How Eco friendly is our money and is there an alternative?

[SidJohnLeopold]

Just wrote this paper. Hope you like it!

Lightweight version https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-eco-friendly-our-money-alternative-sid-john-leopold/

In- depth version http://papers.netrogenic.com/sid/eco-friendly-money.pdf

[Raegorl]

Good post man, very informative. Interesting to see that Ethereum is still way below Bitcoin in terms of energy consumption. Maybe in the future we`ll see the trend shift from PoW to PoS to be more environment friendly (would be good to see some data on this one with just nodes running to stake).

[jseverson]

Woah, excellent write-up man! Incredibly detailed.

Bitcoin being insanely inefficient in terms of power consumption isn't a new subject, but I have never seen it compared to other cryptos, and even USD. It's not a good look for us with the numbers being as lopsided as they are. It's still a rather obscure issue, and until it makes it to the foreground, it can never be addressed. People who are against Bitcoin are going to have a field day with your article, but that may be necessary to push innovation.

[jtipt]

Wow, Bitcoin consumes more power than many multinational companies combined and more power than a whole country of Ecuador. Eh, certainly BTC is not power efficient I think we all can agree on that.
Well, That's a very good and informative article.

[odolvlobo]

The problem with these claims that Bitcoin uses X times as much energy as Y is that they don't compare total energy usage. For example, this article quotes data center usage for some big companies but that is only a small part of the company's footprint. What about manufacturing, or even the energy cost of employees driving to work?

[bohr]

Wow, Bitcoin consumes more power than many multinational companies combined and more power than a whole country of Ecuador. Eh, certainly BTC is not power efficient I think we all can agree on that.
Well, That's a very good and informative article.

One of the many dreams of bitcoin users is that bitcoin is used all over the world so it is obvious that bitcoin is going to use a huge amount of energy, but as we know bitcoin mining most of the time happens in china and most of the miners are close to hydro plants so bitcoin is powered by green energy already and for many small mining farms they only use excess energy created by those plants so bitcoin is not as bad for the environment as many people think.

[innocent93]

Just wrote this paper. Hope you like it!

Lightweight version https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-eco-friendly-our-money-alternative-sid-john-leopold/

In- depth version https://www.docdroid.net/bwh0R9O/eco-friendly-money.pdf

Regarding the envirement issue, as long as there is renewable energy available in the mining process, i dont think there are big problems related to the envirement and cryptocurrency.

[pinkflower]

Good post man, very informative. Interesting to see that Ethereum is still way below Bitcoin in terms of energy consumption. Maybe in the future we`ll see the trend shift from PoW to PoS to be more environment friendly (would be good to see some data on this one with just nodes running to stake).

Do you want a real environment friendly cryptocurrency? Check Burst's website. The coin can be mined using your hard drives. The power consumption per transaction is very much lower than that of BTC. BTC consumes 205 KWh of electricity per transaction, Burst can do that with only 0,5 KWh.

It has not been having the attention it deserves from my perspective. But maybe soon it will, once the PoCC starts announcing their new proposals and updates.

[TagaMungkahi]

I couldn't agree more, It's just surprising that BTC Mining is profitable and yet at the same time it's very costly and yup not that Eco friendly. Well, this is an issue that should be tackled by the Bitcoin Developers, we just hope that someday there will be a solution for this.

Regarding the envirement issue, as long as there is renewable energy available in the mining process, i dont think there are big problems related to the envirement and cryptocurrency.

Yup, but not all miners uses renewable energies.

[trecore4]

Okay interesting read.


I never thought that ripple is so much cheaper to produce but I think its all because it is centralised and there is control over the emission rate of those coins. This replicates both characteristic of USD token production and the crypto token production.


But this also explains why the ripple prices are not much volatile and they have fixed face value at any time I look at them.


No doubt why bitcoin is consuming almost 118Kwh of energy as it is being mined at alarming rate while ripple stands at the deepest with almost 0 emission rate. This is very extensive comparison and thoughtful article. Looking at the conditions like this bitcoin should be reaching to costly affairs real soon. :-)

[Yakamoto]

Just wrote this paper. Hope you like it!

Lightweight version https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-eco-friendly-our-money-alternative-sid-john-leopold/

In- depth version https://www.docdroid.net/bwh0R9O/eco-friendly-money.pdf

Even though ETH might be lower in power consumption than BTC, you have to realize that both of them consume a hugely diminished amount of energy compared to most other forms of money production, especially most fiat forms. If you are prioritizing the energy consumption and ecological impact of probably one of the least impactful currencies to have existed you don't have the right priorities going for you, no matter how interesting the paper may be. If the paper was made merely out of research and curiosity, then it achieved the purpose of being informative.

[ALT67890]

The first time I know it, i was also shocked and surprised how this Blockchain technology transaction works and its electricity cost. But as I have researched most mining farms are located on a specific country with low electricity cost and more environment friendly facilities. I don’t bother to make a statement out of concern as an environmentalist as myself care much for nature.

[_Dawid_]

Woah, the article from docdroid about Eco-friendly-money.pdf open my eyes on that huge problem. But what is more I am strongly surprised with the Ripple specifications and other things connected to that currency. To be honest I have known its from the general informations and news heard somewehre here... Very usefull, I thing it should be visible for more people interested.

[NUFCrichard]

Just wrote this paper. Hope you like it!

Lightweight version https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-eco-friendly-our-money-alternative-sid-john-leopold/

In- depth version https://www.docdroid.net/bwh0R9O/eco-friendly-money.pdf

Even though ETH might be lower in power consumption than BTC, you have to realize that both of them consume a hugely diminished amount of energy compared to most other forms of money production, especially most fiat forms. If you are prioritizing the energy consumption and ecological impact of probably one of the least impactful currencies to have existed you don't have the right priorities going for you, no matter how interesting the paper may be. If the paper was made merely out of research and curiosity, then it achieved the purpose of being informative.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
Not according to this!  I was shocked that each transaction (an average) uses 276kWh!  I use that much electricity at home in 2 months!

Bitcoin is shockingly wasteful with electricity, we don't see it so we don't really care, but it is still there and happening.
An average google search also uses quite a bit of electricty, but that is nothing compared to Bitcoin.

The sad part is that it is unnecessary, it's just greed causing the increase, but the charts show that it will only get worse.

[wantjokull]

I think crypto currencies are still have lot of differences than the real world currency. IF this situation continues then why would any government will allow the operations of mining throughout the world.


In ever thought that currency can be priced according the energy consumption they have but your article says it all. But what if we go into green energy channels and try to mine with the green energy on full level, then may be the situation can be altered.


Plus, you are considering the bitcoin currency as whole, which is global currently but the USD is just limited to the USA country. I mean to have real comparison you may need to cover the cost of energy consumption for all the currency in the world altogether. That would be global comparison and I’m sure bitcoin will look like very eco-friendly at that time.   

[ahkiatt]

How fast do you guys can we move towards mining purely through renewable energy sources that leave little environmental impact?

[pinkflower]

How fast do you guys can we move towards mining purely through renewable energy sources that leave little environmental impact?

From my perspective, not fast enough. All the countries around the world cant agree on how much reduction on they can do in their own carbon foot prints, we also have the US who has removed itself from the Paris Accord. In short, we all depend on the government and the power companies, so its really out of our hands.

But what you should do is support a greener and more environment friendly cryptocurrency.

[mrcash02]

Bitcoin is the future's money and in the future we will have more renewable energy disponible. It surely consumes a lot of energy, but that is the price of decentralization at this moment. As technology advances we can have more powerful energy sources that don't harm the nature and at same time we can have more developed machines that don't consume so much electricity.

Ecology is important, but we can't stop the progress because of it, to say the truth, the ecology benefits itself when we have progress in the world (that can harm the ecosystem for some time or not).

[pinkflower]

Bitcoin is the future's money and in the future we will have more renewable energy disponible. It surely consumes a lot of energy, but that is the price of decentralization at this moment. As technology advances we can have more powerful energy sources that don't harm the nature and at same time we can have more developed machines that don't consume so much electricity.

Ecology is important, but we can't stop the progress because of it, to say the truth, the ecology benefits itself when we have progress in the world (that can harm the ecosystem for some time or not).

If you are waiting for all the world's power source to come from renewables, then you are not in luck. Thats more than 50 years away. Its more practical for the community to come to consensus to fork BTC to a new PoW algorithm.

Proof of Capacity could be a good replacement.

[Haiduongbg]

Just wrote this paper. Hope you like it!

Lightweight version https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-eco-friendly-our-money-alternative-sid-john-leopold/

In- depth version https://www.docdroid.net/bwh0R9O/eco-friendly-money.pdf

Good post man, the increase in price of Bitcoin will drive the increase of electricity consumption. the more bitcoin price increases, the more peple will flock to mine it. it is an estimation that 70%-80% Bitcoin price will go to electricity. That means Bitcoin will consume electricity worth of billions a year.