Just a few moments ago this question popped to my mind. I was curious and asked myself
how much raw power was used in the process of building the Bitcoin blockchain.
Actually this is a very interesting and research paper worthy question to answer, after all we're building the new digital pyramids of our era brick by brick - or better block by block. I started the question in the Wall Observer thread, but I'd like to concentrate the discussion and the research in a specific thread so it won't get buried under thousands of pages.
xhomerx10 started to work on it already and just came up with a very interesting observation, that even the bandwidth should be accounted in the equation to get an accurate picture.
Here are the postings from the WO thread:
An interesting question just popped in my mind:
How much kWh was used to create the current Blockchain?
Should be somehow possible to calculate it based on the given mining hardware and mining difficulty.
From inception or for each new block?
Purely from a scientific point of view. And from inception, thus the genesis block.
Would be nice to see(feel) the monumental work and energy that was put to secure the blockchain and to get an impression and a feel of how much power was used to create this distributed ledger.
An interesting question just popped in my mind:
How much kWh was used to create the current Blockchain?
Should be somehow possible to calculate it based on the given mining hardware and mining difficulty.
Possible to
estimate, yes; but I don’t see how it could be easy. That would require cost/efficiency estimates for every generation of miners: CPU (various optimized implementations and CPU models), GPU (ditto), FPGA, every generation of ASIC...
Does a collection of those historical data even exist anywhere? If you folks discussing this were to gather in the first instance, the effort may be worth a research paper. Maybe one already exists (with data up to some past point).
Purely from a scientific point of view. And from inception, thus the genesis block.
Would be nice to see(feel) the monumental work and energy that was put to secure the blockchain and to get an impression and a feel of how much power was used to create this distributed ledger.
I don’t think that the historical electricity cost would give a clear view of the
current security of the Bitcoin blockchain. With ASIC hardware, you could easily outrun the whole early CPU-mined Bitcoin network at drastically lower energy cost! Of course, as you continued rewriting blockchain history, sooner or later, you would slam into the historical point at which the real Bitcoin network’s hashrate exceeded your hardware’s capabilities. From that point onwards, you would just get further and further behind with your fake blockchain, as the chaintip of the real Bitcoin network keeps advancing faster than you can chase it.*
Still, yes, the energy-cost accounting
would be historically interesting.
purely for science
The real kind!
(* And one of the marvellous properties of the Nakamoto Consensus is that the “real” chain can be selected by an isolated node with no information except the block data alleging one or more consensus-rule valid chains. Most-work (not “longest”) chain wins, and that’s that. Not even a trustworthy realtime clock source is required. It is the whole point of how this is supposed to work; but somehow, I often see people missing it—usually when they want to suggest some “improvement” which would break Bitcoin’s security without even achieving what they expect.)
What people forget on these type calculations is all those that mined but didn't win a block, that is part of the calculations as that is what creates the dif.
Working on it...
Transferring 10 MB of data uses about the amount of energy in a AA battery which is 0.0039 kWh
Here are the top ten viewed YouTube music videos and the number of times they were viewed (while I compiled this tonight).
The average video play time is ~ 4 minutes which equates to about 40 MB of data transfer per video per view.
The total number of views for the 10 songs above is 43808209188.
This translates to 683408063.3328 kWh of energy for the data transfer alone.
I'm just warming up. Thanks for the confidence and the pressure JJG, it will help me to achieve the optimal level of arousal required to complete my mission.
Wait, should I even bother to include data transfer for pool mining or just the CPU/GPU/FPGA/ASIC power required for hashing?
Don't worry @Hueristic. I'll use the network hash rate in my calculation to ensure the energy usage from all miners is included.
edit: SMF seems to insert superfluous breaks when translating BBcode to HTML.
Damn, that's the spirit - awesome !
I was thinking of only the power required to run the hash rate. But if transferring the block chain to thousands of different peers at a specific time (different sizes, varying amount of nodes, etc) makes an extra impact to the total power usage, it would be awesome to include it as well for the big picture.
My main idea is to have a given number to show how much raw power was put into building the blockchain, to show that it is not backed by nothing, but that we are building the new digital pyramids.
