Bitcoin isn't green

[01BTC10]

Producing electronic like the computer we use or FPGA is not green. But once produced FPGA is greener than GPU.

[nedbert9]

Energy economics is a difficult field to wrap your mind around.  Don't assume that ASICs will make the number lower.  A large portion of every dollar spent on mining hardware ultimately ends up being consumed as energy as well.

Every last economically-recoverable bit of fossil energy will be burnt with or without Bitcoin.

Think of the level of waste due to mal-investment, for instance, in maintaining Dollar hegemony or the global derivatives market.  Bitcoin is insignificant in comparison, and always will be.

@ OP.  ^ was exactly my point.  If Bitcoin becomes what it was intended to be the energy cost would be minuscule compared to the large financial institutions.

So, Bitcoin, potentially, is massively greener by comparison, so worrying that is not green is obtuse.

[realnowhereman]

Once after FPGA comes online, it'll be lower

No, it won't.  Well maybe for a few people, for a while as FPGAs distribute through the network.

The network adjusts difficulty, and miners buy more buying power until the block cost equals the block reward.  The technology used is, I'm afraid, not a factor.

Cost per transaction will go down as the average transactions per block goes up or as the reward per block goes up (measured in dollars).  Nothing to do with the hash rate.

What we do get is a more secure block chain for the same cost -- hurrah.

[RandomQ]

BTC will have a new green option in the future www.greenbtc.com (Coming Soon)

[Xmufa23X]

Bitcoin needs mining. Mining costs a whole lot of electricity. Electricity still mostly comes from fossil fuels.

Ergo, bitcoin isn't green.

I can rephrase that, and play with words all day as well:
Bitcoin needs mining. Mining costs almost no electricity. Electricity can come from microwave lasers from solar satellites orbiting our Earth.

Ergo, Bitcoin is space age and the future!

Now the facts:
Bitcoin needs mining. Mining uses electricity. Electricity comes from energy.

Ergo, bitcoin is energy.



Your logic is flawed.

[jamessandydale]

well, HUMANS and everything they do isn't green. The problem is that this energy must be used to decipher the SHA256 hashes, which is how the btc supply is naturally regulated. If only there was some other low-power activity we could be doing instead this would be great.

How about every time you plant a tree you register the tree and get 1 btc...or something. Someones would figure a way to scam the system, the value will decimate, and people will lose faith and stop using btc. And anyway who is gonna issue you that 1 btc? The central bank of btc? I think alot of people participate in btc because its decentralized and anonymous, and the environmentally unfriendly methods we have now give the currency the unique qualities that make people want to trade in some of there dollars for it.

[benjamindees]

If only there was some other low-power activity we could be doing instead this would be great.

Slavery is pretty low-power.  You should try that.

[arne]

I heard Chinese people are good at math and have low hourly wages. Just saying.

[BlackBison]

Bitcoin mining probably uses like 0.000001% of the worlds energy. Who cares if its green or not?

[deus-ex-machina]

Once mining becomes unreasonable(er) it will be greener. Why? No electricity except for the transactions.

[jamessandydale]

If only there was some other low-power activity we could be doing instead this would be great.

Slavery is pretty low-power.  You should try that.

Ok...

[dirtycat]

silly "go green" hippies

[MoonShadow]

Bitcoin needs mining. Mining costs a whole lot of electricity. Electricity still mostly comes from fossil fuels.

Ergo, bitcoin isn't green.

Any thoughts about this?

The US dollar needs paper from trees & cotton, and printing presses, and a mint, and employees, and security trucks to move it around, and computers to count it all, and banks to hide it in, and construction of banks, and more employees.  All of these activities require electricity, and material resources, and human resources.

Ergo, the US dollar isn't green.

[Raoul Duke]

What currencies are considered green now?

I always heard that green currency was the US Dollar. Maybe I got fooled, dunno.

[khagler]

If you're worried that Bitcoin is a sin in your religion, why not just go to the Catholic Church Al Gore and buy an indulgence carbon offset?

[jamessandydale]

If you're worried that Bitcoin is a sin in your religion, why not just go to the Catholic Church Al Gore and buy an indulgence carbon offset?

I'm more of an environmentalist than almost anyone I know, but I feel the same way that the green movement is looking more and more like a religion. Anyways back to the regular discussion...

[MoonShadow]

If you're worried that Bitcoin is a sin in your religion, why not just go to the Catholic Church Al Gore and buy an indulgence carbon offset?

I'm more of an environmentalist than almost anyone I know, but I feel the same way that the green movement is looking more and more like a religion. Anyways back to the regular discussion...

Well, once one of the founders of Greenpeace comes out and says that Greenies are screwed up for rejecting the science on (carbon free) nuclear energy, it's past the cult stage.

[publio]

Once mining becomes unreasonable(er) it will be greener. Why? No electricity except for the transactions.

Let's hope we'll always have miners wasting electricity; we need them to protect our coins.

[benjamindees]

http://adventurecolorad.hubpages.com/hub/Dollar-Coins-Saving-The-Government-Money

The dollar bill has an average lifespan of 18-22 months. Some will last longer, but that means that every two years or so the U.S. Mint has to make a new supply of dollar bills. A dollar bill only costs 6 or 7 cents to make, but because it has to be replaced so frequently, it ultimately costs the government more money to use it over time.

Bitcoin has a current market cap of around $43 million.  It costs about $15,000 per day to maintain.

An equivalent amount of US one-dollar bills would cost over $3,500 per day, in printing costs alone just to replace worn bills.  That doesn't even count transport and handling costs and all the energy wasted by the banking system, which, believe me is substantial.  In fact just the energy used by ATM machines would probably dwarf the Bitcoin network.  The energy used by the corporate jets owned by the largest banks would probably dwarf the Bitcoin network.

But it actually gets much better.  Because the current Bitcoin market cap could grow by a factor of 100 with only, at most, a doubling or tripling of energy consumption.  That would make it a 4.3 billion dollar market cap supported on less than $45,000 per day.  The equivalent in dollar bills, say ten-dollar bills on average, would cost $35,000 per day, just to print replacement bills.

And 4.3 billion dollars isn't even that much in terms of a currency.  There are 9.5 billion one-dollar bills in circulation alone.

[Shawshank]

The reason why it costs so much to mine is because Bitcoin resembles commodity money, similar to gold mining. The value of commodity money, assuming competing suppliers, is equal to its marginal cost of production.

On the other hand, fiat money such as the US dollar and the euro, commands a value far higher than its costs of production, which raises the risk of severe mismanagement by their monopolistic suppliers.

The good thing is that in Bitcoin, it is likely that its marginal cost of production will mostly go to Research and Development to build more energy efficient and faster hash generators. So I believe Bitcoin occupies the green scale of commodity money, in comparison to gold, silver, etc.