Should Bitcoin lower its carbon footprint?

[Wind_FURY]

Yes, I know this energy is securing the network, which is of course very important.
But shouldn't we try to find a way to minimize this energy consumption. Shouldn't we be looking for alternative methods? Maybe even something like Proof of Stake? There has to be a better way.

Understand the incentives of what makes everything stick together in Bitcoin. Once you do, you will never ever consider POS as an alternative.

Plus trolls would say POW is wasteful, its role in Bitcoin is actually THE breakthrough.

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[Casdinyard]

Shouldn't we be looking for alternative methods? Maybe even something like Proof of Stake? There has to be a better way.

No, better yet leave bitcoin the way it is. Isn't getting incentives is more profitable than what you could get in staking?

and hydroelectric power, which is good but also affects environment (such as dams for hydroelectric that bring imbalance to the ecosystem).

Not just imbalance but being harmful as it can cause flooding that could kill wildlife and humans. Just like what happened in Sichuan,China wherein they have over 6,600 dams and unfortunately some of the dams had collapsed and flooded villages and displaced millions of lives.

[sehoon]

I think we should focus on renewable energy instead of burning something in order to produce electricity. Instead of coal power plants or fossil fuel powerplants, use hydro, and windmill powerplant. But if the higher people are such greedy people, we can lessen it by lessening the mining of bitcoin.

[BigBoom3599]

what do you think the legacy banking system runs on, magical fairy dust? no, it runs on massive amounts of energy. same with gold mining, coin minting, etc. that's the correct lens to view bitcoin mining through.

I know the banking systems use massive amounts of energy, however they process millions of transactions per second. So they provide more utility per energy unit.
(this is subjective, and probably controversial on a bitcoin forum  )

Gold mining is a good point, hadn't thought about that. It is very comparable to bitcoin mining in terms of energy usage. Thanks for bringing that up!

I honestly don't see a reason for that to happen. The more important question I'd like to ask all climate defenders is:
Would that energy be produced anyway if Bitcoin miners weren't paying for it or not. To my knowledge a power plant is usually making excess energy that doesn't go anywhere because it's difficult to run generators on 20%. When you start a A 100 MW generator it will run full steam producing 100 MW +/- 10% and all you can do is switch it on and off. Does it make a difference for that generator that some miner turned on a room full of miners that uses 1MW? For us mere mortals it's a big farm. For a power company it's only a blip on the screen that they have to bill.
Chill people.

Eh, I'm not really convinced TBH. If electricity producers see that more power is being used, they will produce more. It is as simple as that. Of course there will always have a buffer of electricity that no one is using, but that buffer needs to be there. It has purpose. So if miners use up that buffer, electricity producers will start producing more to maintain that buffer.


To all the people saying we should move to green power. I agree, and I also agree that we can't do much about it, that is up to the electricity companies and not our responsibility.

[SummerBliss]

We can't do anything in that.
Decentralization or Conservation. Only one is possible at once.
Due to the decentralization in Bitcoin mining, anyone can mine. When anyone can mine, the person with higher GPU power will get the mining rewards. This competition leads to increased usage of computing power. Hence, the competition will continue until miners will reach the break-even point between rewards and cost. No one cares about environment.

[fuguebtc]

It is 2019, there are climate protests nearly every day all around the world. Meanwhile bitcoin is consuming more energy than a small country

In my opinion the bitcoin network needs to take responsibility and change so that it has a smaller footprint, it just isn't responsible to burn such a large amount of energy for such little utility. I honestly felt a little ashamed when I read that for a single transaction Bitcoin uses the amount of energy that could power an US home for 22 days! ^[1] This number will only be going up as the price rises.

Yes, I know this energy is securing the network, which is of course very important.
But shouldn't we try to find a way to minimize this energy consumption. Shouldn't we be looking for alternative methods? Maybe even something like Proof of Stake? There has to be a better way.

Or do you think that electricity consumption is not bad in itself, just the way it is made. eg. If all of bitcoin was powered by solar, it would be fine.


[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Its known for many years that PoW is responsible for securing the BTC blockchain at cost of too much energy consumption. Point is can we replace PoW in BTC with some echo friendly consensus algorithm like PoS or DPoS etc ? I dont think its possible now. 

[kaya11]

It is 2019, there are climate protests nearly every day all around the world. Meanwhile bitcoin is consuming more energy than a small country

In my opinion the bitcoin network needs to take responsibility and change so that it has a smaller footprint, it just isn't responsible to burn such a large amount of energy for such little utility. I honestly felt a little ashamed when I read that for a single transaction Bitcoin uses the amount of energy that could power an US home for 22 days! ^[1] This number will only be going up as the price rises.

Yes, I know this energy is securing the network, which is of course very important.
But shouldn't we try to find a way to minimize this energy consumption. Shouldn't we be looking for alternative methods? Maybe even something like Proof of Stake? There has to be a better way.

Or do you think that electricity consumption is not bad in itself, just the way it is made. eg. If all of bitcoin was powered by solar, it would be fine.


[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

As you have said there are also other energy sources that could power up the bitcoin network. And for sure there are scientist out there that is doing the very best to solve similar problems in energy sources. I am also hoping and imagining things on how we could accumulate energy that could last up for centuries and not destroying any part of the world using it.

[Asmonist]

Its not really that bitcoin is the culprit of it. We are in a digital world now. Everyone is just so dependent with internet. And this interner really consume that energy. However, most likely all businesses are dependent with internet connection. It gives the fastest communication media around the world. So definitely, bitcoin is just part of it but you can't say its the bitcoin that exhaust it.

[seoincorporation]

It is 2019, there are climate protests nearly every day all around the world. Meanwhile bitcoin is consuming more energy than a small country

In my opinion the bitcoin network needs to take responsibility and change so that it has a smaller footprint, it just isn't responsible to burn such a large amount of energy for such little utility. I honestly felt a little ashamed when I read that for a single transaction Bitcoin uses the amount of energy that could power an US home for 22 days! ^[1] This number will only be going up as the price rises.

Yes, I know this energy is securing the network, which is of course very important.
But shouldn't we try to find a way to minimize this energy consumption. Shouldn't we be looking for alternative methods? Maybe even something like Proof of Stake? There has to be a better way.

Or do you think that electricity consumption is not bad in itself, just the way it is made. eg. If all of bitcoin was powered by solar, it would be fine.


[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

If a single transaction cost to the world the same amount of energy that could power a home for 22 days, then we are doing something terribly wrong. And the solution is just as ethereum did it, change from PoW to PoS, that way holders would mine the coins and not those miners.

If btc moves to PoS we would reduce the carbon pootprint in a exponential manner.

[southafricadude]

Bitcoin miners are going more and more towards better more efficient hardware and "green" energy such as hydro / solar / wind etc.
The problem is not bitcoin, the problem is all the rest of the people. What should happen is every normal person should lower their carbon footprint...that would help more than if there was zero bitcoin carbon footprint.

[Wintersoldier]

Bitcoin miners are going more and more towards better more efficient hardware and "green" energy such as hydro / solar / wind etc.
The problem is not bitcoin, the problem is all the rest of the people. What should happen is every normal person should lower their carbon footprint...that would help more than if there was zero bitcoin carbon footprint.

What if there is a law that needs to be passed for miners to return something to the environment, like for every bitcoin that they can mine, they need to plant 100 three. That 100 three is so easy for the market value of 1BTC in return to them. Since they are consuming lots of natural resources in return for digital technology that is also helpful, we need something to balance the condition, and for me, that is through planting trees.

[Mike Mayor]

Not sure if I believe the statistics here to be honest, not really sure if bitcoin transactions take up that much electricity, seems quite a bit exaggerated to be honest.

I'll do the napkin math for you.

Every day 144 blocks are mined, every block rewards the miner 12.5 + 0.1555 BTC. So every day 1822,392 BTC (= $16,4 million) is given to miners (on average). If you assume for every BTC a miner mines he pays 0.5 BTC in electricity (not sure how accurate this is, just estimating) than that would mean $8,2 million spent on electricity daily. If we assume an electricity cost of $0.06/kWh that comes down to 273,3 million kWh daily. If we consider 300,000 txs per day we get roughly 910 kWh per tx. Which is what the average US household consumes per month. So that's even worse than what the original post said.


Again this is really rough napkin math, if you want more accurate estimations, go to the link I put in the OP, it is way more accurate :p

It is not as much as that your maths seems wrong to me (unless I am wrong then forgive me) 8.2 million is = 820million cents. 1 kWh is 0.06, therefore, 820/6= 136.66million kw per day Somewhere you doubled up. But still, that is a crap load I didn't realize it was so much damn.

[Lucius]

BigBoom3599 & all others who think Bitcoin mining is destroying the planet Earth please read the following posts carefully and with understanding!

It's not 1%.

The report (which was released months ago) is available here: https://www.energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/files/serve?File_id=8A1CECD1-157C-45D4-A1AB-B894E913737D

Their method for calculating energy consumption was to assume everyone is mining using an Antminer S9, which will use 98 watts per terahash. Current hash rate is 60,000,000 TH/s, meaning a global consumption of 5.88 gigawatts. That converts to 51.5 TWh per year.

According to https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/KeyWorld2017.pdf, global electricity production is 24,255 TWh per year. 51.5 is around 0.2% of 24,255.

This is not even taking in to account that the majority of mining uses renewable energy.

0.2% (which I showed in my post above is a more accurate number than the 1% this report suggests) is such a tiny fraction compared to other uses of electricity. Not even in terms of major things like infrastructure or corporations, but in every day household use.

Bitcoin uses approximately 51.5 TWh per year. According to this report (https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/settopboxes.pdf), cable boxes in the US alone use 3 GW just being in standby, which works out to 26 TWh per year, or about half of the bitcoin network's power demands. This doesn't even include the TVs they are connected to, or the associated sound systems, or DVD players, or games consoles, or everything else that sits there in standby for 16 hours a day. And this in the US only, never mind globally.

Now think how many lights are left on which aren't needed, or computers turned on which aren't actively being used, or computers in sleep or standby modes, or TVs which are on but not being watched, or consoles on which aren't being played, etc. Not just in the US, but globally. Even just wasted household electricity absolutely dwarfs the electricity consumption of the bitcoin network.

So roughly 0.2% of the total generated electricity is used on Bitcoin mining, and more then 50% of that comes from renewable energy sources. By what is o_e_l_e_o posted only cable boxes, TVs, DVD players, and other devices in standby mode consume more energy in one year than all bitcoin mining. And this is only in USA, what about rest of the world?

[hulla]

It is 2019, there are climate protests nearly every day all around the world. Meanwhile bitcoin is consuming more energy than a small country

In my opinion the bitcoin network needs to take responsibility and change so that it has a smaller footprint, it just isn't responsible to burn such a large amount of energy for such little utility. I honestly felt a little ashamed when I read that for a single transaction Bitcoin uses the amount of energy that could power an US home for 22 days! ^[1] This number will only be going up as the price rises.

Yes, I know this energy is securing the network, which is of course very important.
But shouldn't we try to find a way to minimize this energy consumption. Shouldn't we be looking for alternative methods? Maybe even something like Proof of Stake? There has to be a better way.

Or do you think that electricity consumption is not bad in itself, just the way it is made. eg. If all of bitcoin was powered by solar, it would be fine.


[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Your calculation about bitcoin electricity consumption was correct but if you also check out the amount of energy consumption used by the central bank printing press in printing money the energy used in a year is more than the amount of energy used to mine bitcoin in a year.
With that being said, a lot of solution about mining energy consumption have been created and i think the problem now if the financial status of each miners in using the alternative facilities.

[Zionatin]

In my opinion the bitcoin network needs to take responsibility and change so that it has a smaller footprint, it just isn't responsible to burn such a large amount of energy for such little utility.

what do you think the legacy banking system runs on, magical fairy dust? no, it runs on massive amounts of energy. same with gold mining, coin minting, etc. that's the correct lens to view bitcoin mining through.

this is fundamentally a human problem, not a bitcoin problem. if humans didn't need money, we wouldn't need dollars, gold, or bitcoin.

until that problem is solved, the best we can do is steer energy consumption towards sustainable sources.

It is all in perspective. You cannot really compare things like the way that user is trying to. I am not sure how many kw the bank users everyday but I am sure it is a lot.
The internet apparently uses 70billion kw per year https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2016/06/28/how-much-electricity-does-it-take-to-run-the-internet/#3490838f1fff
Bitcoin users 5million+/hour so it is 45 billion a year

So basically 60% of the power it takes to run the internet is the same as it takes to mine bitcoin.

100 million TH in the bitcoin network and a Richsun Bitmain Antminer S17-56TH/s that users 2500w on full load at 56TH
So that is 2 million miners x 2.5kw= 5million/hour

Quite crazy. I wonder how the bank compares.

[Duzter]

Mining is consuming more power. Every year something is getting advanced and whenever something is advanced the better efficiency from the machine is achieved lowering the electricity consumption. In one of the quote its been clearly mentioned bitcoin isn't mined with the power generated out of burning coal to emit carbon. So, there needs to be some development to make things more eco friendlier which can make everything good around the environment.

[figmentofmyass]

So roughly 0.2% of the total generated electricity is used on Bitcoin mining, and more then 50% of that comes from renewable energy sources. By what is o_e_l_e_o posted only cable boxes, TVs, DVD players, and other devices in standby mode consume more energy in one year than all bitcoin mining. And this is only in USA, what about rest of the world?

that's a good point, but we shouldn't only be considering current consumption. bitcoin's electricity consumption may significantly increase over time---and it definitely will if the price keeps increasing. televisions and DVD players have already completely penetrated society, so their associated electricity consumption is already near the upper bounds.

in another 10-20 years, i doubt we'll be comparing bitcoin to christmas lights or cable boxes. the question then becomes, what is an unreasonable amount of consumption? we shouldn't be content to say, "it's still small right now, let's not worry about it".

and i don't mean to fearmonger. i just don't see any useful extrapolations into the future, and i think that's necessary for any honest discussion of this issue. i don't want people to get the impression that bitcoin will always use less electricity than television devices in standby. that's definitely not true.

[Carlton Banks]

I read that for a single transaction Bitcoin uses the amount of energy that could power an US home for 22 days!

that's incorrect

Transactions aren't related to the amount of energy used to mine, if that was true then:

Code:

More mining = More transactions

...which is 100% wrong

energy used in mining only finds the next block. It's trivial to demonstrate this; every once in a while, a block is found with 0 transactions processed in it. That block is subject to the same threshold requirement as all the blocks before and after it (during the ~ 2 week window where the difficulty of finding a new block is static).


I would suggest actually reading more than 1 article about bitcoin mining before you venture strong opinions on the subject publicly, as you've ended up repeating a whole string of statements that are factually wrong, not just this one

[Lucius]

~snip~

Current consumption is something that is the result of the first 10 years of Bitcoin, so although it is impossible to predict how much electricity will be needed on an annual basis after another 10 years, can we say that consumption will reach about 1% of total world consumption? Whether it is a lot or a little depends on how you look at it, and who makes the judgments about it. Some already blame Bitcoin mining for global warming and pumping numbers trying to portray Bitcoin in a negative light.

I may be wrong, but a good part of the world still lives pretty much isolated on technology today (no Internet, TVs, washing machine, microwave...) and I am sure that in the future they will contribute to even greater consumption of electricity. The fact is that all electrical devices in the world consume double-digit more electricity in standby mode than it is spent on mining in one year. Added to this is the fact that the largest mining farms are located near hydroelectric power plants, and that the electricity they use is largely surplus.

[BigBoom3599]

that's incorrect

Transactions aren't related to the amount of energy used to mine, if that was true then:

Code:

More mining = More transactions

...which is 100% wrong

energy used in mining only finds the next block. It's trivial to demonstrate this; every once in a while, a block is found with 0 transactions processed in it. That block is subject to the same threshold requirement as all the blocks before and after it (during the ~ 2 week window where the difficulty of finding a new block is static).


I would suggest actually reading more than 1 article about bitcoin mining before you venture strong opinions on the subject publicly, as you've ended up repeating a whole string of statements that are factually wrong, not just this one

Fair point, putting the energy consumption in function of amount of transactions may not be completely correct. However it does give a good perspective on how massive the consumption actually is, it gives the number meaning.

If you want a more correct number, here it is: The Bitcoin network uses an estimated 73 TWh per year while only verifying 100 million transactions.

I know full well that more mining != more transactions. Instead of attacking my knowledge on Bitcoin (which is more than 1 article) please provide your opinion on this issue and contribute to the discussion. Thanks