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Bitcoin Businesses Power

Estimates of Bitcoin's Soaring Energy Use Are Likely Overstating the Electric Power Required To Mine the Cryptocurrency (cnbc.com) 115

From a report: The computer process that generates each coin is said to be on pace to require more electricity than the United States consumes in a year. This bitcoin "mining" allegedly consumes more power than most countries use each year, and its electricity usage is roughly equivalent to Bulgaria's consumption. But here's another thing you might want to know: All of that analysis is based on a single estimate of bitcoin's power consumption that is highly questionable, according to some long-time energy and IT researchers. Despite their skepticism, this power-consumption estimate from the website Digiconomist has quickly been accepted as gospel by many journalists, research analysts and even billionaire investors. That model is also the basis for forecasts of bitcoin's future energy use that remind some experts of wild projections about internet data traffic in the mid-1990s that contributed back then to companies spending far too much for capacity they would eventually not need. "Doing these wild extrapolations can have real-world consequences," said Jonathan Koomey, a Stanford University lecturer who pioneered studies of electricity usage from IT equipment and helped debunk faulty forecasts in the 1990s. "I would not bet anything on the bitcoin thing driving total electricity demand. It is a tiny, tiny part of all data center electricity use."
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Estimates of Bitcoin's Soaring Energy Use Are Likely Overstating the Electric Power Required To Mine the Cryptocurrency

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  • Sure. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) * on Monday December 25, 2017 @06:04PM (#55806029)

    It's free money and anyone who says different is a rube. I just mortgaged my house and pulled my kid out of college so I could use his tuition to buy more Bitcoins!

    • by Awkkh ( 5204473 )
      Regardless of what the power consumption estimates are, it seems to me that bitcoin mining must be taking computer cycles away from more worthy scientific projects such as BOINC (SETI, climate modeling, protein folding, etc.). Does anyone have any numbers to suggest that it is or is not the case that bitcoin is harming these?
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

        Make a crypto-currency with a useful POW then; needs a task with a randomizable search space, and quick verification once a correct/satisfactory solution is found.

    • It's free money and anyone who says different is a rube. I just mortgaged my house and pulled my kid out of college so I could use his tuition to buy more Bitcoins!

      I hope for your sake you're not joking. If you are you'll really get upset when bitcoin hits $100k

      I advised on twitter to buy at $11k - whoever listened will be up 50% shortly.

      Imagine if you have an average US house worth $189k roughly, if you partially re-mortgaged for $50k you'd have $450k by the end of next year.

      I know I know, what if it turns to 0 your life would end and everything would be ruined. It seems like it's a 50/50 right>? a huge gamble.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    ... and journalists took the bait hook line and sinker.

    Must be another day ending in Y.

  • ... use more electricity.

    • Take a look at a label on the side of a charger. Disregard completely the fact that they are not drawing the same amount of power when idle and when charging.
      Now take a look at the label on the side of a PSU needed to run 5 or so GPUs. Multiply by number of rigs and assume constant use.

      Mining rigs are closer to water heaters and microwave ovens in power consumption than to "idle chargers".
      Thickness of the cable needed to run a charger and a mining rig should tell you that all on its own.

      • Gotta look at the numbers.

        There are a shit-load more idle chargers than there will ever be mining rigs.

        • There are a shit-load more idle chargers than there will ever be mining rigs.

          A mining "rig" is a useless metric, because they vary wildly in size.

          A popular miner is the Antminer S9, running at 0.1 Joule/GH. Current hashrate is 13 million TH/sec, so about 1.3 Gigawatts, plus overhead for power supplies and cooling. An idle charger uses less than 1 W, so we're talking about the equivalent of maybe 2-3 billion idle chargers.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 25, 2017 @06:53PM (#55806177)

    Current bitcoin hashrate is about 16E18 hashes per second for the network. Typical ASIC mining rigs do something like 1 gigahash/s for about 0.25 watts (some of the newer ones do a gigahash/s for under 0.1 watt). Do the basic math, that's about 4 gigawatts to power bitcoin currently. Yeah, that's a lot, about 3.5 nuke plants, and is enough power for some small countries like Denmark or Ireland or Cuba, at about 35ish TWhr per year. But that is a far cry from the end of the world, which uses about 22,000 TWhr/year. So bitcoin is on the order of 0.15% of the world power consumption. Given that virtually all this power is used by customized mining rigs, and there are only like 3 places that produce those, the growth rate of power consumption is heavily limited by what those companies can produce, even if the $ was there to drive it as fast as they could ramp up. Its taken about 4 years of ASIC production to get to this point (and 8ish years of bitcoin existence overall). It is disappointing that a forum with supposedly technically skilled people is so chicken little about this whole thing. Is it a lot? On tis own yeah, but not really in the whole scheme of things, and it is evolving so slowly that its not like everyone is going to wake up tomorrow and it will be taking up 50% of all the power produced in the world. Keep an eye on it but stop being so fucking alarmist about it.

    • by sunking2 ( 521698 ) on Monday December 25, 2017 @08:46PM (#55806617)

      You assume everyone that is mining is using the most efficient hardware, which all those people surfing pornhub and mining in the background for them aren't. Those people are mining in the most inefficient means possible.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Whoa there cowboy! You are saying the minimum that the network is using is 35TWhr/year, or 0.15% of the WORLD POWER, all for a "currency network" that can handle about 4-5 transactions per sec (aka "useless") and saying it is not alarming???
      WTF?

    • Yeah, that's a lot, about 3.5 nuke plants, and is enough power for some small countries like Denmark or Ireland or Cuba

      And more importantly, you can go back to the future almost 4 times!

    • Woah, bad estimations. First off, figure you have to double the energy consumption just to account for cooling.Secondly, you're talking about an ideal world. Let's say half the computing power is top of the line (you said half of it came online in the last 6 months), that would more than double that again. Let's say triple, if for no other reason than it has to be more than double. So that's 21 nuke plants or ~1% of world energy production.

      ~1% of world energy production is a fucking huge amount That se

  • " It is a tiny, tiny part of all data center electricity use."

    We're not talking data center power usage here. We're talking the actual fucking power of every piece of bitcoin mining equipment, most of which lies in consumer hands and operates at home. Then to boot there are plenty of other cryptocurrencies being mined which are more intensive on energy usage. Way to hand-wave away something you so clearly do not understand, Jonathan Koomey.

    • No, most mining equipment is not consumers operating out of their homes. Almost no one can make a rig efficient enough for that to be anywhere near cost effective. Mining is concentrated in data centers, oftentimes bootstrapped by consumers leasing mining equipment that resides on premises at the data center.

      • by Khyber ( 864651 )

        You clearly know nothing of available cryptocurrencies if you think one cannot do mining at home. Have a peep at zcash. Extremely memory-hard, favors GPU mining and even then you're only getting a few hundred hashes per second with the best GPUs currently available. Look at Ethereum, still GPU dominated because of its memory-hard algo. Sure, ether mining profitability is dropping, but still there and doable on consumer hardware when you join a pool.

        Solo mining might be out of the question for ASIC-riddled s

        • You clearly know nothing of available cryptocurrencies if you think one cannot do mining at home. Have a peep at zcash.

          The whole discussion is about bitcoin.

        • "Solo mining might be out of the question for ASIC-riddled shit like bitcoin."

          So, you're saying I'm correct and no one is doing any home mining of Bitcoin. You chose a very adversarial way to claim I was right.

          • by Khyber ( 864651 )

            You can look at mining pools and clearly see home miners all over the place. You clearly know nothing about the Gold rush, do you?

  • Check my math? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This question seems interesting so I thought I'd do a back-of-the-envelope number myself.

    blockchain.info estimates the total hashing power of the bitcoin network at 14,000,000 TH/s. An antminer s9 can do 14 TH/s. Therefore the bitcoin network computing power could be approximated by 1 million antminer s9s. An antminer s9 draws 1372 watts. So if all bitcoin hashing was done by antminer s9s, we'd need 1,372,000,000 watts, or 1.4 gigawatts.

    Not everyone is using the s9; some people are still using the s7, some

    • The estimate that TFA says is to high is 36 gigawatts, almost 8 times higher than my estimate.

      The difference is that your calculation (which I agree with) doesn't take into account the status quo. Because bitcoin prices have risen so much lately, the mining capacity is trailing behind.

      At the status quo level, when people stop building additional mining rigs, the total power cost will be slightly lower than the total profit, which is 1800 bitcoin reward per day, plus the transaction fees.

  • Since bitcoin was built so that mining gets harder as new bitcoins are mined, power consumption will rise. If the numbers are not correct right now, they will be correct later.

    Except if return on investment on mining hardware vanishes with the rise of mining complexity, causing miners to leave the market. That will halt bitcoin power inflation, but that will also halt bitcoin completely, since the blockchain will not be maintained anymore.

    • But that is limited by the block reward. Right now, solving a block is worth around $100k in the form of the Bitcoin reward. So, it's worth it for miners to spend $90k in hardware and electricity to mine a block.

      The difficulty is NOT designed to rise. The difficulty is designed to adjust to the mining capacity. As prices go up, the reward goes up, the mining capacity goes up, and the difficulty goes up.

      But the reward is designed to phase out. So, every four years or so, the reward gets cut in half, and so m

  • Current hash rate 1.2x10^19 Hashes per second (12am EST)- https://blockchain.info/charts... [blockchain.info]
    Best miners - 10^9 Hashes per joule. https://shop.bitmain.com/antmi... [bitmain.com]

    That took 2 minutes to look up and grade nine math knowledge of scientific notation. If you understand scientific notation you won't become a reporter.
    • Whoa, that's a bit of juice. Now I'm wondering how much CO2 per year is attributable to mining. Assuming most is done in China: What's the average carbon use per TJ or GWh in China?

  • One thing running an ISP with a small data center has taught me is that it's not just the power used by your servers, it's also about the heat they generate. You need to remove it. So if you have a server than consumes 300 watts of power (typical for a Poweredge server with 6 SAS drives), you are going to use about 300 watts more on your AC removing the heat.

  • From TFA:

    "I don't think anybody can make a credible claim about the current" electric power use for bitcoin mining "without actually having data from the miners."

    The network hashrate is easily computed from the difficulty and block generation rate or you can look it up here:
    https://www.coinwarz.com/netwo... [coinwarz.com]

    Today it's 13000PH/s

    The antminer s9 specifications are here:
    https://shop.bitmain.com/speci... [bitmain.com]

    100 watts per terahash is 100 Kw per petahash.

    I'm no multiplication genius, but doesn't 13,000 PH 100Kw/Ph mult

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