Nobody Knows How Much Energy Bitcoin Is Using (vice.com) 161
dmoberhaus writes: A new report published in 'Joule' today claims Bitcoin may use up to 0.5% of the world's energy by the end of this year. We often hear about how bad Bitcoin is for the environment -- it already uses the same amount of energy as the country of Ireland -- but these numbers are usually just the /minimum/ amount of energy the network must be using. The actual amount of energy used by the Bitcoin network is likely substantially higher, but getting an accurate reading on that energy level is hard. The only researcher trying to quantify Bitcoin's energy use spoke to Motherboard about opening Bitcoin's 'black box.'
Worser and worser (Score:2)
Especially considering web page scripting running stuff in ways as anti-efficient as you can get, relying on millons of copies to keep up with the Joneses.
Still, if it helps drive green generation, well, that's right in line with supply and demand.
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I agree, jQuery really sucks.
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I seriously doubt that. Guess what requires energy every time it's spent or used?
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Indeed, the only people who benefit are those who have shares in the power companies.
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The US Government spends about $1 BILLION per year alone just creating the currency. That's just one government, creating paper money. That doesn't include other governments. That doesn't include all the banks and their server farms, that doesn't include ANYTHING that is required to USE that money... that's just to create the paper money. In one year.
Tell me again how you doubt it?
http://mentalfloss.com/article... [mentalfloss.com]
Re:But how much energy is used by traditional fiat (Score:4, Insightful)
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Energy costs money. Just convert one to the other in the equation.
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Oh come on, when all other things are equal...
Just assume the ratio of energy cost to associated cost is the same for both comparison terms, say 2:1 (it doesn't really matter anyway).
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Employees, contractors, buildings, associated services and materials require energy too.
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I don't NEED a bank to spend money.
If you want to include the BTUs my body expends trading money with some dude, sure
So let's assume the article is write 0.5% of worldwide power generation, and my local electricity charge of $.20/kwh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_energy_consumption
Says in 2012, WW energy consumption was 20900 TWh.
so 20900 M kwh.
$4,180,000,000
I think I did that math right.
Your assumption is that the money spent on banks and other institutions would NOT be spent in a
Re:But how much energy is used by traditional fiat (Score:5, Insightful)
$1B out of the global GDP OF $84 trillion is only .0011% of overall economic activity. Assuming that energy consumption of most economic activities is roughly proportional to cost, you've only accounted for 1/420th of Bitcoin's energy use.
And don't forget that the US dollar is used for orders of magnitude more total transaction value than Bitcoin. Even if you add in the energy use of the portion of the global banking industry that deals specifically with fiat currencies, here is simply no way that they use anywhere near the amount of energy per unit of value transacted as Bitcoin does.
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...Even if you add in the energy use of the portion of the global banking industry that deals specifically with fiat currencies, here is simply no way that they use anywhere near the amount of energy per unit of value transacted as Bitcoin does.
Uh, you had to fracture this down to "amount of energy per unit of value transacted" in order to make it look like traditional currencies is a bargain. Now let's add up all of the extended costs of warehousing physical currency (every bank, bank vault, and ATM we've built and maintain globally), along with the cost to print and mint physical media (the US Mint spends billions on metal and materials costs every year). THEN perhaps we can start actually comparing the real costs between cold hard cash and cr
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The US Mint is still making pennies at a loss "per unit". The CFO told them to do what makes sense. Obviously there was some confusion...
Coin production in the US has steadily been dropping for obvious reasons.
The cost of printed money, which accounts for the largest part of cash transactions, is pretty low.
Most 'dollar' based transactions never involve an actual coin or bill.
How to compare I don't know, but its hard to imagine typical currency using nearly as much energy 'per dollar or dollar equivalent".
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You would have a point if all transactions were conducted by exchanging truckloads of US penny coins (which should have been abolished 20 years ago, BTW).
But they're not. Most transactions don't even use paper cash.
The US government makes up billions of fresh dollars every day out of nothing simply by writing a few bits to a database. If you think that, like your Bitcoin mining example, it costs the government 25% in overhead to do this, then you're high. It's a small fraction of 1%.
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You would have a point if all transactions were conducted by exchanging truckloads of US penny coins (which should have been abolished 20 years ago, BTW).
But they're not. Most transactions don't even use paper cash.
And yet here we are, still minting pennies.
The US government makes up billions of fresh dollars every day out of nothing simply by writing a few bits to a database. If you think that, like your Bitcoin mining example, it costs the government 25% in overhead to do this, then you're high. It's a small fraction of 1%.
It's grossly ignorant to try and dismiss operational costs as a small fraction of 1% when the existence of a centralized government and military (requirements for traditional currency) costs taxpayers trillions every year. You're also assuming that the other 24% of government cost isn't pissed away every day with nothing more than good old fashioned government waste.
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We would have just as much government waste and military spending even if all transactions were done with Bitcoin. You can't attribute those costs to the production of currency.
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It you are going to include other costs of money, you should do it for bit coin too. Include the cost of each computer the portion of each house taken to store that computer. Security for computers if you are storing millions of dollars on it they too should probably be stored in a safe. Cost of disposal of old hardware. Cost of bit coin exchanges. I would not be surprised combined hardware for mining bitcoin far surpassed that of banks, and probably replaced more frequently, since banks don't buy cheap ser
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Expensive. I wonder how much of that billion is spent on mucking about with useless pennies.
But still, to put it in perspective: The US money supply [wikipedia.org] is 10,000 billion, making the cost to produce a dollar about $0.001.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, has the wonderful property that unless it costs a healthy fraction of the full purchasing power of a BTC to produce a BTC, then the market will break down. So the cost to produce a dollar's worth of BTC should be somewhere between 0.1 and 1.0 BTC, making it at lea
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The US Government spends about $1 BILLION per year alone just creating the currency. That's just one government, creating paper money
That's actually not a lot for something that costs pennies on the dollar and lasts thousands of transactions. In fact, it's very little.
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Yo' momma.
But seriously:
- nobody knows how much energy street lamps are using.
- nobody knows how much energy idle PCs, servers and related hardware are using.
- nobody knows how much energy mobile phones are using while people scroll through their Facebook feeds.
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The physical cost of that money may go away, but the costs of accounting for it and protecting it digitally will not.
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Re: But how much energy is used by traditional fia (Score:1)
It's like anything involving the Internet. It's magic and new, and very liberating, until it's not, for some reason that wasn't considered.
Re:But how much energy is used by traditional fiat (Score:5, Insightful)
You raise an interesting point about current money using a lot of energy and resources to maintain; however, I'd be shocked if it were 0.5% of all energy produced (as bitcoin is being quoted as using). I've no doubt bitcoin uses more. A lot more.
Also, bitcoin is used by what, about 1 million people world wide? Whereas cash is used by... 6 or 7 BILLION people.
1 million- using 0.5% of all energy (and only a small fraction of that 1 million are miners using it), is a disproportionate amount of energy. Imagine if the other 7 billion of us started using bitcoin too. The energy usage would go up.
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I wouldn't...
http://mentalfloss.com/article... [mentalfloss.com]
Ink, paper, people, transporation, etc... that all uses massive amounts of energy. Just the transport of those bills alone probably uses up a considerable amount of energy.
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They're not even able to handle the transactions going on now in any reasonable length of time.
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I'm not clued up enough to know if the current 1 million miners could handle 7 billion people's worth of transactions but if they could increases in energy usage would be negligible.
The chain has a fixed transaction throughput no matter how people are mining.
If so many people adopt Bitcoin, then they'll need to be fully using a multilayer scaling solution such as Lightning network for all their transactions.
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Yes, it uses power, but so do fiat currencies
Yes, but fiat currencies have a well-defined useful purpose.
Bitcoin is just a vehicle for rich boys to sucker money out of Stupid People.
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Electronic banking also takes power, and given how many servers and things in banks throughout the world it's not a trivial amount of power. But even so, the very nature of Bitcoin both in mining and in transactions makes me suspect the difference in energy used per unit compared to traditional electronic banking is huge. It might be multiple orders of magnitude.
As for paper currency is, I'm not sure that is relevant, as that is slowly being phased out in first world countries.
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Limit hash rate of miners or a region (Score:4, Interesting)
One way to think about it is that BTC needs to do all the same things in terms of power usage as the current banking network AND large amounts of expensive math on top of it. The power cost for mining is in addition to the power consumed by doing stuff the banking system also does.
One way to mitigate the waste of bitcoin is to have fewer miners. The bitcoin network needs a reasonable number of distributed and independent miners. More miners don't necessarily make the network any more secure, they just increase the power consumption. Matter of fact one could argue that the unbounded number of miners creates an opportunity for an insecure network. The industrialization and commercialization of bitcoin mining is what brought us near to a hypothetical 51% attack a few years ago.
Perhaps mining should be restricted. Large scale miners prohibited. Software could solve this, sorry, you or your region is providing too much hash rate and excess mining solutions will be discarded.
Re:But how much energy is used by traditional fiat (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not an apples to apples comparison, because bitcoin is not needed in this world or any other world, whereas normal currency is.
Suppose a new fad appears where people are burning big piles of coal stacked in the shape of a giant penis. Say it becomes really popular. Critics then point out that it's a waste of energy and emitter of greenhouse gases. Defenders of penis coal justify this by saying,
"But the CO2 emissions from cars is much bigger than CO2 emission from penis coal. So it's not a problem, cars pollute more than penis coal."
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BBC = Big Burning Coal? (Score:1)
BBC = Big Burning Coal?
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Re: But how much energy is used by traditional fia (Score:1)
I, and many other people have been guilty at times of finding stuff to keep their computer busy doing. It just seems so living and active and relevant when it's doing something.
At times in the past it involved defragging the hard drive and watching the graphical representation of the 'stuff' being moved around.
Or a screensaver. I remember when I first got AfterDark for my Windows (3) PC. Watching the animations became a pursuit all it's own for awhile. Those flying toasters are random, man.
Going even furthe
Re:But how much energy is used by traditional fiat (Score:5, Informative)
A printing press does not use a lot of energy. Hell, even smelting metal for coins doesn't use anywhere near that much energy.
Visa averaged 6kJ each for 111.2 billion transactions in 2017. Compare that to Bitcoin, which at most favorable estimates (only 0.3% of world energy), averaged 3GJ each transaction. That's 500,000 times as expensive. VISA uses less than 0.3% of Bitcoin's nominal usage, and probably 0.1% of Bitcoin's total usage. Yet it processes many orders of magnitude more transactions.
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No amount of dollar bills ever cost that much per year.
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But how much energy is used by other currencies?
That's a lot harder to figure out, since every currency note has to be manufactured, and occasionally cleaned, or burned and remanufactured, there are also the processing of raw materials that went into every currency note. Furthermore, all the human labor and equipment involved in counting, processing, and distributing coins and notes. Even with electronic payments; there is a massive amount of 24x7 server and datacenter infrastructure to run J
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Even with electronic payments; there is a massive amount of 24x7 server and datacenter infrastructure to run JUST the banking functions, and these applications are closed-source, and not necessarily designed to be efficient in terms of the size and power consumption of the centralized infrastructures required to support them.
Yes but this is changing as well. I know one major leading Credit Card issuer for example plans to have no infrastructure of their own within 2 years - it will all be cloud probably mostly Amazon. They are already well on their way. So that massive data-center infrastructure become shared services. All those compute resources can do something else besides just idling while much of the Western Hemisphere is a asleep.
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The US government is a bit behind the curve. Most world governments have phased out smaller denomination bills and many have replaced larger bills with more durable materials.
Even so, the vast majority of transactions are purely electronic, and those electronic transactions use an almost negligible fraction of what bitcoin does.
Bitcoin's problem is that it replaces centralized trust with proof of awesomeness, and they chose "how many computers can you use to burn how much electricity to do something comple
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The people that have crunched the numbers insist that paper $1s and $5s are cheaper long-run than coins.
I find it hard to believe too, but supposedly a lot of the cost advantage comes in the gimmick of seignorage, where the paper currency is sold at face value to the Fed, making it quite profitable to actually print paper currency. The seignorage profit is less on coins apparently.
I think there's something about people socking away more coins than notes, which adds to the cost of coins.
What seems weird is
Re:But how much energy is used by traditional fiat (Score:5, Interesting)
How does bitcoin compare?
Basically, bitcoin's problem is that it replaced gold's natural scarcity with artificial scarcity produced by imposing a high energy cost to generation and transaction. Consequently, its production and transaction costs are roughly two orders of magnitude higher than traditional currencies. Mathematically, it (blockchain) is a brilliant concept. But it's obvious its developers had little practical knowledge of both monetary economics and day-to-day business economics.
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From an ecological standpoint, this approach to currency i
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So I get it, bitcoin is using massive amounts of energy to power it. But how much energy is used by other currencies? Both in the creation and the destruction of the currency? It costs a lot of money to maintain paper bills and coins.
Very little actually, because 1) the vast majority of money in circulation is electronic these days, not printed or minted; 2) electronic money transfers of common currencies are not using some obscure computationally-intensive scheme to survive on the unsecured Internet but they rather use traditional channels which are vastly more efficient at the cost of some amount of necessary centralization to ensure physical safety.
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So I get it, bitcoin is using massive amounts of energy to power it. But how much energy is used by other currencies?
Compared to bitcoin, money uses negligible power per user. BTC is using a ton of power and its usage is so small it's not even a rounding error.
You're comparing purchases performed by 7B people (money) to purchases performed by a few thousand. In this case it makes more sense to consider the energy used per person, and BTC is horribly inefficient compared to money.
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Most fiat currency is never realised as physical bank notes.
Most transactions with fiat currencies are just amending numbers in some ledgers held on a computer.
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I literally do this all the time. Paying in bitcoin is often faster than cash. If it's taking longer, you're doing it wrong, and either YOU or the person receiving it is retarded.
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So you're paying huge premiums to have your transaction processed? It requires mining to complete.
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No, you set your own fee. I pay about a $0.06 premium for using bitcoin per transaction.
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6 cents, not 60 cents. Just set your miner fee to whatever you want. It's simple. I'm not the only one... anyone with a half a brain can and does do it. You are an idiot if you use the default fees in your wallet software.
MB model 1886 (Score:1)
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And not just outspend competitors - you also have to outspend fraudsters trying to create a large enough consensus for fake transactions.
More importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
how much bandwidth does it consume?
You can always toss some solar panels and a powerbank into your cabin in the woods to mine.
I know there are concerted efforts to thermal map grow sites, and bitcoin miners are starting to be of interest.
The power company knows how much electricity you're using, and they can figure out from your billing information if you're doing something "extra"
Re:More importantly (Score:5, Interesting)
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Here's a Pic https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/... [akamaihd.net]
You must be American to be able to fit a 151MW power station on a trailer.
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You can always toss some solar panels and a powerbank into your cabin in the woods to mine
Where's the profit in that?
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Opportunity cost (Score:2)
How much power is being saved due to heating uses that aren't necessary? Ultimately a computer turns electrons into heat while doing some useful stuff (like playing cat videos) while doing it. The heat is no less for playing the cat video. So a computer is effectively the same as a resistive heater like a space heater is. So if a computer is a space heater which turns its power almost entirely into heat, it must be offsetting heating needs some of the time and increasing cooling needs other times.
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Got it. Once winter comes I'll start bitmining to heat my house.
What about energy consumption of other currency? (Score:1)
Sure, Bitcoin (especially mining) use a lot of energy, but how does it compare to other currency?
- How much energy are used to print/make money and get the raw materia?
- How much energy is used to store money? (Bank and others)
- How much energy is used to do transaction with money?
- What about Wall Street?
etc.
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Not just money. How much energy is wasted by people watching funny cat movies, playing games, or any other kind of unproductive entertainment ?
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Re:What about energy consumption of other currency (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sure, Bitcoin (especially mining) use a lot of energy, but how does it compare to other currency?
- How much energy are used to print/make money and get the raw materia?
- How much energy is used to store money? (Bank and others)
- How much energy is used to do transaction with money?
- What about Wall Street?
etc.
On a per transaction level? I tiny fraction of what Bitcoin does and with plenty of room to spare.
Knowledge ain't free (Score:1)
For 300 bitcoins I'll tell you how much.
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Oops, it's singular, ain't it? I usually use Slashcoin.
Oops (Score:1)
Sweet Mercy (Score:4, Insightful)
That a nifty thought experiment from 2008 now uses a measurable and rapidly increasing percentage of global energy output should be cause enough for geekdom to feel ashamed of itself.
That the end result of this energy use is ensuring we can maintain FSM-knows-how-many simultaneous copies of a rapidly-growing 167 GB file for the purposes of maintaining a fraud-rife, impractical-to-use, and highly volatile digital currency should have us cowering in our basements and refusing to ever show our faces in polite society again.
wait
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Who cares? Let the energy costs adjust and fix it naturally. As for storage, you don't need to store the whole blockchain as a mere user.
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Who cares? Let the energy costs adjust and fix it naturally. As for storage, you don't need to store the whole blockchain as a mere user.
Lots of people care, sexconker. There's every reason to not want to spend huge amounts of power generation on something that is, for all intents and purposes, an intangible speculative investment used by a very small number of people.
Generating all this energy has real-world consequences. It create huge amounts of real-world physical waste. It creates huge amounts of real-world air pollution. Worse, it does all this by design: there's no way to make Bitcoin more energy efficient, as every gain in energy eff
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Who cares? Let the energy costs adjust and fix it naturally. As for storage, you don't need to store the whole blockchain as a mere user.
Lots of people care, sexconker. There's every reason to not want to spend huge amounts of power generation on something that is, for all intents and purposes, an intangible speculative investment used by a very small number of people.
You haven't shown who cares or that there are lots of those who do.
Further, I don't think we should spend huge amounts of power generation on sporting events. Does that mean others should care? Does it mean sports stadiums should be shut down? What if I get "lots of people" to say they care like I do?
Or maybe, just maybe, people can buy electricity and do what they want with it.
Cryptocurrency is CANCEROUS (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nobody knows how much of that total is wasted (Score:2)
writing and reading about Bitcoin...
Those in Cash houses, shouldn't throw stones. (Score:4, Insightful)
Should we talk about how much energy is wasted building and maintaining heavily fortified bank buildings that warehouse large stacks of colorful paper? Or why the US is still minting fucking pennies?
When comparing standard currency to cryptocurrency, traditional proprietors of legal tender have zero room to talk about overhead or waste. At least bitcoin doesn't have to exist as physical tender, and we've done fucking nothing to minimize or eliminate the massive burden of printing and minting cash, regardless of the popularity of electronic transactions. The US Mint spends billions every year just in metals and materials costs.
Re: Those in Cash houses, shouldn't throw stones. (Score:1)
Yawn, read the thread. This has already been debunked. Bitcoin still uses more: people smarter than you have done the math.
The same infrastructure fiat needs,
Bitcoin needs that and some, it's a no brainer.
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Yawn, read the thread. This has already been debunked.
When TFA title starts with "Nobody Knows", I'd say there hasn't been a damn thing truly "debunked". Bullshit comparisons to Christmas lights sure isn't doing it.
Bitcoin still uses more: people smarter than you have done the math.
The same infrastructure fiat needs, Bitcoin needs that and some, it's a no brainer.
Fiat currency and Bitcoin uses the same infrastructure? Care to explain exactly how bitcoin requires physical banks? Or requires a multi-billion dollar organization (US Mint) to print and mint the currency? Not to mention the fact that traditional currency is often backed by precious metals, so let's add traditional mining to the mix too. Hell,
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Yes, we should talk about that.
However, that money, spent for that volume of economic transactions, is a fucking miniscule fraction of what it is for BTC.
I'm not sure you appreciate how much power
If you scaled BTC up to say, the world's economic throughput in transactions, we'd all die of heat stroke before the centur
Re:Those in Cash houses, shouldn't throw stones. (Score:4, Insightful)
Should we talk about how much energy is wasted building and maintaining heavily fortified bank buildings that warehouse large stacks of colorful paper? Or why the US is still minting fucking pennies?
Oh, hey, I agree! Minting pennies is stupid, and we should stop doing it! Paper money is also pretty limited in its utility, and we should try to find ways to minimize it! We could probably find lots of ways to make fiat currency more energy efficient overall, and we should!
We can find and implement these efficiencies this without causing the collapse of the entire currency. We can find ways to make classical fiat money more energy efficient. Energy costs are not intrinsic to the value of fiat currency. All it takes is political will--tough, sure, but far from impossible.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, is defined by energy cost. We literally can not make Bitcoin more energy efficient.
Bitcoin is designed to require maximal energy usage. So long as the energy cost of mining a block is lower than the value of that block, it's worth it to spend the energy. So long as the number of nodes increases, the energy cost per transaction will increase. So long as the length of the blockchain increases, the energy cost per transaction will increase.
In other words: so long as Bitcoin continues to be a viable currency, its energy costs will only increase.
The only way to make Bitcoin more energy efficient is to fork it to a model that doesn't tie value to energy costs. Good luck convincing the world of Bitcoin to do that. You'd have an easier time killing the quarter, let alone the penny.
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Simple (Score:2)
It's simple:
You take the difficulty and current block rate to determine an estimate of the current hashrate (you can also get this info from pools that share).
You could also add 1% or 2% for wasted work (stale shares, for example) and other overhead.
Then you take the best ASIC you can find and get the hash/Watt conversion. Then cut that in half that since much of the network will be powered by older shit.
Then you take your hashrate and divide by your ASIC efficiency and bingo bango, you've got an estimate
Just reband it - CO2 coin (Score:1)
Then again new debt (all fiat currencies) are spent into things which cause environmental damage too.
Wasted Energy? (Score:1)
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So what. Why should we care. As long as the power isn't being stolen who cares. Spend your money however you want.
I'd say if you're running your bitcoin farm on solar, then no one cares. If you're running it on coal. The environment cares.
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If you're running it on any relatively scarce commodity driving up prices, the world cares.
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Proof of work is rewarded because the entire network depends on it. The valuation of the currency is separate from that, and automatically adjusts to what people thing the value of the currency should be. The work also automatically adjusts to keep blocks coming in at a steady pace. But one hour of mining is never pegged to one hour of some other work to produce some good or provide some service. Nor is the more universal measure of one hour of block generation for the entire network (i.e., 6 blocks sin
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I'm running the ReddCoin Core wallet on my main computer, an old Core 2 Duo. I barely notice it's running except when trying to optimize PNGs and shit.