Bitcoin needs to change to avoid the inevitable environmentalist backlash

[monsterer]

I am still waiting for the inevitable environmental backlash from the 390 million tonnes of CO2 produced by the banking system.

I take it, then, that you don't expect any news coverage or negative exposure due to the energy cost of POW?

[monsterer]

Proof of Work uses as much electricity to mine 1 bitcoin as it does 1,000,000 bitcoins. It has nothing to do with per user.

The article where these tables have been linked from suggests that at the time of writing, it costs $597 per bitcoin mined. So mining one bitcoin is vastly cheaper than mining 1M bitcoins.

[mestar]

armchair academics take note – in the event that bitcoin scales to a million times its current size and market cap over the next 30 years, it’s environmental impact will still be insignificant compared to existing systems."

When considering Moore’s Law, we can expect $/GH to continue to half every 18 months until at least 2020.

Dollars per hash is not any kind of a limit.  If you can create more efficient hardware in the Watt per hash sense, it does not mean there will be less electricity used.  It means that there will be more hashes calculated.

Electricity will always be the limiting factor.

Simple economics dictate that almost always, most of the block rewards will be spent on electricity. How can we be sure of this?

Armchair academics, take another note:  Bitcoin mining market is one of the most perfect free markets ever created.  Anybody can mine in their bedroom.  If there are profits to be made, there will be miners.  Rarely, if ever do you find a market more efficient than this.

Bitcoin miner is a perfect money printing machine.  Electricity goes in, money goes out.  This simple fact overwhelms everything else, and ensures that Bitcoin will always use a lot of electricity.

[monsterer]

Bitcoin miner is a perfect money printing machine.  Electricity goes in, money goes out.  This simple fact overwhelms everything else, and ensures that Bitcoin will always use a lot of electricity.

If bitcoin always uses proof of work, then you are correct because proof of work will always use a lot of electricity.

[cdog]

In short, ASIC's are 99.9% efficient at converting electricity to heat.

Heat is the least useful form of energy, though. The best solution is to produce less by consuming less electricity in the first place.

Every new generation of ASIC is vastly more power efficient. Can the same be said for every bank branch or finance employee?

Bitcoin enables efficiency gains orders of magnitude above printing, distributing, and then finally destroying billions of notes of paper currency.

This is just STEP 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaBapDvfwFw

During Fiscal Year (FY) 2013, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing delivered approximately 26 million notes a day with a face value of approximately $1.3 billion.
 
During Fiscal Year (FY) 2013, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing delivered approximately 6.6 billion notes at an average cost of 10 cents per note.
 
Over 90 percent of the notes that the BEP delivers each year are used to replace notes already in, or taken out of circulation.
 
Between the Fort Worth, Texas and the Washington, DC facilities, approximately 9.6 tons of ink per day were used during FY 2013.

http://www.moneyfactory.gov/uscurrency/annualproductionfigures.html

[monsterer]

Printed paper money is legacy technology - when comparing electricity usage we really should be talking about digital fiat transfers. After all, if you were to invent some new form of currency now, that wasn't a crypto, it sure as hell would be digital.

[Eotnak]

Fiat uses millions of times more energy than Bitcoin. Bitcoin will save the babies, puppies and rainbows.

Evidence?

Just to continue the discussion, assuming you are correct for a second this figure isn't per person using the currency is it?

World population: 7 billion (ref http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/). Lets assume that half of them use fiat currency, so 3.5 billion
Estimated bitcoin population: 500k (ref http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/197tqx/estimating_the_amount_of_bitcoin_users/)

Ratio: 7000 fiat users to each bitcoin user. So current bitcoin electricity consumption has to be 7000 times less than current fiat electricity consumption in order to be on par.

So, at a million times less energy consumption bitcoin would indeed consume less. So lets see this evidence?

Cheers, Paul.

Please note bold text.

I hadn't. That's actually very useful - this says that current bitcoin mining electricity usage is roughly 600 times less than the fiat banking system. Taking into account my previous point assumption about the cost per user, that means that, per user bitcoin mining uses 11 times more than the fiat banking system.

Talking about cost per user is important because currently bitcoin is far from at mass adoption levels, whereas fiat certainly is.

FTFY

Printed paper money is legacy technology - when comparing electricity usage we really should be talking about digital fiat transfers. After all, if you were to invent some new form of currency now, that wasn't a crypto, it sure as hell would be digital.

Just some more numbers that we can estimate and assume.  Also, printed paper money is current technology and very much relevant to this thread.

[Beliathon]

Bitcoin makes no difference.

Any "environmentalist" who isn't putting their life and freedom on the line to destroy industrialism should not be taken seriously. This is why I don't dare call myself an environmentalist. In reality, I'm part of the problem, enjoying the many luxuries of industrial capitalism such as this computer.

[mestar]

Bitcoin miner is a perfect money printing machine.  Electricity goes in, money goes out.  This simple fact overwhelms everything else, and ensures that Bitcoin will always use a lot of electricity.

If bitcoin always uses proof of work, then you are correct because proof of work will always use a lot of electricity.

Of course.  But, my estimate of probability that it will ever be changed away from POW is zero.

[mestar]

Every new generation of ASIC is vastly more power efficient.

So we only stop adding them when there are more of them.  Again, running costs become the ultimate limit.  Thank you for, again, repeating that "more efficient mining hardware" fallacy.

[torry28]

Bitcoin miner is a perfect money printing machine.  Electricity goes in, money goes out.  This simple fact overwhelms everything else, and ensures that Bitcoin will always use a lot of electricity.

If bitcoin always uses proof of work, then you are correct because proof of work will always use a lot of electricity.

But generating heat with electricity does not necessary means waste. The heat could be well used in future when the competetion will go to the point only the miners who sells/monetarize the heat can still turn profit in Bitcoin mining

[odolvlobo]

Bitcoin miner is a perfect money printing machine.  Electricity goes in, money goes out.  This simple fact overwhelms everything else, and ensures that Bitcoin will always use a lot of electricity.

If bitcoin always uses proof of work, then you are correct because proof of work will always use a lot of electricity.

But generating heat with electricity does not necessary means waste. The heat could be well used in future when the competetion will go to the point only the miners who sells/monetarize the heat can still turn profit in Bitcoin mining

That doesn't matter. Money from generating non-waste heat just means more money to buy more power.

[Soros Shorts]

In the long run Bitcoin mining always moves toward zero profitability. In the state of dynamic equilibrium, the cost of mining would be more or less equal to the value of the mined coins (block reward and fees). Hence there is an upper limit to how much electricity mining will consume. As the block reward halves, the power usage also halves over the long term (assuming a steady price). As the value of BTC increases, the power usage will also increase. This upper limit is independent of the number of users or the number of transactions per second, at least while fees are a small fraction of the block reward.

[Chris_Sabian]

Bitcoin mining uses an insane amount of electricity. If bitcoin gains mass adoption, it will swiftly be followed by a fully justified environmentalist backlash as the facts regarding the vast electricity use in bitcoin mining operations become fully disseminated.

When one mining farm alone consumes $70,000 USD / month (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/12/chinese_bitcoin_farms_from_scifi_to_scuzzy/) in electricity alone, it has got be time to ask why bitcoin is still using the costly proof of work algorithm (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work), which is the primary reason for the vast costs involved.

If bitcoin is to be a true replacement for visa or paypal, it must be an environmentally sound choice.

Cheers, Paul.

How much diesel fuel does a copper/gold/silver mine use on a daily basis?  What amount per month?  It is several orders of magnitude larger than bitcoin is and that is just 1 mine.

[toleng]

Bitcoin miner is a perfect money printing machine.  Electricity goes in, money goes out.  This simple fact overwhelms everything else, and ensures that Bitcoin will always use a lot of electricity.

If bitcoin always uses proof of work, then you are correct because proof of work will always use a lot of electricity.

But generating heat with electricity does not necessary means waste. The heat could be well used in future when the competetion will go to the point only the miners who sells/monetarize the heat can still turn profit in Bitcoin mining

No, it is not possible to transform heat into other forms of energy. Unless you need heat right away (to stay warm) any heat energy is essentially wasted

[odolvlobo]

No, it is not possible to transform heat into other forms of energy. Unless you need heat right away (to stay warm) any heat energy is essentially wasted

Tell me, if not by transforming heat, then how is electricity generated?

You obviously don't live in Iceland, where 25% of the power is geothermal. Try this for starters: Geothermal electricity

[johnyj]

To force people to use some money without production cost (like fiat money), you need to make it a legal tender, that requires a war, which cost many many times more than bitcoin mining, it actually cost everything in a country

If people are voluntarily using one type of money like gold or bitcoin, this money must have production cost to worth something. If it can be duplicated endlessly without any significant cost, it will worth nothing, just look at those PoS alt-coins

[repairguy]

Perhaps you missed it:

I hadn't. That's actually very useful - this says that current bitcoin mining electricity usage is roughly 600 times less than the fiat banking system. Taking into account my previous point about the cost per user, that means that, per user bitcoin mining uses 11 times more than the fiat banking system.

Talking about cost per user is important because currently bitcoin is far from at mass adoption levels, whereas fiat certainly is.

However, if the bitcoin network acquired 100x more users, the consumption of electricity would not need to increase to sustain the other users, bringing the ratio per person to a more respectable level.

Also, as the profit ratio of mining decreases, I think that the overall hash rate will decrease.  Many of the units that will be shut down will be older and less efficient, because they have completely lost profitability.

[Grand_Voyageur]

Fiat uses millions of times more energy than Bitcoin. Bitcoin will save the babies, puppies and rainbows.

And bring back unicorns.

+1.  

This has recently been discussed to death in this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770591.0

There are many solutions to this. https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/19/mining/  Some involve doing nothing as market forces and economics will force decentralized miners to be used for heating.

Economics are already pushing miners to go green to compete with sunk electrical costs  -

http://thecoinfront.com/new-decentralized-mining-pool-runs-on-100-clean-renewable-energy/

In the future it is likely that all electrical costs will be used create the product of heat with PoW as a nice consequence that helps subsidize the energy bill or ASIC appliance.

What this means is the PoW could go from being much more environmentally friendly than fiat to much greener.

No, it is not possible to transform heat into other forms of energy. Unless you need heat right away (to stay warm) any heat energy is essentially wasted

Tell me, if not by transforming heat, then how is electricity generated?

You obviously don't live in Iceland, where 25% of the power is geothermal. Try this for starters: Geothermal electricity

IMHO ASIC Farms surely will end up trying to recovery some of their operation cost by using their waste heat for District Heating ops as some Data Centers already did. As any of you surely knows ASIC farms cooling is a issue and they're already engaging in a competition to be more efficient on dissipating excess heat from their equipments. District Heating is done also with the waste hot water from (Thermo)Nuclear Power plants as in Swiss' Kernkraftwerk Beznau.

[Anarchyman99]

Enviromentalists gonna environmentalist, but if bitcoin really goes mainstream, would it even matter? Whenever there's a lot of money involved, things like the environment are usually forgotten. Just look at the rainforests...