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what about the Absorption Refrigerator someone mentioned? Why are the electric ones mainly used in hotel rooms only so far? Can't be that they're less efficient then. Thermodynamics are not my strongest field, but I just did some reading for the fun of it (the german article has more detail: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorptionsk%C3%A4ltemaschine) Probably one should use a lithium bromide / water system which needs >70°C input and produces 5°C output at a COP of 0.7 The 70°C might be just about acceptable for silicon devices. And the 5°C are perfect for air conditioning. But this doesn't change anything in my criticism of bitcoins PoW concept. I just don't see why such energy consumption should be necessary just to make a currency stable. PPCoin has yet to mature and proof its stability - but it already shows a possible way out. |
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Ok, inform us please if you'll come
to something practically useful.
Actually, Proof-of-burn could be a way out of bitcoin's waste of real-world resources ( https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn) At first sight, it seems to me that this approach would even be compatible with bitcoin. Maybe even without a hard-fork. However, I'm no expert of bitcoin protocol. Basically this would replace spending fiat currency on hardware and energy by spending the cryptocurrency itself in such a way that the same randomness of possible reward results. |
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I'm afraid such a currency will soon find itself to be under total control of MtGox and (later) Goldman Sachs. You got a good point there. Food for thought, thanks. PPC probably only works if people do not let banks or ewallet providers take care of their coins. But: Isn't this risk comparable to pooled mining in bitcoin? What about a BTC guild 51% attack? |
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Ok, inform us please if you'll come
to something practically useful.
I'm very tempted by the Proof-of-Stake concept: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_StakeIt certainly addresses the issue of energy consumption. I'll need to do more reading to understand the possible drawbacks. The checkpointing is a violation of decentralization, but might be acceptable. What makes me sceptical is the fact that mining can only take place with an unlocked wallet. I can already hear people whining for lost coins.... Good reads: http://ppcoin.org/static/ppcoin-paper.pdfhttp://www.links.org/files/decentralised-currencies.pdfJust got myself a couple of PPcoins ;-) It's funny that the developers didn't even find the time to consequently search/replace the word bitcoin by ppcoin in their software....so I guess they're at a very early stage.... |
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imo energy costs will translate into transaction fees which will get bigger to include a small 0.1-1% fee extra for all the juice we waste...
What will cause even more juice to be wasted. Transaction fees shift the economic equilibrium towards higher energy consumption. but the easiest version would be: you think fiat comes cheap ? magnetic ink, special paper, ultra high tech industrial printers, shitload of employees ...a triple shitload of security for printing, designing, moving, destroying old ....etc etc MONEY IS A LOT MORE EXPENSIVE that we think sometimes..... in most countries COINS nowadays have basically a bigger metal value than face value for example .... (doesnt mean you get rich if you start melting copper penies ...but while 1penny is 1 penny ...the copper it weights is at least 1.05 penny in value....and the work, machinery, employees would make that penny cost maybe 1.15 to create...so ..wow bitcion is a lot cheaper  plus it costs only the miner to create it ...in el ....el spent in transaction is almost 0 ...(or same as when paying online with fiat) .... while fiat costs are covered by the FED (or equivalent local bitchgroup) which is DEFINITELY financed from public monies paid by all tax registered hard working sons of bitches  like all of us .... You're talking about M0 money supply. Bills and coins. They make up for about 10% of the M2 money suppy. ( http://money.howstuffworks.com/how-much-money-is-in-the-world.htm) including all money located on bank accounts and funds. Money on bank accounts and funds is most probably less "costly" if you only count storage and transaction energy and infrastructure. If you want to convince me, you need to do a little more research. |
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but if you look at it from the perspective that energy costs can also drive people to move toward their own energy generation (Solar, Wind, Tidal, etc), in order to be competitive in that market, the total energy consumption isn't as relavent as the source of that energy being consumed.
If you think of the trilions of gigawatts of energy that are wasted by not harnessing the Sun's power... There's not a big issue with consuming a lot of energy.
In the far future you might even be right. There are clever people around that think energy will be 100% renewable and almost for free in the future. But I think we should consider the status quo and not rely on utopia when judging weaknesses of today's bitcoin technology. Bitcoin value might rise a lot faster than renewable energy will progress. In the case of Photovoltaics one should bear in mind that today PV cells are produced in china using non-renewable energy. So their embodied energy is not renewable at all. As long as renewable energy is more expensive than fossil and nuclear energy, I consider excessive energy use as being bad because real costs are externalized. |
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It's TOTALLY relevant. If you consider what a "computer" cost 40 years ago, how HUGE and power hungry it was, and how pathetically not "powerful" it was, you could have predicted some insane power consumption trends, based on current technology.
Now consider that your cell phone is 100,000 times smaller, 1,000,000 times cheaper, and 1000 times more powerful than a university-grade computer from 1965.
That's a BILLION (with a B) fold increase processing power, cost efficiency, and reduction in size in the past 47 years... Think about it.
You didn't get the point. Your billion or whatever increase in computing efficiency will just increase mining difficulty. It will not reduce energy consumption of the bitcoin network. Variable costs of mining are dominated by electricity price. Mining gear will be run as long as those costs are not higher than the expected mining reward plus transaction fees. (Amortisation has no influence on this - it's the miner's risk) So what follows from the above is that more efficient mining gear will of course produce more GH/s per Watt. So it will be more GH/s per $ on your electricity bill. This means that it is profitable for more people to run even more mining gear. And what's profitable will be done on a free market. If such a thing as free market really exists, Bitcoin is it. Efficiency goes up Difficulty goes up Energy consumption stays exactly the same. The Energy consumption of the Bitcoin network can be approximated by the following formula: GlobalEnergyConsumptionForMining = (MiningReward + TransactionFees) * bitcoinValueInUSD / EnergyCostInUSDperkWh The efficiency falls out of the equation because of how a free market works |
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Bitcoin.de has I understand connect directly seller and buyer so every transaction need a bank transfer, that is not ideal, even if the idea is quite good for buying and selling
I think this kind of person-to-person transfer is optimal for switzerland because people can use SEPA. You need bitcoin.de only for BTC escrow what to me is an advantage. mtgox sucks because you may fund your account with SEPA, but for withdrawal their bank does not support SEPA for switzerland so you have high fees for international wire transfer. |
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It's kind of hard to prosecute wars when they can't be financed. "It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking."
Good point. We might have to change the thread for this discussion. Still: Why do you think bitcoin can change this? The US still dictates in what currency US citizens have to pay their taxes. And even more: The USA are very good at evilizing what "they" don't like. Expect Bitcoiners to be treated like enemies of the state once Bitcoin really starts to weaken the States |
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>>>energy-efficient successor.
2brenzi
And what do you propose ?
PoW - is evil ?! Fine...
What will be your proof-type of choice ?
I don't know. I'm still updating on alternate concepts, haven't crossed and understood a better solution yet |
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So, when you say "7% of electricity" as though that's supposed to be a big number, who cares? It isn't. The worst case is that it's slightly less efficient than the current economic system without, you know, subsidizing murderous psychopaths. The best case is that it ushers in a new golden age of renewable energy and slightly subsidizes those living in colder areas.
You seem to assume that thanks to almighty bitcoin the world will be a better one and that there will be less wars. I do not share your belief. Bitcoin has a serious design flaw being its potentially enormous energy consumption.I think bitcoin is an absolutely brilliant idea whose time has come. But I sure hope it will not be bitcoin that breaks through but a more energy-efficient successor. Disclaimer: I hold Bitcoins. (But probably not for much longer). |
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I'm open to your suggestions. But please be more specific. It's really hard to estimate and I know I'm on thin ice here, but if I read other people on this forum just wildly guessing what fits their beliefs (or what they've read from other people doing exactly that) I want to counter with at least trying to get the right order of magnitude in a more scientific way. You can't just go by the electricity directly used by the financial system. First of all, you have to include other forms of energy than just electricity.
Other forms of energy: These account mostly for heating of buildings and transport (for the switzerland case this is 1 PJ for Oil and 1.7PJ for Gas, the others don't matter. Same source as above). Now think about where the employees go that are no longer needed by banks because of bitcoin (those are not so many because new fields of banking might arise thanks to bitcoin). Those employees will work in some other office that need to be heated as well. But, more importantly, you have to include all of the energy used by all of the subsidiary industries and by those who work in the financial system.
Are you sure they will disappear because of bitcoin breaking through? Which ones exactly? I could think of telecommunication industries, but bitcoin needs the internet and will cause a lot of traffic in my scenario. The financial industry is a huge portion of the economies of developed countries. It's over 8% of US GDP. You can't compare the electricity used by Bitcoin to that.
Why? GDP is a bad measure for what we are looking for. We should compare apples to apples. And please quote your sources. |
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Could you please give some info on your thesis? What's the topic and where can we follow your findings?
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bitcoin's value is directly linked to energy consumption.
this has been discussed pretty extensively here by now and is regarded as a 'public secret' to 'bitcoin believers' because it has not yet been solved. It is more desirable to bitcoiners to not have this be well known as it is a huge design error.
Very true. Thanks for pointing this out. How much energy use banks for their luxurious buildings ?
How much energy is used to build a skyscraper where resides a bank ?
How much energy is used to print fiat money ?
Only if you know this values also can you say which one is more energy efficient.
Here's my estimation: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=181759.msg1913572#msg1913572Bitcoin has the potential to use a lot more energy than the whole banking sector of the world. Energy consumption for mining has a high correlation with bitcoin exchange rate to fiat currency. Because variable costs of mining are dominated by electricity price, the economic equilibrium for the mining rate is reached when global electricity costs for mining approximate the value of mining reward plus transaction fees. This fundamental rule is unfortunately not yet widely understood. And there's more conclusions directly following: - more efficient mining gear does not reduce energy use of the bitcoin network. It will only raise the network difficulty
- cheaper energy linearly increases mining energy use of the bitcoin network
- the same conclusions apply to all proof-of-work based currencies (i.e. Litecoin).
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You also need to substract the amount of energy, fuel and other ressources that are used for our current currncy system,
OK, let's try to estimate this: I'll take switzerland as an example, just because I know where to get the figures. As you sure know, in switzerland the financial sector is a big part of economy and switzerland is highly developed in global comparison. So it's not really representative. But lets try anyway: The Credit and Insurance Sector uses 4.4PJ of a total of 211PJ Electricity. ( http://www.bfe.admin.ch/php/modules/publikationen/stream.php?extlang=de&name=de_828732397.pdf) As bitcoin does not replace insurances and only a part of financial services, I'd arbitrarily reduce the 4.4PJ to 1PJ that is used for things that bitcoin could replace (I'm sure its a lot lower than that). This would be < 0.47% of switzerlands electricity use. So if the benefit of bitcoin has to compete with classical banking in terms of energy use, 0.470% of todays global electricity use is the figure.Somebody fancy researching the numbers for global banking? |
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You're right. And I haven't checked your figures. But if you think that 7% is "significant", then we'll just have to agree to disagree. As pointed out, this is well within the range of energy already used for heat in colder areas.
Heating with electricity is a stupid option in the environmental sense because each Joule of electrically produced heat causes even more primary energy consumption at the power plant because of low efficiency. Of course, a geothermal heat pump is a different case (But then you won't be mining at the same time anyway). So Gavin's "bitcoin heater" to me just makes things a little less worse. And how to use your mining heat in summer anyway? |
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Internet power consumption is how much % of total world? 10%? Or 15%?
Please consider that many phone carriers, TV, mobile also use internet for data transport.
As the bitcoin revolution would be historically comparable to the internet revolution your point is valid. But it then comes back to the benefit for society that we expect from bitcoin. I'm not yet convinced, that the majority of the world's polulation will have a better life thanks to bitcoin breaking through. But that's a different topic. |
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And actually this is good, it pushes more people to research for the more efficient energy resource
Unfortunately, this won't help at all. Let's say that we find a supercheap possibility to produce electricity a 1 cts $ /kWh. This only multiplies the profitable energy consumption of the bitcoin network. It's the proof-of-energy-consumption principle that is the problem in the first place. We could even convert the whole solar irradiation on earth into electricity with an efficiency of 100% (we never will..of course). The bitcoin network would still burn a significant part of it, given that its market cap is significant on global scale. |
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It then seems that X years down the road, mining will only be done by massive supercomputers. Or that seems to be the implication to me anyways. Could be wrong, but if the hashrate an difficulty go up like that, we should see ASICs pushed out as being unprofitable the same way that CPU mining has been pushed out, and the way that GPUs older than <insert # of months/years here> are not profitable now.
The question then seems to be about the initial cost of hardware? i.e. Are we assuming that the limiting factor will be electricity when the limiting factor in the future may be the cost of hardware?
Because of the scaling factor I don't think that HW cost will dominate. There will be such a huge market for mining gear that prices will drop. However: If a producer of top-notch mining gear can earn more money by mining than by selling his gear, the game could change. The bitcoin network would then become dominated by semiconductor-fabs. And knowing that such fabs are incredibly expensive to run this unfortunately means that bitcoin will be dominated by a handful of players (The end of all that's good about bitcoin). One more thing: We didn't so far talk about the grey energy that needs to be spent before mining gear even starts to mine. That might at one point become important as life-cycles may be expected to be quite short for mining gear. |
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Energy consumption is massively impacted by the size of the semiconductor die, e.g. 110 nm vs. 50 nm vs. 20 nm. Currently, most ASIC rigs are using 110+ nm chips, but the currently available semiconductor techology available to OEMs is in the 2x-nm class. The 1x-nm class isn't far behind now.
I'm an electrical engineer, so I know about the technological constraints you are talking about. But you are wrongly assuming that the efficiency in MH/J affects overall energy consumption. It does not (at least to my understanding of a free market). More efficient HW will just make the Hashrate go up what in turn will make difficulty level go up. As long as additional gear can be run profitably, this will be done. |
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