Bitcoin mining leads to cheaper energy, and also cheaper computation

[BrotherCreamy]

There is a lot of talk about how Bitcoin mining incentivises the creation of cheaper energy, but what is not often talked about is how it also incentivises the creation of cheaper computation.

I've been thinking a lot about theoretical limits to the efficiency of computation as it relates to Bitcoin.

I had assumed that Bitcoin miners would soon approach theoretical limits of computational efficiency in the context of hash power.
Maybe within an order of magnitude I thought.

As it turns out, we are nowhere near the theoretical limit of computational efficiency:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle


I'm sure there are practical limits I am not aware of - e.g. lower limits of feature size of semiconductors probably impose a relatively hard limit on computational efficiency.
Someone here probably knows the calcs for the practical limits of computational efficiency with conventional semiconductor technology.

In any case, it is reassuring to know that we have a long way to go yet.

To think that Bitcoin could be a strong driving force to improve the efficiency of computer hardware is very exciting to me.

Just a thought I wanted to share with you folks.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

There is a lot of talk about how Bitcoin mining incentivises the creation of cheaper energy, but what is not often talked about is how it also incentivises the creation of cheaper computation.

I think bitcoin is not big enough yet to incentivizes the creation of cheaper computation.

According to studies gamers consumes similar electricity as bitcoin mining:
"Based on our very rough estimates, we found that the worldwide electricity consumption of people playing video games is 46% higher than the total consumption of Bitcoin mining as of November 2019."
https://braiins.com/blog/bitcoin-mining-vs-gaming

Especially that its a way cheaper to find less expensive energy source (just move a farm to different country) rather than improve efficiency of computation.

[hugeblack]

Just a thought I wanted to share with you folks.

I don't think it can contribute much, let's look at it abstractly, the capacity of the bitcoin market at the moment is far from a trillion dollars, so the amount of spending on research and development will not be like companies with several trillion dollars or mega economies.
If we reach a market capacity, for example, 10 trillion, it will be a suitable motive for research and development.


Based on this article, the volume of investment in development is $80.5 billion, how much do you think the bitcoin share will be?

Semiconductor companies worldwide are expected to increase research and development spending by 9% in 2022 to $80.5 billion after climbing by an above average 13% in 2021 to a record-high $71.4 billion, according to IC Insights' soon-to-be-released 2Q Update to The McClean Report 2022

Soruce ----> https://www.newelectronics.co.uk/content/news/semiconductor-r-d-hits-record-in-2021/#:~:text=Semiconductor%20companies%20worldwide%20are%20expected,to%20The%20McClean%20Report%202022.

[NeuroticFish]

I've been thinking a lot about theoretical limits to the efficiency of computation as it relates to Bitcoin.

Since Bitcoin uses ASICs, which do basically only one operation, most probably the generic computation won't be affected significantly by this. As a comparation, altcoins may have been driving GPUs into getting more powerful, but Bitcoin.. I don't know...

And about the cheaper energy, Bitcoin indeed can (and should!) get people and companies invest into renewable electricity sources, since sooner or later only the mining with free electricity may remain profitable. Will this make people and companies expand their use of free electricity to everything else? I don't know, I wouldn't be so sure, since the mining facilities will probably be away from the place they're living and transporting that electricity around may or may not worth it. Plus, let's be honest, people are generally lazy. They need quite a push to do the right move and Bitcoin alone may not be the one in this case. Maybe the energy war though.

[Hydrogen]

I think industrial crypto mining operations utilizing GPU's, are similar to an IT datacenter. We have seen in past years where surplus datacenter computation was dedicated to mining bitcoin. And the opposite was also true. Mining ops that were no longer profitable after rewards halving were converted into IT datacenters. Nations like iceland used local cold weather in an effort to save on server costs. This opened the door to crypto mining ops and datacenters industries flocking to their country.

In addition to this, rising demand on GPUs fueled by crypto mining likely incentivized AMD, nvidia and others to produce in higher volumes to keep GPUs affordable for gamer markets. Which could have in turn provided semiconductor manufacturers with greater profits and revenue to expand their existing operations.

The same positive precedents might also apply to ASICs even though they're optimized more for pure cryptographic operation rather than FLOPs.

But yes I think it is fair to say that bitcoin mining did incentivize the expansion of semiconductor production and distribution throughout the world. Which is something we can all be thankful for.

[Leviathan.007]

Time after time companies will produce miners with cheaper energy consumption and better performance with less electrical power, which is important for the miners to change their device because they have some kind of competition, in the other hand during the last few years many people are stopped using fossil energy resources and use the renewable energy resources, in the other hand, the miners have a race and if they don't change their devices to use consume less energy or they keep using the old miner devices they will have less profit and will have to leave the stage soon.