Is bitcoin mining environmentally responsible?

[adam3us]

To comment on the OP clearly not very environmentally responsible in a direct sense.

According to this article http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-12/virtual-bitcoin-mining-is-a-real-world-environmental-disaster.html the bitcoin hashcash mining function is taking a gigawatt hours per day.

As the inventor of hashcash thats a lot of power I indirectly caused to be burnt.  Personally I am reasonably green minded so I can see  the negative aspects of that.

However an alternative view is that bitcoin is lower financial transaction costs.  And credit card companies, clearing banks, banks have been getting away with charging some rather high fees.  The cost of that electricity is a lot lower than those fees.  Maybe the money freed up by saving those transaction fees.  Global fund flow is measured in the trillions per day.  Depending on the details banks charge 20 - 50 USD or more and a percent of the amount.  Surely would dwarf current mining costs.  Human resources have value too - if banking become more efficient and if people can save money, human resources are freed to invest in and work on more human progress.  Maybe we get fusion power a year sooner, or people can buy more solar with the money saved etc. in the big picture.  Also about half the bitcoins have already been mined.  Though I dont think the mining arms race is barely started.  I think its probable we will see rows of datacenter racks full of 22nm custom chips ultra dense blades in datacenters chasing down the last of it.  ie right at the technology limit tracking moore's law.

Adam

[adam3us]

I'm surprised you haven't spotted the FUD in that article, its based on the figures from blockchain.info that are an approximation of power usage based on GPU's only.

Well its just a guestimate and there are factors pushing towards it being over estimate (FPGA, ASIC, and people having second uses as space heaters, people using mining on systems that were on anyway and not using much extra power or no extra because of it) or an underestimate more people than you'd think still playing with CPU miners, or CPU mining + GPU simultaneously etc.  Who knows!

But another thing is the stat of 982/24 = 40 MWatts sounds less alarming than ~ 1 GWh per day.  You notice how they did that.  However thats still quite a few households eh has to be into the thousands of households range.  According to this stat http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3 that would be like 30,000 households ongoing energy budget. 

And escalating probably as the difficulty ramps up if the price supports the demand.

Adam

[hughperman]

But another thing is the stat of 982/24 = 40 MWatts sounds less alarming than ~ 1 GWh per day.  You notice how they did that.  However thats still quite a few households eh has to be into the thousands of households range.  According to this stat http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3 that would be like 30,000 households ongoing energy budget. 

And escalating probably as the difficulty ramps up if the price supports the demand.

Adam

I was wondering what the context of this kind of number is vs. say industrial usage. I found this analysis of European Energy Efficiency, including stats for overall european industry: http://www.lbst.de/ressources/docs2010/EP-05_Energy-Efficiency-Industry_DEC2010_PE-451-483.pdf

One key quote was:

The final energy demand in the European industrial sector has remained relatively stablesince 1990 (representing on average 320 Mtoe for the last 15 years)

.
So in 1990 to 2005 (I don't know about the last 8 years) European industrial sector has used 320 MTOE per year.

TOE is a tonne of oil, with an equivalent energy expenditure of 41.868 GJ or 11.63 MWh.

320MTOE is equal to 3.2*10E8*11.63 = 3.722PWh (peta-Watt-hours)! However, that's per year, so per day that works out as "only" 10.2 TWh (tera-Watt-hours) per day. So, well done BitCoin you're currently running at 0.01% of the energy usage of the European industrial sector!

[vlad307]

im newbie XD

[decentral]

Not sure if I'm right on this, the asicminer being bid on does 12gh at 86W and the current hash rate is 70265gh so that adds up to just a little under 500kw to run the worlds most powerful security network. That techs development was publicly funded with Bitcoin.

EDIT: 10gh, 12gh is an overclocking estimate so 600kw.

Food for thought. We're not all using asicminer just yet though. And do you think the global hash rate might increase once everyone owns an one ?

[caveden]

CO2 is good for trees  

Indeed it is: How Fossil Fuels Have Greened the Planet (weird, I must click the google link to get through the paywall, the direct link doesn't work)

[BitCoinHarlemite]

My electricity is produced by the voice of Bill Withers, and the tears of Orphans.....Its sufficient for now.


BTCHarlemite

[testsieger]

What does it cost? We all should ask us what does it cost, if we do not etablish an independend money system.....

[poi]

Compared to the energy usage of all HFT-trading worldwide its nothing.

[Coinbuck @ BTCLot]

I think the question in here is how much energy is spent in producing, distributing and regulating fiat currency. All those articles do not talk about that subject and I'm sure it is spent much more energy in fiat currency.

It would be interesting to see the other side of the coin.

Best regards,

[TempleGuard]

Of course. In what scenario would it be environmentally responsible? It is a waste of real-world resources.

[insulting_robot]

> ...

> this is the insulting robot

> all your lives are a waste of resources!

[adam3us]

Compared to the energy usage of all HFT-trading worldwide its nothing.

I think you're right and you could reasonably claim HFT is a stupid zero-sum game, leading to flash spikes when algorithms go wrong real-fast.  The defenders might claim it adds liquidity but traders were trading before HFT and liquidity was fine, and what human needs sub-microsecond liquidity.  People should be investing not speculating by the day, minute or now microsecond!  A bit of short-term speculation helps liquidity and remove exchange differentials via arbitrage and reduce spread via volume, but there need to be sanity limits.

Adam

[kujina]

I'd really like to get solar panels, did anyone here get them just to mine?

[mLiberty]

Short answer: No.

[pendula032]

Just wondering what peoples thoughts are on bitcoin mining.

In a simplified case, say you mine with your pc 24 hours per day you are more than doubling your power usage (increasing carbon footprint) compared to if you used it for 12 hours or for an 8 hour working day.

Is mining gold, silver, nickel etc environmentally responsible?

[astor]

Bitcoin mining isn't sustainable at all, and this is the reason why it will be overtaken by other better crypto currencies.


Just to give you an example. The M1 money supply in the US, the money "minted" by the FED is approx 2.000 billion USD.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M1/

Each block mined in bitcoin gives 25 coins out of 11049125, or 6*24*25 = 3600 out of 11049125 a day.

That works out to 0.03258% per day.

If we used bitcoin instead of fiat with a total market value equal to 2.000 billion USD, the cost of mining will be close to the energy price of 2.000 billion USD * 0.03258% per day.  That works out to

$ 651 million in energy expenditure per day.

That is almost $240 billion a year.

Now make no mistake, that is simply the cost of reaching consensus on which transactions have happened. Thus the equivalent of this value in goods and services are extracted from the economy.

Instead of going to bankers, it is smoked by computers for the benefit of reaching consensus.

The thing is that there are actually cheaper ways of reaching consensus, and the ppcoin is one such method.  It uses proof of past work instead of constantly doing new work to reach consensus.  Thus the cost of running the network in terms of energy is radically different.  This means that it can scale to cover a bigger economy than what bitcoin can.

[Dougie]

I often wonder this! It is quite a waste of computing resources really. What we need is a useful sum! The power is used to find massive primes and that leads to the creation of a new block! Primes are useful!

[astor]

It is better to reuse proof of work that has already happened.   A bitcoin is proof of work that happened in the past, and one concept that is put on top of this is to count the days since you received the coin, and that is your "integrated" proof-of-work.

Every block, all holders of bitcoin gets one "bitcoin-block" of voting power.  In ppcoin this voting power can be used to reduce the real proof-of-work/hashing required to win.

[TheRealSolid]

Bitcoin mining isn't sustainable for a currency but for a digital commodity I don't really see the problem with it. Compared to all the waste in general society worrying about a couple megawatts of electricity mining Bitcoin is far from a concern in my opinion.