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."
Sure. (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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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.
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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.
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BTC unpredictability graph [imgur.com]
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2) Bitcoin miners are co-locating at hydro plants to get cheap energy.
case China and Russia: https://medium.com/@evawxiao/c... [medium.com]
"China has an enormous surplus of electricity that can be harnessed for mining. In 2016, for instance, overcapacity from hydropower stations in Sichuan and Yunnan amounted to a whopping 45.6 terawatt hours. To put that into perspective, the entire US generated 4,100 terawatt hours of electricity in the same year.* By partnering with these power stations, cryptocurrency miners get acc
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"In 2016, for instance, overcapacity from hydropower stations in Sichuan and Yunnan amounted to a whopping 45.6 terawatt hours"
that's almost 20% of the total power generated by all of China's wind turbines in 2016 or the output of nine 1 GW coal plants running at a 60% capacity factor.
Why are they not using that power?
Re:5 Things To Know From The Article (Score:4, Insightful)
Central planning sucks at anticipating demand / huge differences between rainy season and dry season / China is big and the distances to other regions that would need the energy is too great
Pick one, two or three :)
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Corruption. Local grid operators want to keep coal jobs and buddy's power plant running (more jobs). Importing power equates to exporting money and jobs.
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'Over-capacity' for hydro does not make one iota of sense, why would you burn coal when you can have relatively free energy from the dam.
"amounted to a whopping 45.6 terawatt hours"
They could have burnt that much less coal.
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The grid cannot handle it?
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You could easily just make the hashing requirements gentle and still verify the chain.
At one point the hashing requirements were gentle, but people put more an more research and investment into doing it efficiently so the difficulty rose, so they put more effort into doing it better, and the cycle perpetuated. The original white paper envisioned mining to be done by individuals, but as it turns out the particular algorithm BTC is based on happens to be possible for dedicated ASICs to process thousands of times faster than a CPU or even GPU can. Frankly even if the algorithms in use were suc
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You just don't award much for mining. The whole thing is insane.
If there was no reward for mining, why would people invest the money to do it ?
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Because they thought bitcoins were useful
I think bitcoins are useful, but I'm not mining myself.
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No, you could not. The only reason Bitcoin solves the famous Byzantine Generals' problem is due to the amount of work that goes into its Proof of Work.
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"Much of the mining takes place in China, which generates most of its electric power from coal, prompting warnings that bitcoin threatens to wreck the environment and supersize the world's carbon footprint."
Well, at least we now know who has been artificially driving up the price of bitcoins:
The International Coal Industry Conspiracy!
As the thirst for Bitcoins exponentially expands, our renewable sources of electricity will be quickly exhausted. The only solution will be to re-open the mines and coal fired power plants.
Otherwise, the US could face a Bitcoin mine shaft gap . . .
Re:5 Things To Know From The Article (Score:4, Funny)
Otherwise, the US could face a Bitcoin mine shaft gap . . .
Wow. For some reason I just got a woodie. Tell me about Lenstra elliptic curve factorization, differential encoding and little endian nonces.
Eco alarmists exaggerate ... (Score:1, Insightful)
... and journalists took the bait hook line and sinker.
Must be another day ending in Y.
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But moral panics are fun!
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I mine crypto currencies during the year when it is cold outside. While my electricity bill has gone up, my natural gas bill has gone down. So for cases where the waste heat is useful, should the energy consumption be treated the same?
The source of the electricity matters too (without taking pollution into account). If the power plant you get electricity from releases as much heat energy as it produces electricity, it's far from zero sum.
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Idle chargers probably ... (Score:2)
... use more electricity.
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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.
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Gotta look at the numbers.
There are a shit-load more idle chargers than there will ever be mining rigs.
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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.
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You don't provide any citations.
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Neither did you.
But everything is easily verified using a few google searches.
Media, and most people here, are morons. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Media, and most people here, are morons. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: Media, and most people here, are morons. (Score:2)
Those people are mining in the most inefficient means possible.
Worse than using an abacus?
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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?
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And more importantly, you can go back to the future almost 4 times!
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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
This idiot misses the point (Score:2)
" 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.
Re: This idiot misses the point (Score:2)
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.
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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
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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.
Re: This idiot misses the point (Score:2)
"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.
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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)
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
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I worked through similar math and also got to a power level of 1.4 GW.
Remember, however, that they're ultimately calculating the total energy consumption, not energy per unit time (as measured by watts). At the yearly level, 1.4 GW * 24 hours / day * 365 days / year ~ 12 TWh / year -- exactly what De Vries says is a lower bound. So at a first glance, the figures check out to me.
Ga Power's plant Vogtle presently has two 1.2 gigawatt nuclear reactors, so all of bitcoin mining could be handled by that one plant.
Extra points if you know why Alvin Vogtle was more cool than Steve McQueen.
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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.
If not correct now, will be later (Score:2)
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.
Re: If not correct now, will be later (Score:2)
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
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If 97-99% of banks and cash registers closed due to zombie attack, US Dollars would lose a lot of value as well.
You post is only relevant to the obsolete "Bitcoin Cash" chain, not real Bitcoin.
12 Giga Watts (Score:2)
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.
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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?
You computer uses moe power than you think (Score:2)
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.
This is not hard. (Score:2)
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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The environment is a scam perpetuated by the Chinese to keep America from being competitive. And you can blame "Big Weather" for creating these recent storms to boost ratings.
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Once the Democrats give up on carbon taxes, we can go back to having a civilised discussion.
It's like after they lost the civil war it stopped being controversial to say that working black people to death on plantations is bad. Before the civil war, questioning drapetomania [wikipedia.org] was questioning The Science.
Re:Why not hold climate 'science' to this standard (Score:4, Informative)
These "Democrats"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... [nytimes.com]
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Bullshit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: Why not hold climate 'science' to this standar (Score:2)
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Climate 'science', for example, needs to face far more objective scrutiny than it currently does.
Keep your hands over your ears and go LALALALALALALAL!
PS: climate science has plenty of large corporations busy trying to prove it wrong (and failing)
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Re: Why not hold climate 'science' to this standa (Score:3, Informative)
You have two theories. The first one you present in your first sentence. The second one you present in your last sentence. When we apply the scientific method properly we have to consider both of your theories to be incorrect until one or both have been proven to be correct. We don't just 'conclude' one to be correct. We require sufficient evidence before we come to any conclusion.
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...you prove that a theory is correct. You don't prove that a theory is incorrect.
You don't disprove that a theory isn't incorrect.
Re: Why not hold climate 'science' to this standa (Score:1, Flamebait)
When it comes to science, you don't prove the negative. That is, you prove that a theory is correct.
What in the fuck are you smoking??
Re: Why not hold climate 'science' to this stand (Score:3)
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Please try to act like a mature, intelligent adult in discussions here. When it comes to science, you don't prove the negative. That is, you prove that a theory is correct. You don't prove that a theory is incorrect.
Science is about both things. Finding out what doesn't happen tells us more about what does happen, by helping us eliminate possibilities.
Climate 'scientists' have not yet proven their theories to be correct.
That, however, is a complete lie.
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you prove that a theory is correct. You don't prove that a theory is incorrect.
facepalm^10.
(shakes head and walks away)
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Re: Why not hold climate 'science' to this standa (Score:2)
Climate 'science' is essentially a religion because of how detached it is from the observed evidence.
Among scientists who study this all the time, you are in the severe minority here. Why should we think you are right and the majority from multiple backgrounds and disciplines are wrong?
Coming up with conclusions that fit the needs of politicians who want to impose taxes on carbon, of all the absurd things to tax, is contradictory to the scientific method.
You are mixing politics with science. The application of the latter by the former is rarely scientific. Usually more religious, customs, and emotional based. Politics has historically been a subset of religion.
But to counter, there is far far more funding, establishment, players, and status quo for proving Climate Change w