11 ms·
MS: Bitcoin mining uses as much electricity as 1M US homes
- cbanek 9y agoIs that more or less than the amount of power used to grow marijuana indoors? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/27/marijuana-industry-huge-energy-footprint https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/27/marijuana-in...
- dajohnson89 9y agoConsider also that residential power consumption is a minority percentage of the total (vs manufacturing and commercial).
- cbanek 9y agoTrue, although I imagine the legal dispensary grows are all on commercial rates, and those are pretty big.
- cgb223 9y agoI wonder how much that contributes to something like global warming It would be pretty strange if bitcoin had a noticeable effect
- alexkcd 9y agoProof of work systems are, at the core, a race towards ever greater energy consumption. They're an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Surprised how little attention this gets. I would argue that the benefit of decentralization is not worth the price.
- sbenitoj 9y agoWhat would you say is the value of decentralization?
- otheotheothe 9y agoFreedom? On some stuff you cannot put a price tag - like mastercard ads say, some stuff is priceless.
- alexkcd 9y agoI'm not advocating for decentralization. Just offering that up as a common argument that PoW advocates use. I think that in reality, PoW systems become more centralized over time. You can already see that with Bitcoin. Eventually the gatekeepers become those with the largest energy resources available to them, and "we the people" will be in the noise when it comes to hashing power. I'd rather take energy efficient centralization than faux decentralization that also happens to destroy the environment.
- sbenitoj 9y agoThe ability to fork off from the main chain and create your own coin + the long-term economic interest of miners being aligned with the entire ecosystem acts as checks on these potential problems.
- Sir_Substance 9y agoSame as the value of free speech. Civil forfeiture is a great example of a chilling effect based on seizure of property. There's nothing illegal about buying a car with cash, but you might not want to because if a US cop stops you and searches your car, he gets to just keep your money, so people think "eh, maybe not, wouldn't want to be mistaken for a drug dealer". It's not healthy for a society when people start self-censoring their actions like that. If nothing else, it places banks in a privileged position where they can get away with more predatory behavior, because people are more likely to see them as a necessity. It's for this reason that anonymous transactions are valuable. You really should be able to buy legal marijuana or books about firearm construction without worrying that people might judge you. Neither is illegal, if you want one (or both) you should have the freedom to purchase them. However, many people would choose not to buy them, simply because they know the bank might see it on their balance sheet if they ever have to call the support line, and they're worried about follow-on consequences to their insurance premiums or their job if knowledge about that purchase ever circulates. That's a chilling effect in action.
- weavejester 9y agoPoW isn't the only path to decentralisation. A proof of stake system is also possible; or a hybrid approach, where PoW is used to bootstrap the currency, and PoS incrementally takes over after a certain hash-rate.
- sbenitoj 9y agoMaybe, hopefully they figure it out, Vitalik Buterin et al are certainly working on it -- but there is no proof yet that a Proof of Stake system can function at scale like a Proof of Work system can.
- billylindeman 9y agoBitshares and Steemit are both based on Delegated Proof Of Stake and work great. If you're interested in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations you should definitely check them out
- sbenitoj 9y agoThe combined market caps of Steem and Bitshares is ~$500m, that is not the same as a $30bn market cap like Ether.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoAn odd thing to say because that same argument could have been used when bitcoin and Ethereum's combined market caps were ~$500m and were still orders of magnitude higher than their competitors. In fact, many experiments on those networks were NOT tried by developers because they were "soooo big and financially important" at $500m valuations. Due to this relative nature, I don't think that is valid reason to shut your mind off to discussion by trivializing other network's sizes. Cryptocurrencies gets attacked all the time. Much smaller and more insecure cryptocurrencies are double-spent where possible, because these "bug bounties" are still worth several hundred thousand dollars. Its not international news when it happens. It happens.
- geewee 9y agoIt really seems like a race to the bottom. We produce specialized hardware, stick 'em in giant mining farms where they devour power - for what? Crunching arbitrary numbers. It just seems incredibly wasteful.
- twblalock 9y agoBitcoin advocates ought to understand that the whole mining thing, and the increase on the rate of difficulty in mining, and the eventual limit on the number of bitcoins that can exist, are just as artificial as anything that happens with fiat currency, and controlled by a much smaller number of unaccountable people.
- Double_a_92 9y agoExcept that fiat money is stored on a "normal" server. Not on many computers that constantly do full power calculations, on purpose! If all the super computers on the world started mining Bitcoins, it would take them 10 minutes (or so) of calculation to mine a block. The 10 minutes are fixed, it doesn't get faster even if you get faster computers. Just the power waste gets higher.
- sbenitoj 9y agoThat's not strictly correct, the difficulty to mine Bitcoin has increased massively over time: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty Every 2016 blocks the difficulty adjusts so that ON AVERAGE a block is found every 10 minutes. If the hashing power of the network is increasing over time, the amount of time it takes to find a block goes down (can be less than 10 mins) as it approaches the next difficulty adjustment (and vice versa). But you are correct that as the hash rate increases, the total power consumption increase along with it -- at the moment there is no proven alternative.
- sbenitoj 9y agoYou're correct that the cap on Bitcoin is somewhat arbitrary, but the point is that there IS a cap, which is not the case with fiat currencies which can be printed indefinitely (which is why the purchasing power of all fiat currencies goes down over time). You're incorrect to state that crypto is "controlled by a much smaller number of unaccountable people" -- Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are decentralized networks with lots of different stakeholders (miners, developers, exchanges, wallets, users) and no single group is in control. Quite the opposite -- there has to be broad consensus among all the groups for a cryptocurrency to survive long term. Not possible to fork your own currency off of the USD or the EURO!
- urza 9y agoCommon misconception. I let the great Andreas to educate you: https://youtu.be/rsLrJp6cLf4 https://youtu.be/rsLrJp6cLf4
- bdcravens 9y agoYou're assuming people know or care who Andreas is. Many aren't glued to /r/Bitcoin. A common misconception is that the various Bitcoin heroes are well known.
- urza 9y agoBy the downvotes it seems you are true. But the ideas speaks for thselfs regardlea. I suppose it doesnt fit to the worldview of sillycon valley "hackers" :))
- bdcravens 9y agoHN has a higher standard of dialog than Reddit. Appeals to authority without qualification and name calling doesn't really work here.
- lsd5you 9y agoNot convinced. He seems to be preying on willing believers like an MLM salesperson. Mixing truth with omission.
- SkyMarshal 9y agoClean energy production is becoming increasingly viable and cost competitive. CA already produces surpluses of solar power at times [1]. A significant portion of electricity consumed by Bitcoin is already clean energy - Chinese hydropower, Icelandic geothermal power, etc. The hand-wringing over Bitcoin's energy consumption, and suggestions of sacrificing decentralization for it, I'm not sure are justified just yet. [1]:http://247wallst.com/energy-economy/2017/07/03/why-california-is-giving-away-electricity/ http://247wallst.com/energy-economy/2017/07/03/why-californi...
- MagnumOpus 9y ago> significant portion of electricity consumed by Bitcoin is already clean energy Electricity is very fungible, and hydro locations are limited. This means that when the (very limited) hydro energy is converted into heat to mine bits because it is easier to colocate some ASICs next to the dam than an aluminium smelter - then the smelter will run on slightly-pricier coal instead. The marginal carbon emissions can still be blamed on the coin mining.
- noonespecial 9y agoSome delightful trains of thought along these lines have an answer to the Fermi Paradox as their last stop...
- mathgenius 9y agoI'm not even convinced it _is_ decentralized. Seems like mining is clustered around a few big operations (mostly in china) that have access to cheap electricity.
- sbenitoj 9y agoEven if it's not perfectly decentralized, the fact that users can fork and create their own cryptocurrency acts as a fail safe. Miners with > 51% mining power would only be destroying their own long term profitability if they destroy the network.
- Synaesthesia 9y agoIt’s but a tiny fraction of the environmental damage the US mulitary creates, with it’s reliance on oil.
- __warlord__ 9y agoI know this proof of work is not efficient (energy wise) but I think is worth the price to get rid of centralized entities. I hope with time we will find more efficient ways to handle the decentralization but for the moment is a good start.
- anandsuresh 9y agoThe proof-of-work algorithm is an expensive proposition. I wonder if there are ways to utilize all that power and compute to perform useful work... like reCAPTCHA. The desired characteristics would include to ability to dynamically modify the difficulty of the problem.
- hamandcheese 9y agoI really like this idea. Perhaps transaction fees could be paid by those needing compute, and the result might be a globally distributed cryptocurrency AND a huge pool of (hopefully) cheap compute resources.
- anandsuresh 9y agoExactly! I don't expect this to work for every case, but if we can re-think even a small subset of socially-relevant computation problems as a PoW scheme, that could be a game-changer!
- otheotheothe 9y agoIt absolutely is USELESFULL work, its protecting a 40 BIO USD Marketcap, financial freedom, censorship resistant payments... Recaptcha and co are gimmicks compared to this.
- anandsuresh 9y agoI wouldn't go so far as to call reCaptcha a gimmick. It is an excellent example of how a slight modification/re-mapping of the original problem-space can solve more socially/commercially useful problems. PoW has proven itself in the field for years, while PoS is still untested at scale. Being able to piggyback scientific/medical/environmental computation over a PoW scheme would provide significant value as opposed to a fairly useless compute problem such as the double-SHA256. The key here is to be able to re-interpret/re-state a problem in terms of the PoW algorithm with the following characteristics: - Expensive to calculate, cheap to validate - Dynamically-adjustable difficulty An ideal implementation of this would be similar to an OS running an idle process (double SHA256), and switching to running user-processes (medical/scientific computation) when needed/instructed.
- dplarson 9y agoI'm having trouble finding the source of the figure shown, but I did find a page with similar information ("Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index"): https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
- mrb 9y agoI have produced what is to my knowledge the most precise estimate of Bitcoin's energy consumption: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ That other index ("Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index") is famously flawed, and its author is strangely defensive. I wrote a critic: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ The chart https://twitter.com/FatTailCapital/status/899714838796148745 https://twitter.com/FatTailCapital/status/899714838796148745 was produced as described in the footnote (mining hashrate × efficiency linearly declining from 1.5 to 0.2 J/GH), which IMHO fairly represents the "upper bound" of the energy consumption. The real consumption is likely lower. For example my study estimates the current efficiency is between 0.100 and 0.195 J/GH. To give you an idea, "1M US homes continuously" is roughly the annual electricity consumption of decorative Christmas lights in the US.
- dplarson 9y agoThanks for the info and context!
- 0xbear 9y agoI only mine during late fall and winter, when heat is not wasted. I wonder if they took that into account.
- czechdeveloper 9y agoMost mining are centralized factories where such thing is not even possible, so I believe it would not even make sense to put your case into account.
- kalleboo 9y agoWell, it could be possible (district heating is a thing in many places)
- pkulak 9y agoResistance heating is still pretty wasteful.
- hueving 9y agoHow so? Do you just mean electric heating in general?
- Symbiote 9y agoA heat pump (a reverse air conditioner) is more than 100% efficient at heating a building.
- krastanov 9y agoModern ACs can be used to heat - they "pump" thermal energy from the cold outside to the warm inside (against the thermal gradient). For 1W of consumed electrical power they deliver 5W (for example) of total heating power to the room. On the other hand, resistive heaters deliver 1W of heat for 1W of consumed electrical power. This is the difference between "waste heat" (e.g. resistive heating) and heat pumps.
- colordrops 9y agoIsn't a lot of mining done in places where electricity is cheap and/or clean, such as hydroelectric in China and geothermal in Scandinavia?
- zakk 9y ago57.2% of Chinese energy is from coal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China Also it doesn't seem to me that Scandinavian countries are particularly active in mining. Understandably, since electric energy there isn't cheap.
- urza 9y agoYes it is. Chinese mines are mostly hydro powered. On iceland is running huge mining operarion on thermals.
- zakk 9y agoNo, more than half of Chinese energy is produced from coal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China I did some research, and it doesn't seem that the mining farm in Iceland is even comparable to Chinese ones in terms of hashrate. Do you have any source?
- urza 9y agoMany od the mines in china are placed directly near the hydro poweplants.. not becauss any environmental factors but because hydro pw is cheaper for them.
- zakk 9y agoIt still seems a quite a stretch to say that "Chinese mines are mostly hydro powered", when the country runs mostly on fossile fuels and the three biggest mining pools (accounting for 46% of total world hashrate) don't seem to be anywhere near a hydro powerplants.
- coryl 9y agoWhats the alternative cost of printing, storing, protecting, and maintaining an equivalent cash value? Is that a fair comparison?
- bdcravens 9y agoThen you'd have to factor in cost of running exchanges as well as storing for those who maintain their own wallet.
- coryl 9y agoRegardless, an economy running on say $100b of cryptocurrency is more cost efficient than one running on cash, is it not? I mean, as a matter of principle, the transaction fees of a bitcoin transaction are always cheaper than any credit card swipe, ATM withdrawal, or wire transfer.
- krfsm 9y agoIf you don't include the cost of mining hardware, you're probably not making a fair comparison. (Then you have the philosophical question about what is a reasonable comparison target.)
- modeless 9y agoI am always disappointed when this discussion comes up, because nobody considers what will certainly happen in the future. This situation, where a large percentage of Bitcoin's value is spent on mining, is temporary. Bitcoin's mining reward halves every couple of years. When the Bitcoin block reward becomes negligible, as it certainly will in within a few decades, the only thing funding Bitcoin miners will be transaction fees, so the entire cost of Bitcoin mining will be borne directly by users of the network. The amount of money spent on electricity for mining is exactly the same as the (perceived) value of the mining rewards. Therefore, in the future the amount of money spent on electricity for mining will certainly go down as a percentage of Bitcoin's value. If Bitcoin becomes very popular and valuable, transaction fees may be significant in absolute terms, but they will always be a very small percentage of the total, and likely smaller than the percentage of economic output consumed by the traditional financial system (in the future when the block reward is small).
- beebmam 9y agoI think that's one of the biggest flaws of bitcoin and will eventually lead to its collapse. I simply don't want to invest in mining considering how much people have already mined. There's deflationary pressure for many reasons, but definitely because of the rewards being cut in half every couple of years. And currency deflation is highly unappealing for those who don't have large amounts of that currency. Psychologically this is bad design, and it turns a lot people off from it. It makes it feel like a scam. That's good enough to piss enough people off about it to never use it, including me.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago> It makes it feel like a scam. Under what definition? Is this definition a standard that couldn't be applied to other currency systems or asset classes that you respect? There's a reason I ask so specifically
- modeless 9y ago> And currency deflation is highly unappealing for those who don't have large amounts of that currency. For an individual investor making a decision about which currency to hold, all else being equal, deflation is always better than inflation. Not sure what you're trying to say exactly.
- skrebbel 9y agoAs usual in any environmental debate, all sides choose deceiving stats. In most western countries, homes only account for about a quarter of total energy consumption [0]. So while people reading this headline would think "wow, that's the total energy use of a town like San Francisco!", in reality, it's more like the total energy usage of a town like Fremont. Less spectacular for sure. Remember to use this! If you're pro-environment, always express your energy consumption numbers in terms of "homes", for a 4x more impressive result. After all, who care about the truth when the planet is going to shit (note: the anti-environment folks, or whatever they call themselves, do the exact same thing but I can't come up with a nice example right now). This also means that if you see someone express energy usage in terms of N homes, you know they're ok with twisting the numbers to make a point. Read the rest with a grain of salt. [0] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20170328-1 http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DD...
- choonway 9y agoI wonder what would happen when quantum computers manage to break Bitcoin.
- pmuk 9y agoPlease correct me if I'm wrong but does this mean it takes around 3-4 households worth of daily energy use to confirm a bitcoin single transaction? https://blockchain.info/charts https://blockchain.info/charts
- westurner 9y agoSo, clean energy incentives. > That means 1.2% of the Sahara desert is sufficient to cover all of the energy needs of the world in solar energy. https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power-the-entire-world-by-harnessing-solar-energy-from-1-of-the-sahara/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/22/we-could-power... Nearly all other animals on the planet survive entirely on solar energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy
- billytetrud 9y agoThis isn't at all true. 1.4 terawatts would only power about 230,000 homes. And other sources have estimated bitcoin's energy cost at significantly lower: 330 megawatts: https://securitygladiators.com/2017/03/15/bitcoin-uses-energy-a-lot/ https://securitygladiators.com/2017/03/15/bitcoin-uses-energ... . Also think about the cost of normal money. Just printing currency costs the US over $700 million per year: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm . This is not to mention the rest of the infrastructure. Last point, Bitcoin mining won't get much more energy intensive. Why? Because the amount of energy used in mining is directly proportional to the value of mining a block. As soon as segwit is activated tomorrow, the value of mining will drop. As soon as the lightning network funnels 99% of transactions off the blockchain, the value of mining will drop. As soon as bigger block sizes are allowed, the value of mining will drop. Bitcoin doesn't have to be any more "wasteful" than is needed to secure the blockchain.
- urza 9y agoI wonder how much energy is consumed by wallstreet and all banks worldvide, including the work wasted by all the employees, money printing facilities, and all this other things required for fiat money to have any value. I bet you bitcoin minig is drop in the ocean compared to it.