⚡Bitcoin and Ethereum's Energy Consumption⚡

[johnyj]

You need to stop mining. This wastes too much energy and gives too little profit.

Look at people competing for limited gold in gold mining industry: At beginning you can just pick a bucket and mine some gold in river, then you need to input significantly more energy, and then only industry mining rigs which consume mega watts of electricity can mine some meaningful gold.

Is that a waste?

In gold mining, you HAVE TO input lots of energy because it is really difficult to get gold, no matter how high or low the value of gold is. But in bitcoin's case, that difficulty is automatically adjusted based on competition, when the value of bitcoin is low, the competition is less, and so does the required energy input. In this sense, its energy consumption is adaptive, better than gold

Mining coin is more like bidding: Everyone input their energy(or money in a broader sense) and bidding for the coin. But since mining caused lots of wasted energy in form of heat, that is not environment friendly. If you could use money instead of energy to bid for the coin, then at least that kind of heat waste will not happen

[johnyj]

The problem is not how much electricity BTC/ETH mining consumes now. The root of "energy problem" is that we still don't use renewable energy only. There is no lack of electricity. All we need is to explore more eco-friendly energy sources with no negative impact to the environment.

The negative impact is the mass amount of heat generated in mining

[TheGreatPython]

Uuhmm man are you expecting everybody to be mining Bitcoin? There should be those that are buying Bitcoin, because without the buyers there wouldn’t be those that the miners are going to sell their Bitcoins to; after mining Bitcoin, miners always look for buyers to buy from them.

Everybody can’t be a miner. Where I live electricity is costly and I can’t be a miner because I know how much it’s going cost which is a lot of money and I can’t afford that much. Those that I know that are into it have said it’s not profitable for them and some of them have dropped mining to join cloud mining.

[Artemis3]

With this high barrier to enter the market, it puts a lot of centralization on these mining pools. Most people will simply buy bitcoin and sell when it increases to make passive money, instead of running a miner.


What are your thoughts on the energy consumption ecosystem right now?

Yes that is exactly as planned. Bitcoin mining is nearing an end, most bitcoins have already been minted and the reminder will take longer and longer to come, with the reward being so small that those large whale miners will simply go away.

Don't worry about those pools, something tells me those whale miners are mostly Chinese and when when the kw/h at 1¢ becomes unbearable they will close shop. Of course asic production (and improvement) will also dwindle. So a fun side effect of those large whale miners closing, is that since they use the Chinese pools, these very pool will lose hashrate significantly restoring a situation that was more common in the beginning, when only enthusiasts mined. Because after a while, it won't be profitable to mine at any price anymore. So naturally, the few remaining are the enthusiasts that don't care to "lose money" doing so.

The situation is solving itself by pure market forces thanks to the clever Bitcoin design, no need to worry.

You currently have 18/21 million bitcoins in the market, with just 3 million remaining for the next 120 years. Of course most people will just buy them, when mining makes no sense anymore, which should be soon one or two halvings if the price doesn't somehow spike beyond its historical logarithmic curve (which i highly doubt).