Bitcoin Forum

The full report for free >  https://www.forrestvisions.com/blog/bitcoin-and-ethereums-energy-consumption

With this high barrier to enter the market, it puts a lot of centralization on these mining pools. Most people will simply buy bitcoin and sell when it increases to make passive money, instead of running a miner.


What are your thoughts on the energy consumption ecosystem right now?

Someone who's not capable on investing on miners and his location isn't ideal for mining, this is the best option. But do you think miners will continue mining if there's no benefit from them?
If I have the capacity and the best location, I will not have a second thought of investing into it. I guess these mining farms does have a source for alternative energy.

energy consumption should not be looked at alone, instead it should be looked at alongside the utility that is provided after the consumption. for instance you can't say my car is consuming a lot of energy because it is burning fossil fuel and emits pollution, you have to look at its utility which is to take me to long distances.

for bitcoin, when it is a global decentralized currency handling millions of dollars worth of money transfers all around the world per day, you can see how the energy consumption makes a lot of sense. and not just that, it would see very little compared  to what it provides.
similarly for altcoins that have no use cases but to be traded (pumped and dumped on exchanges) any power consumption is excessive because they provide no useful utilities.

What stops governments from printing billions or trillions of dollars of fiat currencies to control or attack the network in proofs of stake model? To be honest with you it is pretty easy to attack a proof of stake network if you have access to fiat printing machines..
I would not use either of them. There are better and more efficient mechanism that can be used

Bitcoin is on a bullish trend,so the FUDsters some again with the same old "bitcoin consumes too much energy and pollutes the environment" type of BS.OP,please don't put "centralization" and "mining pools" into one sentence.If the big miners stop mining,the mining difficulty will drop and mining will become profitable again for the middle sized miners.The Bitcoin/blockchain mining process is flexible.Buying bitcoins is the way to do,if you live a region with expensive electricity.

After ETH 2.0 it energy consumption will be much lower

The energy consumption of bitcoin and ethereum has always been a problem together with other Proof-of-Work projects. I think this is the more reason why many Ethereum has decided to update its consensus protocol to start operating with the use of Proof of Stake. I think this would now make Ethereum more decentralized for anybody who wants to be a validator on its blockchain network.

There's actually a study on that which claims that 74% of the energy used is from clean and renewable sources (you're going to need to enter your email, but a throwaway should suffice):

https://coinsharesgroup.com/research/bitcoin-mining-network-june-2019

Either way, renewable energy is increasingly getting cheaper (https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2019/05/29/renewable-energy-costs-tumble/#12b318cde8ce) and it's only a matter of time until it's the only viable option. With miners being motivated by profits, they're actually incentivized to make their operations greener.

People seriously misunderstand energy consumption of Proof of Work, it's not like an engine that does X amount of work while burning Y amount of energy, spending energy is the goal itself, and the more you spend, the more secure a cryptocurrency is. And since the hashpower follows the price, the more valuable coin will also be more secure. So it's not correct to compare energy consumption between different coins without realizing that they have different amounts of security.

Yeah because it will become now a proof of stake but we still can't say that it will be like that the way it is.
Yeah. We can't tell what will be the exact result of it and it's being delayed and we've been waiting for the updates.

Bitcoins and Etherum's energy consumption is inevitable but what they can do is
Turn to renewable sources of energy so that they go hand in hand with the environment too

Also at the same time when all of the 21 million bitcoins will be mines there will be a time when mining won't even exist .
If people somehow find a way to channel this energy consumption into something else and something profitable it will in turn also allow the governments to give it a second thought , because in many countries mining is banned.

My take on this matter is very simple and I'm sure that everyone with a vision will agree with me. Energy is not a non-regenerable resource. Fortunately it is abundant in our world and we should leverage it as much as possible. While I don't agree with producing energy from fossil fuels, we have all the green energy production systems which are more fiable than fossil fuels in many areas. And I do think in 5-10 years the majority of energy produced will be green energy so I wouldn't worry too much about how much energy is the Bitcoin network consuming, although it is a good thing that people are coming with solutions like LN.

Turning to renewable energy is a good viable option. Renewable energy doe not harm the enviornment and setting it up is also cheap. In my country there is a lot of emphasis to solar energy. The government is also providing subsidy to setup solar panels. But, I have not seen any big mining farms coming up in my country.

I think it also depends on the Government. In my country mining is not banned but there is no support from the government as they themselves are not clear what they want to do with cryptocurrency.

Solar farms require a hefty investment and a big surface area. The source of energy would be cheaper, yeah, but it might still end up costing more because of the infrastructure costs. It's very viable for small miners, but a bit more complicated for full-blown mining farms especially when there are more cost-efficient options like hydro-electric plants.

We can hope so :)


Proof of Work isn't bad by any means, but it is limiting some of the expansion of crypto. It is a great way to validate the ecosystem, but with that much energy being used, we need a better way.

Although energy is not a non-regenerable resource, but in mining most of the electricity is wasted as heat, not calculation, and those heat has  basically no use if not used in heating of the house in north. And since entrophy always go up in the universe, means a reducing of the total energy level, it is better to generate as little heat as possible, for the benefit of the planet

Suppose that you have 1000 dollar, you could just put those dollars to buy POS coin and into Staking, start to earn staking income, same as mining, and it might take 10 years to ROI. However, in a POW coin, you have to use those dollars to buy lots of mining rigs and electricity, wasted all of them to get some mining income, but your ROI time will be faster, most likely in 1-2 years

Suppose that you have 1MW electricity, you could just put those electricity into mining farms and mine bitcoins, ROI in about a year. And in case of POS coin, you could put those electricity to usage, like selling them to power a small village, and receive money to buy POS coins and stake them, ROI in about 10 years. But in this case, your electricity has helped some other people to do something, not totally wasted

By this comparison, POS coin does not burn energy, and its ROI is much slower, POW coins burn energy and ROI much faster

I am sure when Satoshi created BTCitcoin he identified that mining to be competitive if you want to be a miner in the long run and that will bring a situation where we see centralization in the sector where only the rich can make dividends mining.

In the future the huge mining farms will be turning to natural resources to generate electricity which will shut down the energy conservatives  :P.If these conservatives are really concerned about the pollution aspect they must first go after Mining and Ore Processing companies rather than aiming a decentralized market .

It is not that I am even a huge conservative. It isn't sustainable to have this model.

Another view to look at this: You can use Joule to measure the value of anything objectively, anything's value depends on if it provides energy or reduce the energy consumption, since that's all the living things required

So electricity's value(energy) will be fully consumed, mining income is like labor income; but staking coin's value(energy) will not be consumed, the income thus more like a interest/dividend income, small and slow

The problem is not how much electricity BTC/ETH mining consumes now. The root of "energy problem" is that we still don't use renewable energy only. There is no lack of electricity. All we need is to explore more eco-friendly energy sources with no negative impact to the environment.

Look at people competing for limited gold in gold mining industry: At beginning you can just pick a bucket and mine some gold in river, then you need to input significantly more energy, and then only industry mining rigs which consume mega watts of electricity can mine some meaningful gold.

Is that a waste?

In gold mining, you HAVE TO input lots of energy because it is really difficult to get gold, no matter how high or low the value of gold is. But in bitcoin's case, that difficulty is automatically adjusted based on competition, when the value of bitcoin is low, the competition is less, and so does the required energy input. In this sense, its energy consumption is adaptive, better than gold

Mining coin is more like bidding: Everyone input their energy(or money in a broader sense) and bidding for the coin. But since mining caused lots of wasted energy in form of heat, that is not environment friendly. If you could use money instead of energy to bid for the coin, then at least that kind of heat waste will not happen

The negative impact is the mass amount of heat generated in mining

Uuhmm man are you expecting everybody to be mining Bitcoin? There should be those that are buying Bitcoin, because without the buyers there wouldn’t be those that the miners are going to sell their Bitcoins to; after mining Bitcoin, miners always look for buyers to buy from them.

Everybody can’t be a miner. Where I live electricity is costly and I can’t be a miner because I know how much it’s going cost which is a lot of money and I can’t afford that much. Those that I know that are into it have said it’s not profitable for them and some of them have dropped mining to join cloud mining.

Yes that is exactly as planned. Bitcoin mining is nearing an end, most bitcoins have already been minted and the reminder will take longer and longer to come, with the reward being so small that those large whale miners will simply go away.

Don't worry about those pools, something tells me those whale miners are mostly Chinese and when when the kw/h at 1¢ becomes unbearable they will close shop. Of course asic production (and improvement) will also dwindle. So a fun side effect of those large whale miners closing, is that since they use the Chinese pools, these very pool will lose hashrate significantly restoring a situation that was more common in the beginning, when only enthusiasts mined. Because after a while, it won't be profitable to mine at any price anymore. So naturally, the few remaining are the enthusiasts that don't care to "lose money" doing so.

The situation is solving itself by pure market forces thanks to the clever Bitcoin design, no need to worry.

You currently have 18/21 million bitcoins in the market, with just 3 million remaining for the next 120 years. Of course most people will just buy them, when mining makes no sense anymore, which should be soon one or two halvings if the price doesn't somehow spike beyond its historical logarithmic curve (which i highly doubt).