.

[BurtW]

So you would need 0.038 of these high output Nuclear Power Plants to power the Bitcoin network.  That is fucking mind boggling!  

One more fix needed I think

[Eastwind]

Soooo ...

For the first time since the beginning of the ASIC era the difficulty has dropped today.
It is not a large drop, the network has lost "only" something like 2,000,000 GH/s since the last adjustment. It may not look impressive today but you have to remember that it was the whole network hashrate as of october 2013, a bit more that one year ago, just before the beginning of the last "bubble".

It also means that more miners have left than miners have join the network. The only reason a miner leaves the network is that he thinks the coins he gets are worth less than the money he spends to get them.

But that just happened last two weeks. It will keep on rising in the (near) future.

[ZephramC]

We can look at the (necessity of building more) nuclear plants as positive externality of Bitcoin.
Might even stimulate Fusion research.

[neurotypical]

If only we could conduct the heat generated by big ass miners into tubes that would deliver free calefaction for people, bitcoin would be something even greater.

[antirack]

Here's my take.

The Math: (extract from an internal report)

• First difficult y drop seen in 2 years occurred 2 Dec 2014
• Over the next 85 weeks (21 months) a total of 2.1 million Bitcoins will be mined
• USD $735 million at $350/BTC, $1 billion at $500/BTC, >$2 billion at $1000/BTC
• 280 MW estimated Bitcoin network size today (compared to Google's estimated 260 MW, Facebook 78 MW)
• Block reward halving ETA July 2016 (85 weeks, 5 days as of today)
• Bitcoin output from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC per block (next halving estimated 2020)


Historical Bitcoin Network Data:

Nov/Dec 2014 (today):

Hashrate:                     290 PH/s    (+35%)
Total Megawatt:                 280 MW   (home mining almost gone)
Megawatt Industrial/Data Center:    270 MW   (+35% 0.85W/GH new capacity)

August 2014:

Hashrate:                     214 PH/s    (+375% or 94%/month)
Total Megawatt:                 214 MW
Megawatt Industrial/Data Center:    200 MW    (>1000-2000%)

April 2014:
Hashrate:                     57 PH/s
Total Megawatt:           250-500 MW    (mostly at home miners)
Megawatt Industrial/Data Center:    10-20 MW

If only we could conduct the heat generated by big ass miners into tubes that would deliver free calefaction for people, bitcoin would be something even greater.

Bitcoiners are in fact the first ones to heat complete greenhouses.

[solex]

AsicMiner testing an 0.25 W/GH board.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=888260.msg9794133#msg9794133

[Eastwind]

AsicMiner testing an 0.25 W/GH board.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=888260.msg9794133#msg9794133

If it is implemented in miner, that would be interesting.

[lili song]

We can look at the (necessity of building more) nuclear plants as positive externality of Bitcoin.
Might even stimulate Fusion research.

This is a good alternative energy that can be used to support the massive electricity consumption

Here's my take.

The Math: (extract from an internal report)

• First difficult y drop seen in 2 years occurred 2 Dec 2014
• Over the next 85 weeks (21 months) a total of 2.1 million Bitcoins will be mined
• USD $735 million at $350/BTC, $1 billion at $500/BTC, >$2 billion at $1000/BTC
• 280 MW estimated Bitcoin network size today (compared to Google's estimated 260 MW, Facebook 78 MW)
• Block reward halving ETA July 2016 (85 weeks, 5 days as of today)
• Bitcoin output from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC per block (next halving estimated 2020)


Historical Bitcoin Network Data:

Nov/Dec 2014 (today):

Hashrate:                     290 PH/s    (+35%)
Total Megawatt:                 280 MW   (home mining almost gone)
Megawatt Industrial/Data Center:    270 MW   (+35% 0.85W/GH new capacity)

August 2014:

Hashrate:                     214 PH/s    (+375% or 94%/month)
Total Megawatt:                 214 MW
Megawatt Industrial/Data Center:    200 MW    (>1000-2000%)

April 2014:
Hashrate:                     57 PH/s
Total Megawatt:           250-500 MW    (mostly at home miners)
Megawatt Industrial/Data Center:    10-20 MW

What a great information here, gonna note this !

[siampumpkin]

Interesting. Note taken. 

[Amph]

AsicMiner testing an 0.25 W/GH board.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=888260.msg9794133#msg9794133

If it is implemented in miner, that would be interesting.

they would rise the price of it, until it won't roi for sure, just like they did with their previous stuff

but it's cool to see something x3-4 more efficient

[scarsbergholden]

AsicMiner testing an 0.25 W/GH board.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=888260.msg9794133#msg9794133

This appears to still be in the very early testing phase and will probably not be available for some time. Also more efficient miners will only result in overall higher hashrate on the network which means a higher difficulty, not a lower amount of electricity used

[antirack]

Many megawatts I have personal knowledge of (air cooled) have been switched off recently. If this will be "compensated" by newer hardware coming online (hardware that was already in the pipeline) remains to be seen short term.

[DeathAndTaxes]

If my theory is correct, and the price stays where it is now ($200) the difficulty should drop A LOT at the next adjustment.
We will see.

Probably not (although difficulty may decline some).   What is more likely is a rotation.  Older obsolete hardware getting scrapped and higher electrical cost miners being replaced by lower electrical cost miners.   The boom prices lead to some pretty weak miners.  There were miners setting up shop in UK with $0.25+ per kWh.  The OP talks about an average price of $0.15 but I think the upper end is going to be closer to $0.10 and the average somewhere around $0.05 per kWh.

[Amph]

why they can't redicrect the energy dissipated, to something more useful, right cure the cancer or something

[DeathAndTaxes]

why they can't redicrect the energy dissipated, to something more useful, right cure the cancer or something

Why can't a bank guard also cure cancer at the same time?   Not to be snarky but POW has certain important properties:
1) it needs to be cryptographically related to the current and prior blocks (which is why we hash the blockheader)
2) it needs to be a probabilistic process (any hash can solve a block but on average it will take a huge number to do so)
3) the difficulty of the solution needs to be adjustable
4) the solution on average needs to take a large amount of work to solve but take a very small amount of work to verify
5) a potential solution should be reached by any person with only access to the blockchain and memory pool (no central authority)

This is a very difficult set of requirements which is why POW is the "magic" that made Bitcoin possible.   ecurrency is various forms existed prior to Bitcoin but they required a central authority as the idea of there was no solution on how to achieve a distributed consensus among untrusted peers.

Still the heat can be used for additional work.   I think as ASICs become more commodity based (i.e. when I can buy a reel of them for immediate shipping at digikey) and energy costs dominate we will see integration of ASICs into systems that heat a house or hot water tank with the waste heat.

[Nicolas Dorier]

I repost what stdset replied on https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=920007.60

Frankly speaking, this topic doesn't belong to this board.
However, we can estimate Bitcoin mining power consumption in 12 years, provided that Bitcoin replaced all M1 money supply in the world, what is very unrealistic, but we want to make a conservative estimate. As of 2009 M1 was about 20*1012USD http://dont-tread-on.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/SmallGlobalMoneySupply.png
In 12 years block reward will be 8 times less than now, let's assume that fees still constitute a minor part of block reward, i.e. block reward is 3.125 BTC, that means 18.75 BTC created per hour. Value of 1 BTC equals roughly 1 million USD of 2009 purchasing power (in 2027 USD doesn't exist already, since BTC completely replaced it). Let's now assume, that miners spend half of their revenue to pay for electricity (that's rather unrealistic, but we want to make a conservative estimation), so we have 9.4*106 USD per hour to pay for electricity. If we take a reasonable price of 0.07 USD/kWt*h, that results in 1.3*1011 Watts of total power consumption by all miners in the world. In 2007 the world produced about 20*1015 Wt*h of electric power, or 2.3*1012 Watts on the average. We can see that under such unrealistic conditions bitcoin mining consumes less than 6% of total world electric power.
Hope I didn't make a mistake in calculations.

BTW, we can conclude that even in 12 years Bitcoin is unlikely to replace all money in the world, since 6% of total electric power produced in the world is a bit much, I'd say that bitcoin will need not less than 16 years to achieve that  Smiley

I have checked his model with today's input, and it match with reality. I have not seen any flaw in his reasoning.
My question was : why do you think POW energy consumption to be unsustainable ? It was a very good response I think.
However, we won't reach the problem until bitcoin cost 1 Million $ in 12 years
Even if "6% of total electric power is a bit much" is highly subjective depending on the utility of bitcoin. Also the heat can be reused.

The input he took are conservatives, making them more realistic cost more energy.

[thaaanos]

I seriously doubt that "reusing heat from miners" has any sound foundation, I think that cooling miners is just an extra cost. Heat extraction and concentration may well be uneconomical in most cases, Also converting ac to dc adds to inefficiency.
It could well be that having solar powered miners in sahara even with the added cooling costs may be preferable than expending electricity in say norway and tapping into byproducted heat

[Nicolas Dorier]

I seriously doubt that "reusing heat from miners" has any sound foundation, I think that cooling miners is just an extra cost. Heat extraction and concentration may well be uneconomical in most cases, Also converting ac to dc adds to inefficiency.
It could well be that having solar powered miners in sahara even with the added cooling costs may be preferable than expending electricity in say norway and tapping into byproducted heat

Heat recovery is used in some power plants to get efficiencies over 90%, usually providing heating for towns, not many of them and circumstances have to be ideal for those kind of figures though. Maybe something like that could work though, many large offices are using heat storage and biomass burners for heating to offset carbon charges and mining could integrate well with that both in heating and biomass drying (drying wood chip, etc. has high costs).

Makes more sense to locate where there's an abundance of renewable power though, solar, hydro, geothermal, all better than loading up the grid.

Well, if we agree on the fact that if bitcoin rises to 1million USD in 12 years, it will consume 6% of power (according to the model I posted from stdset), the question becomes : will this provoke an incitation to move to POS cryptos ?
I am not sure about that, because if it rises to 1million, the cost of migrating to something else are astronomical and might outweigh the cost of energy.
However, if the price of Bitcoin would make some business model impossible, I would expect migration to happen.

We can slow down the process with energy reuse, but it does not solve the question, only post bone it.

[hashman]

Last century:  Cost of production of money: 0 watts.   Massive waste of all resources results.

This century:  Cost of production of money: determined by public currency mining market.  Efficient use of resources results. 

[solex]

This thread is about the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network, not about new ways to produce electricity which may or may not be more renewable and/or less expensive than the standard ones. So please don't start this discussion again, unless you have a new answer to this simple question : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=520977.msg7578061#msg7578061

What question? My post above already answers the vague "See?" in the bottom of that post and you may notice I didn't mention wind in that and stuck to relatively stable methods that allow consistent operation.

One for you in turn, why is it you attack any mention of renewable energy usage? Its starting to sound like you have some sort of agenda with this, that was a reply to a direct question on a relatively dead thread that's on-topic with the threads title. Minings energy consumption is considered a problem and every problem can be seen as an opportunity.

Yep. Considering the OP still contains this major factual error.

.. that the network consumes something like 600MW. That is one third of the electric capacity of the plant of Fessenheim that made the news today (in France)