion units and 40petawatt/y the warehouses cant all fit in regions where hydro/thermo/solar plants exist

...
now delete that time line we imagined. and look at the real timeline we do live on
only a couple million not 10billion units which means less raw material to manufacture products (good for CO₂)
only 40terrawatt not 40petawatt  (good for CO₂)
less ware houses, less energy so able to function in regions of hydro/thermal plants  (good for CO₂)

I understand your argument and I would say its 50% right. Of course the ASIC energy consumption is less per TH.
But the HASH rate would never grown that much without ASIC the problems you say would people stop doing it this way.
So again if new Antminer come up or not for me there is no save of energy because simple the HASH rate will rise.

This is an old topic but for the sake of the argument i'll leave it here.

Changing the Bitcoin code
Some altcoins have already done this to avoid the race for computing power by miners. This eliminates the need for dedicated high-speed mining equipment.

Hardware
ASIC miners use less power to generate more coins

Buying carbon credits
It is designed to underpin renewable energy credits, meaning that when you trade them, you’re supporting a market that rewards the production of solar energy.

Buying green power
Most jurisdictions offer ways to purchase power from alternative energy suppliers. Alternatively, you can buy renewable energy certificates or their equivalents, which are tradable certificates rewarding producers of renewable energy.

You can look at it here. (https://www.coindesk.com/greener-bitcoin-reduce-carbon-emissions)

And this may result in a big problem for BTC later. For technical reasons (payment ?!) and also my main topic:
Think of new "green" european parlament says: POW Crypto use are forbidden in europe.
They stop normal lamps for energy saving, even vacuum cleaner are not allowed to sell with more then 1000 W because of energy consumption.
They stop much plastic one use material starting 2020
And that was made under mainly conservative leading parlament ....

Disclaimer: I'm a PoW hardliner who's not convinced of PoS and its derivatives (at least those that I'm aware of)

I'm under the impression that whenever the power consumption of PoW gets brought up that one factor is largely ignored: Grid energy storage.

Maybe the hard facts will betray me once a comprehensive studies comes out (so far most studies I found regarding the power usage of PoW were on shaky grounds at best, link me up if you have something interesting), however so far I'm under the impression that economic forces lead to PoW mining using energy that mostly goes beyond what can be stored in the power grid and would therefore get wasted for the most part.

That is, based on the assumptions that
1) miners are driven towards places with the lowest energy cost,
2) energy is the cheapest where there's a surplus of electricity and
3) current energy storage capabilities are very much lacking
we can come to the conclusion that the additional power consumed by miners is energy that is otherwise wasted. Unlike consumers and most industries that have other economic factors at play (eg. you can only drill for oil where there is oil, you can only produce commodities where resources are either nearby or cheaply delivered) electricity is almost the sole concern for mining operations.

But like I said, the hard facts may betray me, so hopefully at one point a proper study will take place proving the above either false or correct. Also I'm neither an economist nor a grid engineer, so for all I know my assumptions could be utterly void.

That being said, I would very much love to see an increase of Bitcoin's transaction throughput as to make it actually feasible to phase out some of the legacy banking system in favor of cryptocurrencies (ie. IMHO Bitcoin's PoW wouldn't feel like that much of a waste if it were to successfully supersede parts of the existing system rather than running redundantly alongside it).

Interesting point to say maybe the electrical power would be wasted when not used by bitcoin.
And as I said before you also point out its not a working payment system at the moment.

So for place with much coal energy power its wrong because you could simply reduce input and output regarding to demand.
For green power can be some right because e.g. windmill produce power even when not needed. Thats big problem normally because you have to backup it when there is no wind  ::)

So lets make an agreement that 30% would be wasted. Its still 20000 kt of CO2 extra. And for the people say the conclusion of Hash Rate and power consumtion is wrong i give another 30%. Still there are more then 12000 kt = 12000000 tons of CO2 extra for bitcoin.

Guys you really can affort this with your conscience.

By the way I wait 3 hours meanwhile for a TX I gave 12000 sat/kb. Cheap TX in Bitcoin mainnet is past again.....

power plants produce more than they consume ON PRPOSE to prevent brown outs/black outs during sudden surges of power utility.

EG they know at superbowl halftime, alot of people microwave some popcorn or make coffee or turn on a houselight to go to the bathroom.. this means there are known times of power utility growth. but not enough time to just flick on an extra generator at a seconds notice. and so power plants process excess power to cop with known and also some unknown scenarios

imagine power plants produce an excess of 15-20% above consumption. because its impossible to give power after its needed. but also its impossible to take the power back if its unused. and so this 15-20% excess is essentially 'waste' electric.

mining farms dont buy the domestic allowance power (normal consumption) instead they make year long deals/contracts that they will buy 1-10% of the excess. which power stations love. after all it would have gone to waste anyway

also although "china" as a country does have coal power plants. asic farms decided to set up in regions not near to coal power plants and in regions of hydro/solar/geothermal. so the CO₂ numbers are way lower than what you may think.

those are actually pretty interesting facts. thanks for sharing!

I've heard that googling something requires the same ammount of heating water for tee 3 times.

average kettle is 1200watt/h = 20watt a minute
average gaming computer 600watt/h = 10watt a minute

if a kettle takes 1 minute to boil (depending on how much water your boiling) you would have to google for 6 minutes to match

I'm not saying that Bitcoin is not a working payment system at the moment, because it is, despite it's scaling probles. I'm saying Bitcoin is not yet able to fully replace existing payment systems -- assuming you want to reduce Bitcoin to a mere payment system (ie. there's also the matter of store of value, financial sovereignty and maybe at one point a useful token / smart contract economy).

In the end it breaks to whether we deem 1) cryptocurrencies a worthy endeavour and 2) PoS and other PoW-free consensus algorithms viable security models.

Regarding the first point, reclaiming individual financial sovereignity and possibly replacing existing, more energy and especially labour intensive financial infrastructure seem worth it. Just imagine the amount of human resources one could free up by automating a large part of the financial industry. At least financial service workers will have a better chance at finding new jobs than most of the manual workers one can expect to be automated away in the coming decades.

Regarding the second point I have simply yet to see a consensus algorithm other than PoW work in practice. Crypto's history is full of failed PoS attempts and most other consensus algorithms are either permissioned or require trust.

That's just my 2 sats though.



Thanks for doing the math ;D

I think people tend to underestimate the amount of energy required for water to reach boiling point.

We are still early in crypto's development and I am most interested in POS coins that won't require massive amounts of energy and hardware to stay secure.  Just because something hasn't gained traction yet doesn't mean we should stop trying.

As payment system, as shown with my first link, BTC uses about 3x more energy then 100 thousend Visa TX:

For me personal I often said, DASH is the more useable payment system because it can send TX within secounds. But DASH still also POW

VISA payments are not settled when you swipe your card. all that occurs is a balance checker (validate UTXO) and relay tx to a bank(network relay of unconfirmed to mempool).
the banks then SEPARETLY batch up the payments and handle the settlement later.(block hashing)
comparing visa to a bitcoin confirmed tx is wrong on so many levels

a visa payment/speed is comparable to just putting tx's into mempool, which costs are much lower than you insinuate it costs for bitcoin, but speeds are the same

also bitcoins confirmed tx cost are not high due to technology. but artificially manipulated to appear high by those trying to stifle bitcoin utility to advertise alternative networks as 'the solution'

also. whether a block is empty or contains 100,000 tx. the asic mining part is the exact same. asics do not handle transactions. they just hash a small piece of data. this small piece of data is the same length no matter how many transactions there are. so trying to insinuate asics costs relate directly to transaction cost, is you mis understanding the whole bitcoin process

I agree that CO2 print is very important, and if it were a way to reduce electricity consumption, it would be great. However, I don't think you are right that it's not possible to keep mining and yet become eco-friendly. Surely, there's some pollution from the alternatives we have today, but significantly reducing it is still a good idea. Moreover, it does not seem like our world is on the path of using less energy. In fact, I am pretty sure that the consumption will grow along with civilization. So searching for better sources of energy and learning to compensate the footprint by actions that can reduce it seems to be a more realistic way. Moreover, I don't think Bitcoin users are generally concerned enough about ecology to support the fork.

Not really.

Mining uses the same amount of energy regardless of there being 10 transactions or 10 million transactions per block. Miners spend as much on electricity as they can while still turning a profit. Accordingly the amount of money miners can spend on electricity mostly depends on the block reward, transaction fees and crypto-to-fiat exchange rate (other factors being infrastructure and hardware acquisition costs).

So one way to lessen the CO2 footprint of a PoW-based cryptocurrency is to shorten its currency emission timeframe, similar to Monero's. Making larger blocks unfortunately is not.

Yes, it should be clear for all to understand that all industries are consuming electricity even the religious organizations do. And of course, there are wastes in every industry and the big incentive why we have to continually look for more efficient technology (or mining equipment on this regard) is all about money or economy.

It's all relative. Do you know how much energy we use for everyday living. In relation to the big picture mining uses hardly any electricity. I wonder how much a bank uses?
You say dams and windmills also pollute the environment? How?

Things that damage CO2 is stuff like coal mining and mass pollution and dumping deforestation. Mining doesn't do this. Worrying about mining leaving a large CO2 footprint like worrying that the cherry on your cupcake meanwhile the whole cupcake looks and taste horrible.

People dont understand. BItcoin is until now not little part of banks. I dont like them but Bitcoin until now dont give credit, dont sell company shares, even not work as payment system. Its only a investment

Pollution of those things is easy: Come to germany and see that windmills are even build in forest, where 100.000 square meters each windmill trees are taken down.
And that damns change the whole landscape is also known

I think the introduction of the Lightning Network and the removal of millions of micro transactions to a off-chain solution has already contributed to a massive reduction in the amount of transactions that had to be done on-chain, so that is a solution on it's own.  :P

Governments could even tax large mining farms with additional CO2 taxes to create special income for them to help fight the CO2 pollution, like they did with the CO2 taxes on new cars. <This money could be used to fund more environmental friendly energy solutions to generate "clean" power to be used for mining>  ;)

That doesn't really address energy consumption. The advent of LN isn't taking miners off the network. On the contrary, hash rate keeps increasing and is near the all-time high.

There are two big issues I see. One is whether mining operations are drawing on excess capacity or not -- how much net increase in electricity generation are they causing vs. load balancing? The other is the trajectory of green energy usage in the coming decades and what percentage of Bitcoin mining will shift away from things like coal-fired energy.

I'm not sure if there are exact figures how much energy is spent on Bitcoin. Probably with bigger adoption energy consumption will grow further but maybe some alternative energy sources could be the answer to that.
The biggest problem for CO2 are huge mining farms but for them there could be defined some additional taxes or something, like is already done in some other industries, and funds from that should be invested further in environment protection. I think that no one wants that Bitcoin becomes another problem for our planet.

a legendary user that doesnt even know that hashing is unrelated to transactions .. dang



energy is already 'taxed' at different rates/additional CO₂.. its why coal energy production is more expensive per kw than hydro.(research carbon credits)
power companies already do deals for farms to buy up power in contracted allotments of power long term. this isnt the standard domestic/residential 'consumption' but the excess that would go to waste. thus its literally 'free money' for the power plants. which they love and can use to expand operations

Green energy and renewable energy is a process that we must achieve. However, development is still underway in this area. Useful results may emerge in the near future, but we are not ready yet.

Maybe we will need new miners who have more power for mining and reduced energy needed to work. Also maybe we need solar energy where is possible for mining and this can help on long term to reduce CO2 emissions.

I wouldn't say that it's bad for the environment,because most of the mining hardware can be recycled.
Anyway,the CO2 blueprint of crypto mining will be reduced only by implementing green energy technologies,any change in the core concepts of bitcoin might ruin it.

More efficient miners only lead to an increase in hashrate, not to a decrease in power consumption. That is, if for example the cost of running mining hardware just got cut in half, a mining operation will simply double their hardware in an attempt to double their profits.

not exactly true.
october 2018 proved the opposite of your assumptions.

in 2018. new S15 came out and replaced S9.
for every 2 rigs of S9 decommissioned. it only required one s15 to replace it.
what actually occured was in october they removed 3 s9 for every 1 s15. thus the hashrate went down.
which is part of why the november 2018 price went down because pools could mine btc using less electric. thus make more profit.

yep less electric, less metal. more profit.

i know what you were thinking though. even i back in august/september was expecting hashrate to ramp up at the release of the s15's. but it just goes to show that different strategies can be implemented and pools still make profit

Additional point is in this CO2 consumtion on HASH rate, even the I dont know how much Bitcoin Full node are not included.

And thats one of the main points to understand. With the right consensus algo you can running coin with only this full nodes.

NO!

There is no CO2 pollution from wind, hydro ,geothermal ,solar, tidal and even nuclear reactors. Do you research before posting such BS.

The only way to reduce BTC's CO2 pollution is by using green energy sources

If you are referring to CO2  " cost" to manufacture the equipment , it is very small compared to energy these sources are giving , thus there is no point of pointing out.

The most common thing that consumes energy is light. If we can control our consumable material as well as improper use of lights or anything produced by energy. We can preserve energy. We don't need to blame bitcoin for being a consumable energy specially through mining because it is really helpful for us. If you are fan of digital currency, you will appreciate bitcoin. We can use renewable energy or we can lessen our consumable materials but do not ever blame crypto specially bitcoin.

Did you read my arguement why also green power makes pollution. I explained already.

Edit: How many windmills you need to use Bitcoin?

No arguement pointing on others
And with light: we uses eco lamp not the old one making heat with 80% of the energy  ;)

You are saying that Germany is cutting down forests to erect windmills. It hard to believe because windmills usually are much taller than trees and even if it is , problem is in the government not in tech itself. In our country windmills are built in the right regions which are clear landscapes. Germany has a coastline and sea, they can easily do it properly if they want to.

Damns do change the landscape but thats not the point, they are not causing pollution, it is not the same thing.

Use google translator to proof:
https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/stopp-der-zerstoerung-des-reinhardswaldes-in-hessen-durch-windkraftplaene-von-gruenen-und-cdu

The green politicians want that 2% are made by wind energeny, so also in forrest.

And northern germany is full of windmills you can come here and see. So much that people demonstrate against more windmill

But you also need big power lines from north to south which pollute the enviroment either.

When you build i the sea, fish are directed wrong:
https://www.nabu.de/natur-und-landschaft/meere/offshore-windparks/index.html (also in german)

Its not so easy with green power. Germany tries hard but there are big obstacles

Only if you ignore that the drop in hashrate was preceded by almost a year of bear market. That the hashrate would plateau and then drop until the market recovers is hardly a surprise.

I'm not saying that your theory doesn't have its merit, but it also doesn't quite hold when looking at the surrounding factors.



Power consumption of non-mining full node should be negligible as the computational requirement of full nodes does not exceed most consumer PCs [1] and there are currently only about 10,000 public nodes [2] on the network.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node#minimum-requirements
[2] https://bitnodes.earn.com/



Oh definitely. But which consensus algorithm would that be, that's the Gretchenfrage, isn't it? ;) So far attempts at answering this question have been less than impressive.



Definitely not easy, but necessary. I'm a bit surprised though about the deforestation issue, most windmills I saw in Germany are in open fields (ie. crop areas).

In general most of Europe appears to be doing well on the renewable energy front anyway, unlike some of the other major economic forces out there (I'm looking at you U S of A, you guys would have a lot of space for photovoltaics and wind power; just sayin').

Stop lying please. I is bitcoin weekly. You going to sit and type to me that what im looking at right now doesn't exist? So my new hard drive my new steam games and my new sound system equipment just popped out and landed in on my living room?

Sorry but I refuse to believe a country as advanced as Germany don't take bitcoins. Also you can replace the trees. Which tree you take down you plant two more. Here they use coal power and makes the sky turn black so please don't tell me a windmill pollutes.

You name me a liar?! Thats outrageous!!! How you can pay DIRECT with Bitcoin at any place without LN or company's credit the payment before use Bitcoin. You want to wait 20 min MINIMUM at Starbucks?

And I dont say coal is better. But the point is saving energy not produce green one. Every windmill you have to backup with other power. What you do if there is no wind? No Bitcoin Mining ???  ;D

Here german mass media from today:
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wissen/bitcoin-energie-strom-treibhausgase-emissionen-1.4484010

Use google translator, they claim again about the footprint. By the why same article in 3 big german newspapars.

In these days, doing same as always dont work.

Yes it is ideal to mine using solar power panel cells but the problem is that solar panel is expensive and may be having trouble when it comes to operation because it needs sunlight and sometimes a cool area to be proficient when it stores energy.

Yes, I do agree that mining using solar power/panel cells definitely will help to reduce CO2 as it will slowly eradicate the use of fuel to generate current and at the same time generates CO2.

Okay, it seems that the issue of cutting down tries to build wind turbines is a isolated issue and that is something that governing bodies have to deal with it. If the location is not suited for the windmills then build it at different spots and transfer the electricity to the needed areas.

Building windmills at different spots does not increase electric line building in such amount that it should be concern.


The question of " pollution" of electric lines is something else . The electric lines is needed in anyway you look at it, energy will never be generated locally, energy also is transferred beyond the borders of countries in order to meat the demand of daylight change.



Ok, they calculated the emissions. The calculation was done with certain assumption like that some amount of energy generates some amount of CO2. Now this amount depends on the energy generation type. Types can be coal, wind, solar and others.
To do an approximation of BItcoins impact, first we would need to know what type of energy is used to power btc farms. .
 

not ignoring anything. quite the opposite.
the BOTTOMLINE VALUE and hashrate cost of ALL2018 was at or below ~$5800
so while the speculative FOMO layer ontop yo-yo's above $5800 and went to $20k and back down again. this didnt affect the hashrates.
the only big noticable hashrate event of 2018 was in october when next gens replaced old gens.. which due to the rate of the swap then reacted in a change in profitability that allowed the price to go down in november

seems most have realised bitcoin is not as bad as people thought. so now discussions moved onto how certain power plants themselves are the nasty polluters

as for people saying that renewables are.
well thats just the construction.
yes the concrete of dams, use alot of concrete mixing trucks=diesel
yes solar uses alot of materials to make a solar panel
yes wind turbines uses alot of materials to make them

but after the initial investment/construction, the utility they produce compared to just burning coal on a daily bases. shows that initial construction vs ongoing burn still makes renewable better by many thousand folds

EG
dams vs coal
the concrete of dams is comparable to the hole left from digging coal... (truck fuel waste.. change of landscape)
but coal then also produces tonnes of CO2 from burning coal. which dams dont.
but coal runs out and a new quarry gets dug=more holes in landscape. yet a dam just continues producing using a single dam

Read what I say. There are many coins using hardly any Energy for their existance and are not as vulnerable as POW hardliners always try to say. Bitcoin HAS a bad CO2 footprint, and I only try to say that these "green energy ideas" are not as good as all people think.
My inital problem is not solved. Why the DEV of Bitcoin dont work on a stable , energey less consensus system, that solve many scaling problems in same fork ??

Many coins that are hardly used. It's nice to argue about scalability and security when no one uses a coin, in practice the reality usually looks quite different. So far the only "consensus" algorithms that seem to be both scalable and secure without relying on PoW are permissioned ones at which point we're back at square one.

That being said, which of the "many coins that use hardly any energy but are still secure" are you referring to precisely?

Most people talk of PivX and its fork. I know they have problems with chainsplit and chain stuck of attack. But as fair as I know there were never coins stolen of PivX.

And even my own coin as Nova coin fork is very small and code from years ago but runs stabile without any chainsplit or something like that within 1,5 years. And with a block time of a minute you can even do a payment

So there must be options, that is my idea, to opimize the existing coins code to generate a stable, fast, POS fork.

And Etherum always claimed as example, but ETH has also its contract useability so much more on chain then BTC.

What more can I say. There are also a large number of industries that consume a lot of energy which are being used abusively and in due course, they are wasting energy for nothing. For instance, if they will integrate blockchain technology within their operations, I am sure they will save a lot more energy, and manpower. Bitcoin energy consumption is not wasted after all, just like you said, it is necessary for the network to keep safe and secure and also keeping the chain alive. So yes, I don't think we are not wasting energy when it comes to bitcoin. There are other industries that should take a look in saving energy consumption.

Industries are using pollution permits from governments, which means they buy rights of a certain amount of pollution.

Once the hash rate is determined to pass the threshold of creating environmental damage, companies as Bitmain will be asked to pay for this.

There are laws in every country that demand reduction of pollution and protection of the environment.

So to conclude, everything has a limit. If Bitcoin hash power becomes a problem that causes environmental damage, there are means, like the pollution permits, that won't allow it to happen.

And since you turned it into a POW argument, be certain that this would never happen.

Yes, it should be treated like any other industry that is consuming energy.
So bitcoin mining should not be an isolated case, but rather another rising industry that is revolutionizing the digital technology.
And we are already reaping the benefits of blockchain technology at this stage.
And with that being said, the existing laws in terms of environmental concerns should also be applied to crypto mining and not to be addressed as special case.

Recently, the network has information that scientists from the University of Munich have revealed how mining affects the environment.  According to their data, the extraction of cryptocurrency emit only carbon dioxide, such as Sri Lanka.  It seems to me that these scientists have nothing to do and therefore I do not invent such nonsense.

I have again a very very cool article, but again in german ( I dont read english news  ;) )

For those guys who can understand the joke and how near we are to collaps with climate , they will change mind. I forget about it but it open my mind to do non comfort choices for the CO2 reduction:

https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/klimawandel-den-absturz-kann-man-nicht-wegdiskutieren-kolumne-a-1271315.html

Very actual ENGLISH article in a science magazine that descripes that the actual arctic melt is actual as expected for 2090 (!!!)  :o :o

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2019GL082187?referrer_access_token=gif7B3jxrlxKX5XghEFo1MOuACxIJX3yJRZRu4P4eruQZUBUWJDPFZF94DV9GaH13SVhl7o9BSrpCCjFd9XCvk87MqQN_rOa7zNjzSfT3EyEk-pBnnCivDMbXpI6xSuZY9VC6t1b9t1pxp8zOux4oQ%3D%3D&

Everyone must do something. And if NEW Bitcoin is only 80% safe its worth sparing 30000 kt CO2 a year  :-[

We are not heading in a global crisis people will die of. We are IN a global crises.  :'(

An ideal solution to make sure BTC has a viable future would be the emergence of 100% renewable energies which leave a minimal carbon footprint. Roll on

Please read complete thread about problems renewable energies.

And even that you could better use to maybe drive a car or use for producing company.

world wide refrigeration of bottles of Pepsi uses more electric than bitcoin..
the only benefit of Pepsi is that a few hours after consuming it you can make your toilet water yellow

Should we not be thinking of reducing the CO2 elsewhere? How about the way the parts for miners and pc's are made? How is the metal smelted? How is the gold for the terminals and conductors mined? What about the trucks, planes, and buses that transport all these parts? I am pretty sure the CO2 gases produced from making the raw materials far outweigh the CO2 caused directly from mining?

I wouldn't be so sure about miner production carbon footprint far outweighing the carbon footprint of mining itself, but it might be a quite signficant portion of it.

For perspective here's a study from 2011 according to which "as much as 70 percent of the energy needed to make and operate a typical laptop computer throughout its life span is used in manufacturing the computer" [1]. With mining hardware having a much shorter lifespan than your average consumer laptop that impact is definitely not to be underestimated, even assuming efficiency improvements in hardware production since 2011.

[1] https://phys.org/news/2011-04-factory-energy.html

Has research been done on the number of people mining with green energy? Why do you think clean energy is bad for mining?I think we should be talking about the reduction in dirty energy usage and not try to eliminate energy usage completely.
Proof of  stake is not an option. It encourages elitism which is
against satoshi vision.

We probably should be looking at making mining more decentralized, energy efficient, very affordable, profitable for small miners and remain PoW (or PoW+PoS)

IMO the b.s. needs to be debunked once and for all. How much power does the USD consume? I need to order a roll of nickles, a roll of dimes and a roll of quarters. How much does that cost to mint, circulate and actually get into my hand? With such an outdated concept of moving metal around a country, it's obvious without looking into it that fiat takes a hell of alot more energy than anyone realizes. Does anyone care though? Of course not! Because it serves a very important purpose. Bitcoin has an even greater purpose and will be using power to do so.

Also, these estimates are all over the place because it's impossible to calculate. Even if you assume everyone has the same ASIC, how can you tell where they all are and what type of power they're using? What percentage is solar, hydro, wind? You'll never hear that. It's all burning coal to make electricity to mine bitcoins. It's a mirage to sway the general public into thinking that bitcoins are for criminals, it's bad for the environment or whatever other FUD.

Does anyone remember when the internet was going to use the entire world's power? I think we turned out okay, and the internet is pretty useful IMO.

Well, there are many reason that one can reduce the CO2 production but we cannot say that it is only bitcoin that could be the reason for this. Whether there is bitcoin or not the sole reason to reduce CO2 production is to save mother earth and this is to produce electricity that could be use in household that limits and minimize the CO2 production. As OP stated those are the example of lesser CO2 production electricity generator in the likes of solar power panel, geothermal, windmills, and water pressure like in those rivers with high current.

Read the thread complete I answer already.

Again pointing on others is like kindergarden   ;)

Edit: I am not interested in Sathoshi Vision. "Team Sathoshi" (I think it was a team) is dead for 10 years now.

Just a thought, for anyone who like me doubts that a secure, permissionless alternative to PoW will be found:

What if one were to create a PoW based alt coin that automatically pays part of the block reward to an environmental organization offsetting PoW-caused CO2 emissions?

The problem is of course finding consensus on which organization to support, but IMO that's probably easier to solve than the double-spend problem as the incentives are less mis-aligned. At worst you would have a developer-based "dictatorship" where devs would decide on which organization to support, but that still wouldn't be much different from alts where a predetermined, transparent percentage of newly issued currency goes into a dev fund, only it would be a CO2 fund instead.

As for which environmental organization to support, there's already a couple of well-vetted non-profit organizations that help people off-set their air-traffic-caused CO2 emissions on a voluntary basis such as atmosfair: https://www.atmosfair.de/en/

In theory one could also try to get this into a Bitcoin hard fork but let's not kid ourselves.

What would be everyone's thought on this?

Thats a really good idea. But not Altcoin new creation. there are many social project not supported. Simply 1 BTC of the Block reward goes to CO2 fund like DEV reward.

Some other idea to change POW algo to something useful like SETI or the idea of Medicoin. Buit this not really work

1. people already pay more for aeroplane tickets due to increased 'taxes' due to climate taxes
2. donating funds to atmosfair.?!? did you even see what they bought with it. they made a motel/youth hostal.
seriously. if they wanna help the co2 'offset' thy should be planting rainforests or solar farms. not doubling their money making motels

Yeah, but good luck with getting the devs, let alone the miners on board with that :)

Also that's the faintest of an idea with not much thought put behind it, so there's probably other reasons why such an approach might be problematic. Still, maybe this idea gets ahold of the right people and gets turned into something useful down the road.



Yep. Using PoW for "useful" calculations appears to be a fruitless approach at trying to eat your cake and have it too.


---


franky1's post is unfortunately completely beside the point but I'm still curious about a few things:


Kerosone is tax exempt on an international level:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_fuel

Living in an European country I never paid any taxes besides various unrelated airport fees and VAT (YMMV, maybe some European countries have an environment tax, but I'm not aware of any in my country of Austria). Going by train within Europe is often 3-5 times more expensive than going by airplane (which is pretty fucked up if you think about it).

The US seems to pull in all sorts of taxes, but non related to the environment:
https://www.travelzoo.com/blog/information-air-fees-taxes/

So which taxes are you referring to and in which country? Serious question, I couldn't find anything.



Did you even look at which projects they are supporting?

https://www.atmosfair.de/en/climate-protection-projects/

Which hostel are you talking about? O.o

Atmosfair is just an example, but one that has been very well vetted by both governmental bodies (BMU) and trusted, well known NGOs (Stiftung Warentest), supporting only projects that follow stringent standards (CDM-Gold-Standard):
https://www.bmu.de/themen/wirtschaft-produkte-ressourcen-tourismus/tourismus-sport/nachhaltiger-tourismus/tipps-zum-nachhaltigen-reisen/
https://www.test.de/CO2-Kompensation-Diese-Anbieter-tun-am-meisten-fuer-den-Klimaschutz-5282502-0/
https://www.goldstandard.org/

I've only recently heard from them but from what I've found about them so far that's about as vetted and transparent as you get.


That being said, to repeat:
1) atmosfair is just an example
2) even if there are countries that charge an environment tax on aviation that's a wholly separate issue from trying to reduce PoW's CO2 impact.

I couldn't agree more. Any news pointing out fabricated CO2 emissions (of an extremely useful network) is distracting newbs front the fact that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. If they don't believe it yet, that's not really my problem.

aeroplanes are not taxed on the gallons of kerosene.
passengers dont pay an extra separate fee

the ticket prices increase to cover extra costs incurred by the aviation industry
and one example of the 'tax'  is the corsia agreement

in the uk without things actually being a 'tax'(vat) we define them as a tax if the price has increased due to government policy.
EG sugary drinks have increased in price. not due to VAT.. but due to a 'sugar tax'
plastic shopping carrier bags are now 5p/10p.. w call that a tax
so excuse me if you took the word 'tax' too literal, thinking it meant vat. but any price increase due to government policy directly or indirectly we consider a 'tax'

..
as for atmosfair wasting money making a hotel/motel/lodge thing rather than reducing co2 via tree planting or other environmental methods of co2 absorbtion
https://www.atmosfair.de/en/die-letzte-und-klimafreundlichste-lodge-des-climate-treks-in-nepal-oeffnet-ihre-pforten/

as for bitcoins co2 reduction.
compare today to 2012's GPU era. imagine if ASICS nevr got invented and we were at 50exa via GPU's
the crypto industry IS ALREADY dealing with the co2 issue.
first moving from CPU to GPU in 2010. then moving from GPU to asic in 2013..
the thing is that debates like climate change/co2 and even war on drugs is they are designed to be a never ending battleground used as an excuse to already/eventually introduce government controls.
take war on drugs. first cannabis, that got legalised, then cocaine, that then become less life threatening due to 'narcan' so now we are hearing everywhere about fentanyl... its just a debate that has no end as even if efforts are being made. goalposts are moved to just continue the battle

in short. even if we moved out bitcoins intrinsic valu of PoW costs and made bitcoins value pure speculation with zero underlying cost of production (imagine scenario of gold being mined for zero cost). then bitcoins value would decline. but not only that the co2 battle would just move onto counting the distributed ledger costs per full node, thus no end to the debate

Interesting, I wasn't aware of the Corsia Agreement, thank you.



I'm not taking the word "tax" too literal, it's just that the Corsia Agreement apparently isn't having people "pay more for aeroplane tickets" yet as it's been only obligatory since the beginning of this year with the obligations being:


It's a start, but mere reporting is not exactly the "taxation" that you claim it to be. I fly on a fairly regular basis and have yet to feel the impact of the Corsia Agreement on my wallet. In fact I see cheaper and cheaper flight routes popping up all over to place. It may just by weird anecdotal happenstance but I call bullshit on your claim of people paying even remotely enough on plane tickets to offset its environmental impact.




So you found one project of literally dozens that you personally think is a waste of money. Good on you.



Which is a complete bullshit statement and having been around long enough you should know better.

The only thing that moving from GPUs to ASICs did was that mining from 600W worth of GPUs changed to mining with 600W worth of ASICs.



On that I agree with you. Which is why I would neither move away from PoW, nor try to use PoW's work for "useful calculations" but rather introduce a CO2 fund that works similar to the developer funds of other alts.

Its really like this 600 Watt GPU or 600 W ASIC....

One actual things we have to think about:

1) Many european country will involve somethink like CO2 tax for a good reason. These people producing the most C02 with driving big SUV will pay more.
Of course this will rise price of electricity and people more and more understand about the idea of POW not the best point.

2) Maybe i mention earlier , Eurpean Union had a "green" election . Maybe they simply forbid using POW Cryptocurrency

3) I read one article in a normally very conservative and legit newspaper:
   They say whe have to stop our behavior immidiatly, otherwiese there will be a point of no return in less then 2 years. So Bitcoin gets instable because of other technologie. Lets say yes and now we get to really importantent problems.

Until you find a way in which mining will require few resources and at the same time the network will remain reliable like Bitcoin, then you should not expect that at least someone will be able to move the BTC from the position of leader. I want ideal conditions, but so far no such methods have been invented.

Anyone who still denies climate change after these massive bush burnings in australia is nothing more then stupid.

1) Its farwide consens of all scientist that this is mam made.

2) There is an actual work that the climate change even appear on local wether meanwhile


And we still mine POW Cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin has currently a energeny consumption of 638 kwh per Transaction and a min of 51,92 TWh in total.
 
As I said simply stupidiy. As I said you can not eat money.

Fiat money is more expensive to create, because it's physical. How much energy is used to create and then move around one roll of nickels? The answer, is about as impossible to figure out as your 51.92 TWh figure. It's all guesses. What if part of that hash rate is some new ASIC that no one's ever heard of (happens a lot)?

Anyway, you create it and move it around. That's a huge problem with fiat, and you haven't even started! After the fiat is created and distributed (to the top 0.01% through quantitative easing) fiat money is then paid to the government (through taxes). The government then uses that fiat money to fund their wars. Wars use a massive amount of energy and also kill many many people on both sides. What happens when governments no longer print the money? They can't afford forever wars anymore.

Why not fixate on something that you can actually change, like governments wasting tons of energy on war, or creating a worthless currency? Why not fight against government subsidies on building highways? Your tax dollars paid for roads, so gas guzzling cars can buzz around and destroy our planet. Every statist you've ever met is the biggest problem with climate change.

Bitcoin, the new monetary system, changes all of that.

In the starting threat I mentioned that pointing on others is like kinderkarden.
Apart from that how many TX can be made with this piece of paper or even a metall penny. Lets say 1000 TX via paper and 10000 TX via metal money. And who says you need cash any more?

And of course its a guess. But when you look at the website I mentioned they explain exactly where the ideas come from. And thats a good estimated guess. Its even too good for Bitcoin to see all hashrate made by Antminer S17e, the newest one.

Most locales offer approaches to buy power from elective vitality providers. On the other hand, you can purchase sustainable power source endorsements or their counterparts, which are tradable testaments compensating makers of sustainable power source.

Some expectation that the utilization of inexhaustible force on the bitcoin system will increase. The bitcoin mining framework is appropriate to renewables.

Good points. Bitcoin is still not a payment system when talking about global international payment standards, but could only be considered a way of transferring funds without limitations by banks.

Lightning Network is still anticipated, and while it solves scalability issues, it goes back to one root problem (or not), which is introduction of centralization in the network.

POS could be one solution, but needs a fork and the effects are still not guaranteed.

100% agree. Reads OP  ::) SMH.

Don't like it? Do something about it. Good luck with that.

This is always an very interesting topic

Fundamentally you need to put some valuable resource in exchange for the bitcoin, that's the best thing with cryptocurrency. It is produced at certain cost, not borrowed from GOD, like fiat money

However, there are 2 major problems with mining:

1. mining is not a very effective way to convert energy into bitcoin: Most of the energy is wasted as heat. If ASICs were made of superconductive material and never generate any heat, then there is no inefficiency of the current mining model: The competetion will always push the chip+energy cost to market value of coin, the waste is minimum, and the world climate will not be impacted

2. A forever increasing coin price will lead to a forever increasing energy consumption, which eventually exhaust all the energy supply on the planet and cause the government to ban the mining like IRAN just did. This will put a upper limit for how high a coin's value can be

So, although spend energy to exchange newly created money sounds very fair, but burning energy to exchange coin is not an optimal way.

I think eventually everything that has value should contain some kind of energy, since human are just energy thirsty animals: We use energy to fulfill all our demands: Food, cloth, house, travel, entertainment, etc... Energy is a fundamental part of anything that has value


PoS coin use another logic: Since energy always can be bought by fiat money, why not just use fiat money to exchange cryptocurrency, so that all the inefficiencies and capacity limitations in mining can be avoided.

So the core question for PoS coin is: Does fiat money also contains energy, just like electricity?

Maybe producing fiat money does not take a lot of energy, but to ensure its value takes police, armies and governments, banks etc complicated sovereign organizations. You can easily write a IOU bill, but the acceptance of that bill would need you to back it with valuable assets and contract etc..., lots of energy, especially when that bill is very large. Fiat money has wide acceptance, that ensures it can exchange any kind of energy

Then people don't need to spend huge amount of electricity just to win the game of poping coins, the same electricity can be used to do useful things, like cutting trees or pave roads, and these kind of jobs can receive fiat money as reward, then people use fiat money to buy cryptocurrencies and stake them

Given same amount of energy, PoS coin has much higher efficiency due to that it does not need direct energy input in exchange for the coins. It still takes energy to make money, but those energy will be used on other more meaningful things

Given same amount of fiat money, PoS coin has higher utilization, since PoW coin miners must convert those fiat money to energy first and lose a large part of it as heat in the mining process


Edit: BTW, I discovered in this thought process, that spending money also has different type of efficiency: The best efficiency comes from that your investment ROIed and generated some extra income, and the worst efficiency is that you just buy some fireworks and burn it

1. As explained elsewhere, the energy used in mining must be wasted because of the economic incentives. There is no way around it without changing how mining works.

2. Energy consumption of mining depends on the price only because of the subsidy. The subsidy is halved every 4 years so energy consumption becomes less dependent on price and more dependent on transaction fees over time.

The most direct and effective way to reduce the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining is to raise the cost of the energy.

1. True, for PoW coin, energy is consumed in the mining process. But for PoS coin, energy is not consumed but stayed inside each staking nodes. Why waste it when you can preserve it?

Mining is just a way for fair competetion. Wether the energy input must be in form of electricity and consumed is to be debated. For example, if satoshi designed the bitcoin to have a chemical miner and require people to input petroleum to do the calculation, then it will create another type of synergy around oil industry. And maybe in future, when quantum miner is invented but require a special kind of atom to do the calculation, then this special material will become the core of mining success

So it depends on how you design this fair competetion model. I believe that fiat money is more decentralized than electricity, so using fiat money as energy input will make it more available for everyone



2. It is true that in future, fee income will replace block reward, however, is must be high enough to protect the network. For example, you have only a few million dollars income per block but the network carries transactions of billions of dollars per block, there is a high incentive to compromise the network to invalid some billion dollar transactions, since the cost will be 1/1000 of that. The BCH/BSV fork war just demonstrated that there can be backup hash power moved into a coin just to totally change how the network runs

PoS coin does not have this problem since the security from each staking node are equally higher when coin value is higher.

PoS(from what I know) isn't really a good solution either. Too much power is given to people with large stake. I think this is technically centralization, because you centralize important decisions making with no checks and balances, and no quick remedies to potential violations.. Another potential problem with the staking model is that it will encourage wealthy people within a decentralized networks to have to much influence on things. This can be used by bad actors against the network... So, there should be ways to check any potential abuse from this. I believe reliance on principles will be one of the most important ways to help checkmate them.  Besides, if you are depending on principles, you probably will not allow that kind of Power concentration from staking model.

In regards to number 3, some kind of Proof of Work that is environmentally friendly can reduce/prevent the problem. Should probably be the most efficient pow available that does very important work. Decentralized networks need to avoid things that are energy(even good energy) demanding when there are better alternatives that do very useful jobs efficiently without sacrificing any Bitcoin/decentralization principles.  If a decentralized community focuses mostly on doing useful and good things, our energy usage will be justified, as long as it is good energy.

Before, we discussed about how to decentralize mining using ASIC-resistant algorithm, so that only corridor miners with free electricity and GPU can survice in the long run, and that will hopefully reach a high level of decentralization. But it proved to be unsuccessful, since there will just be large pools collecting and buying those miners hash rate, and those large pools will reach monopol sooner or later. So the centralization of power is always a self-strengthening trend, regardless of what mining mechanism you select. The only way to deal with that is coin competetion, e.g. at least you have 2-3 coins of the same type, so that one of them will not go rogue

But my point is, given same amount of electricity, instead of just burn it to get some coin, if you could first use those electricity to do other useful things, and then use earned money to stake and get same amount of coin, that is much higher efficiency from a pure energy utilization point of view