Bitcoin Consuming Too Much Energy?

[Malin Keshar]

1 - there are coins made to use the hash power to useful things, or be more power-sufficient. Example: gridcoin, primecoin, peercoin. Others can be designed to solve hard problems easy to verify a given solution(ex: differential equations)


2 - of course FIAT  system uses lots of energy(no idea how much), they do lots of virtual transactions, and credit card machines are electricity moved. They use also lots of paper, metals and plastic, that are energy-consuming and aggresive against nature. Bitcoin being internet-based results in less consuption of paper, metals and plastic.

3 - ASICs consumes less power to produce hash, and they can be further improved to consume less and less energy

4 - fossil fuels aren't the only option to make energy, there are hydroeletric and nuclear energy too.

[1714889732]

1714889732

[1714889732]

1714889732

[1714889732]

1714889732

[1714889732]

1714889732

[1714889732]

1714889732

[hashman]

Did you know most of the easily accessible hydrocarbon energy on earth was burned away immediately in flaring? 

On the contrary to your thesis, PoW valuation will help us use energy more efficiently.  Once we realize that energy = value = money, we might just stop leaving all our lights on and burning gas to move steel round in circles on parking lots. 

[GenTarkin]

I absolutely hate hearing this argument over and over.
Once I did the calculations on how much roughly the ATMs, in the USA alone, use more power 24/7 then the entire Bitcoin network. It was nearly 2x the amount of power.

Talk about a wasteful infrastructure!

Bitcoin is the least of our concerns.
The benefits gained w/ a system like Bitcoin largely outweigh its power footprint.

[franky1]

I absolutely hate hearing this argument over and over.
Once I did the calculations on how much roughly the ATMs, in the USA alone, use more power 24/7 then the entire Bitcoin network. It was nearly 2x the amount of power.

Talk about a wasteful infrastructure!

Bitcoin is the least of our concerns.
The benefits gained w/ a system like Bitcoin largely outweigh its power footprint.

also las vegas (just one city) uses more electric. and they trade plastic chips that cant be used on the internet or in any other convenience store on the planet, only in specific places within the city.

[TooDumbForBitcoin]

4 - fossil fuels aren't the only option to make energy, there are hydroeletric and nuclear energy too.

?

[Peter R]

The sun deposits approximately 1 kW / m^2 of power upon the earth, and somehow it gets used up (growing plants, evaporating water, melting snow, etc).  Since the radius of the Earth is 6400 km, this means the cross sectional area through which the solar power flux passes is:

    A = Pi r^2 = 3.14 x (6400 x 10^3 m)^2 = 1.3 x 10^14 m^2

Since each m^2 has 1 kW deposited, this means the total power hitting the earth is:

    P = A x F = (1.3 x 10^14 m^2) x (1000 W / m^2) = 1.3 x 10^17 W = 130 million gigawatts.  

So how does this compare to all the bitcoin miners?

Right now, when a miner finds a block he earns 25 BTC, blocks are found roughly every 10 minutes and 1 BTC is worth about $450.  So, the miners' revenue is roughly

   25 BTC / block x 0.1 blocks / min x 450 $ / BTC x 1/60 min / s = 19 $ / s

Let's imagine that this revenue goes entirely to electricity and let's assume the cost of electricity is $0.1 / kW-hr.  Then $19 would pay for 190 kW-hrs of electricity.  But this is the amount used per second so the power consumption is then estimated at 190 kW hr / s x 3600 s / hr x 1000 W / kW = 6.8 x 10^8 W = 0.68 gigawatts.

So, the entire earth gets 130 million gigawatts of power from the sun and currently uses no more than 0.68 gigawatts on bitcoin mining.  

Therefore, less than 1 part in 100 million of the total available energy deposited on earth each second by the sun goes towards  bitcoin mining.  

[a7594li]

The consumption of energy to ensure the network security.

[jubalix]

Hello,

First I would like to address the issue:

I think that bitcoin mining as a whole (all the miners in the world) are consuming a lot of power and all we are doing is creating another currency that is going to be so regulated soon that it could be pointless.

Before you say that other things require a lot of power:

Lets take the US dollar. It is not based solely on using your computer/hardware to mine which is consuming electricity rates. It has jobs that you earn the dollar without using electricity or limited like using a computer then doing other stuff.

I do not hate bitcoin and love the idea but I keep getting this idea in my brain that the world is already starting to get more demand for these supplies (fossil fuels) to get electricity. I do not want this to happen but I would like to keep bitcoin alive. I am not a hater but rather someone who looks at the whole thing. Yes the future is going into technology but do you think it would be possible to wait till the world has found a reliable power resource that will generate enough power to feed the hungry demand before we dive into the future.

Main questions
Is bitcoin a big contribution to energy consumption?
Is bitcoin = the amount of electricity used?
Will this be used as a way that people/regulators can shut bitcoin down?

My main hope is that we develop ASICs that are really efficient not per gh/s but for the world or that people find a really good way to use solar energy or other times of energy to power these electricity hungry machines.

I do not hate bitcoin.

yeah no asics will alway run as hot and fast as possible or more asics that run cool will be run, its conservation of energy.

use a POS like PeerCoin or NXT, which require minimal or no mining.

[Light]

The use of 'too' is subjective - what exactly are you comparing it against? I don't have any exact figures but I would doubt Bitcoin mining would even represent 0.01% of electricity consumption of the world. While it might be high for an individual - there are far more who don't mine than do so I would think they would offset that. I'd be happy to be corrected if someone has clear figures.

[jubalix]

The sun deposits approximately 1 kW / m^2 of power upon the earth, and somehow it gets used up (growing plants, evaporating water, melting snow, etc).  Since the radius of the Earth is 6400 km, this means the cross sectional area through which the solar power flux passes is:

    A = Pi r^2 = 3.14 x (6400 x 10^3 m)^2 = 1.3 x 10^14 m^2

Since each m^2 has 1 kW deposited, this means the total power hitting the earth is:

    P = A x F = (1.3 x 10^14 m^2) x (1000 W / m^2) = 1.3 x 10^17 W = 130 million gigawatts.  

So how does this compare to all the bitcoin miners?

Right now, when a miner finds a block he earns 25 BTC, blocks are found roughly every 10 minutes and 1 BTC is worth about $450.  So, the miners' revenue is roughly

   25 BTC / block x 0.1 blocks / min x 450 $ / BTC x 1/60 min / s = 19 $ / s

Let's imagine that this revenue goes entirely to electricity and let's assume the cost of electricity is $0.1 / kW-hr.  Then $19 would pay for 190 kW-hrs of electricity.  But this is the amount used per second so the power consumption is then estimated at 190 kW hr / s x 3600 s / hr x 1000 W / kW = 6.8 x 10^8 W = 0.68 gigawatts.

So, the entire earth gets 130 million gigawatts of power from the sun and currently uses no more than 0.68 gigawatts on bitcoin mining.  

Therefore, less than 1 part in 100 million of the total available energy deposited on earth each second by the sun goes towards  bitcoin mining.  

this is alot more than I thought.....considering, each human could only use about 1 part in 7000 million of the total available energy deposited on earth each second.

[herzmeister]

as soon as you have "proof of unique human" you don't need mining anymore.

the maidsafe community is trying to figure it out: https://maidsafe.org/t/proof-of-unique-human/167

also if they get "proof of resource" (bandwidth / storage space) to actually work, it would also make mining and probably BTC unnecessary.

[TheFootMan]

Hello,
[...]

My appology for not reading the entire thread first, but I wanted to throw in my 2 cents.

If energy comes from renewable energy, is that so bad? Hydropower plants for instance? That does not contribute to environmental damage, or a windmill or sea wave energy.

Forms of energy that pollute is another issue alltogether.

[hashman]

as soon as you have "proof of unique human" you don't need mining anymore.

the maidsafe community is trying to figure it out: https://maidsafe.org/t/proof-of-unique-human/167

I hate to discourage this perhaps noble goal but it is unfortunately a bad idea. 

On one side we will reverse engineer your verification procedures (it won't be hard because you have to open source them anyway).  How hard can it be to generate a million unique realistic enough fingerprints?   

On the other side we will have large databases of sounds and data from real unique humans and even call centers filled with unique humans waiting to solve captchas. 

Meet my friend Sybil here from Iceland.   

[TooDumbForBitcoin]

this is alot more than I thought.....considering, each human could only use about 1 part in 7000 million of the total available energy deposited on earth each second.

The total bitcoin network using as much energy as 70 humans is a lot more than you thought?  

If that's too much energy, than you need to grab the next 71 humans you see and tell them all to take it easy - they're consuming more energy than the entire bitcoin network!!!

Another estimate of bitcoin network portion of global electricity consumption goes like this:

5TW * 8760 * .47 = 20 trillion kWh annually, where 5TW is an estimate for total global electric generation installed, and 0.47 is a usage factor used by utilities applied to typical residential usage. 

The bitcoin mining network uses 70PH/s at 1W/GH/s = 70MW, and it uses that electricty 8760 hours annually, which results in 600 million kWh annually.

600 million / 20 trillion is 30 parts in a million, or 1 part in 30,000.

So you'd really have to find 250,000 people (say, atttending an appearance by the Pope) and tell them all, "Hey, slow down!   You're using more energy than the entire bitcoin network!!!"

[Peter R]

The use of 'too' is subjective - what exactly are you comparing it against? I don't have any exact figures but I would doubt Bitcoin mining would even represent 0.01% of electricity consumption of the world. While it might be high for an individual - there are far more who don't mine than do so I would think they would offset that. I'd be happy to be corrected if someone has clear figures.

Total power deposited on earth by sun:

   130 million gigawatts

Total (average) power consumed by humans:

   16 thousand gigawatts

Total power consumed by bitcoin mining:

   0.68 gigawatts (assuming all bitcoin inflation buys electricity at $0.10 / kw-hr)
   0.07 gigawatts (assuming 1 W / GHash)

So, humans are using 0.012% of the sun's energy that hits earth, bitcoin is using somewhere between 5x10^-8% and 5x10^-7% of the energy available from the sun or 0.0004% - 0.004% of the total energy consumed by humans.  

[Hashforfun]

Don't forget that there are renewable energy resources Like: Wind energy, solar energy, hydro energy.


For example Wind energy.


How much electricity can one wind turbine generate?

The output of a wind turbine depends on the turbine's size and the wind's speed. Utility-scale wind turbines being manufactured now for the U.S. market have power ratings that range from 1.5 megawatts to 3.0 megawatts.

So think of buying your own wind turbine for bitcoin mining.
 

[Boussac]

Bitcoin is more energy efficient as a mutualized infrastructure compared to redundant, proprietary data centers, office buildings, workstations, trucks, ATM, etc required by legacy monetary systems.
If mining happens at home, the energy dissipated by mining can be repurposed to useful applications (like heating), assuming mining ibecomes somewhat regional and seasonal.
Look how http://www.qarnot-computing.com illustrates my point.

However, PoW alt-coins are wasting energy because the energy consumption each alt-network is adding does not result in a more secure network.
For instance, litecoin is still one million times less secure than bitcoin.
From a security stand point, spreading hashing power over multiple networks is less efficient than concentrating it on the bitcoin network.

Multi-purpose mining à la primecoin is a security vulnerability because it creates conflicting incentives for mining centralization. The more the secondary purpose is profitable, the more likely a mining pool is  to cross the 51% line which destroys the value of the block mining.

[arloseb]

More mining power more consuming. 

[TooDumbForBitcoin]

The output of a wind turbine depends on the turbine's size and the wind's speed. Utility-scale wind turbines being manufactured now for the U.S. market have power ratings that range from 1.5 megawatts to 3.0 megawatts.

With ~20% capacity factor, so annual energy out (in kWh) equals power rating (in watts) x 8.760 x ~0.2.

[Razick]

I am thinking of this idea.
You guys remember folding @ home?
What if we can make a crypto algo which also simulates the folding at no big additional effort?
So you can mine coins and contribute to mankind at the same time (as such contribution requires computer running and consuming power as well)

Personally I think providing security to a secure decentralized payment network is more useful to mankind than searching for intelligent life on other planets that probably doesn't exist.