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One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week

100 points by mortenjorck 9y ago

harpiaharpyja 9y ago
The title of the article is incredibly misleading. According to the content of the article, you could use, "as much energy as your house [uses] in a week," to mine a bitcoin and still make a profit off of it due to the current price of bitcoin. That's a very different thing from a single transaction using that much energy.
- ajross 9y ago
  No, that's not what it's saying. Here's the quote: > [Bitcoin total power consumption] averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, I didn't go to primary sources to confirm those numbers, but if they are correct the title is accurate. The bigger point here isn't the price per transaction, it's to point out the absolutely absurd liquidity mess that bitcoin has become. To first approximation, no one uses bitcoin to buy anything anywhere, ever. They just park coins as investments, hoping to cash out at some point in the future. Except of course that won't work, because when it comes time to cash out, everyone will realize that there is no one out there to buy your coins. The crash, when it comes (and it will) will be catastrophic. And also, yeah, it's wasting a ton of energy.
  - danbruc 9y ago
    No, you got it wrong, the Bitcoin total power consumption is unknown but it can be bound from below by the hash rate and the most efficient mining hardware available and from above by the price, block reward, and energy costs assuming nobody is mining at a loss. Reread the paragraph before your quote. [...] estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually [...]
    - ajross 9y ago
      All estimates I've seen are that bitcoin mining in practice is extraordinarily efficient and that new capacity comes online to track price increases quickly. You have evidence to the contrary that miners are leaving money on the table?
      - danbruc 9y ago
        If that is true, then the actual energy consumption would closely track the theoretically expected maximum. This shifts the question to how accurate the discussed estimate is but it still does not give the total energy consumption. But we could probably agree that it is probably on the same order of magnitude.
  - cgmg 9y ago
    > The crash, when it comes (and it will) will be catastrophic. Your statement is unfalsifiable and meaningless. When will the crash come?
  - dr_win 9y ago
    I just preordered Trezor T (hardware wallet) and paid with bitcoins. So your statement "no one uses bitcoin to buy anything anywhere, ever" is provably false.
    - ajross 9y ago
      There, uh, was a clause immediately preceding that statement. The point isn't that it never happens, it's that the total value of bitcoin transactions used for "money" is dwarfed by those used to simply "buy coins".
  - harpiaharpyja 9y ago
    Did you read the paragraph just before that, where they state how they came up with the "[Bitcoin total power consumption]" figure? What I said, is what they are saying.
  - senectus1 9y ago
    I know a guy that used his bitcoin to buy a 3D printer, and eBike and some other bits of tech. Then Sold a huge chunk off to pay off his mortgage. Does this not count as using bitcoin to buy things?
- danbruc 9y ago
  The lower bound given by the current hash rate and the most efficient miners available is only about a factor three lower. So it might be only two days instead of an entire week but that doesn't really change the overall numbers and message.
  - harpiaharpyja 9y ago
    That doesn't excuse making an observation about how much energy used per transaction would be profitable, then turning around and saying that's the actual amount of energy used. The impact of the message is lost when it's given without any sensible basis. Until your comment I didn't really know what a realistic estimate of the energy usage would be - I couldn't use their claim, since it was obviously garbage. If it's two days then they should say two days.
tananaev 9y ago
It would be nice to have an estimate on how much resources would be used on the same bank transaction.
- nonbel 9y ago
  # kilowatt-hours per transaction # https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change btc = 215 # Transactions per day tpd = 3e5 # convert btu to terawatt-hours # http://www.dvirc.org/how-much-energy-does-an-office-building-consume/ officeEnergyPerYear = 1.4e9*.293071/10^12 # https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/10/05/24-7-wall-st-banks-with-most-branches/16648133/ nBankBranchUS = 94725 # Convert to kw-h to tw-h btcEnergyPerYear = btc*tpd*365/10^9 > btcEnergyPerYear/(officeEnergyPerYear*nBankBranchUS) [1] 0.6057412 I have no idea if the source numbers are correct, but this is a better statistic. Mining uses the same amount of energy as used for ~58k average office buildings. So the worldwide bitcoin mining energy consumption is about half of that currently used for banks only in the US. This is assuming banks are "average" (probably higher due to security concerns) and of course that banking doesn't consume energy in any other way.
- apetresc 9y ago
  Well, Mastercard ALONE processes well over 3.5 billion transactions per day, compared to Bitcoin's 300,000. So without knowing anything at all about how energy-efficient they are, we can say it must be many, many thousands of times better, considering that otherwise there wouldn't be enough energy on the planet to power them all.
blunte 9y ago
Their approach of attributing cost per transaction doesn't really make sense for bitcoin. I don't know the edge case of zero transactions within a block timeframe, but for 1+ transactions, a block will certainly be generated. And the generation of that block has very, very little energy cost associated with transaction validation. The vast majority of time spent is on hashing over and over until the outcome has the lucky leading zeroes (and thus winning the privilege of writing the block). Whatever throughput solution is devised, unless the fundamental block-writing-lottery rules are changed, energy use will not change significantly. Also, you can't just sum up all bitcoin mining energy costs and project how that energy could otherwise be spent. Energy transmission is complicated and wasteful over great distances. If some mining operations are in areas of low habitation, then they aren't necessarily taking from what could otherwise be given to more productive uses. Finally, assuming _some_ mining is done with local renewable energy, then that energy is not necessarily being wasted any more than sun that falls on unused dirt is being wasted.
- thisisit 9y ago
  While I can't comment on the exact stats they are pulling up but I don't understand your logic here. Transaction is not "valid" until it is part of a block. So, validation is not separate from block generation, it's a part of it. A good read on this topic: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/49531/concept-of-validating-transactions https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/49531/concept-of...
  - blunte 9y ago
    Correct, validation is certainly part of block generation. But the act of validating a transaction is a minimal effort compared to the (many times of) hashing that goes on as part of the proof of work. My point is that for all practical purposes, the transaction validation is so insignificant that it makes little sense to try attribute the energy cost of making one block to the transactions within that block. Stuffing more transactions into a block doesn't change the fact that a new block will be created about every 10min, and that the energy cost of writing that block will be about the same. Seeing this cost from a per-transaction perspective is questionable. The reason this whole process is so expensive is because of the design goal of relative immutability and the proof-of-work scheme that aids in this reaching this goal.
prostoalex 9y ago
He's right to question the environmental footprint, but "worldwide Bitcoin mining could power the daily needs of 821,940 average American homes" only in the world where high-power lines cost zero to build, span enormous distances across oceans and mountain ranges, and are fairly reliable to allow for zero maintenance costs. In certain places of the world the electricity costs are approaching zero (or negative).
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
Well, since bitcoin only supports a maximum of 3.5 transactions-per-second [1] we at least have an upper boundary on its excessive waste. 1. http://www.altcointoday.com/bitcoin-ethereum-vs-visa-paypal-transactions-per-second/ http://www.altcointoday.com/bitcoin-ethereum-vs-visa-paypal-...
- BLanen 9y ago
  That's not at all how it works... 3.5 Tx/s stays steady and the price increases the power it takes will only increase because miners will turn on more machines but due to increased difficulty will mine the same amount of bitcoins. A clear example of tragedy of the commons. Where the commons is new blocks. And the tragedy is the waste of electricity and labour.
- peterisza 9y ago
  Let me add here that Ripple doesn't have a traditional blockchain, sending money is essentially free compared to Bitcoin, and can handle up to 1000 transactions per second (https://ripple.com/dev-blog/ripple-consensus-ledger-can-sustain-1000-transactions-per-second/ https://ripple.com/dev-blog/ripple-consensus-ledger-can-sust...).
- thisisit 9y ago
  The upper boundary should be on the bitcoin difficulty and not tps. More difficulty = more hashes needed to mine 1 bitcoin = more machines added = more difficulty = more hashes....you get the idea.
- imtringued 9y ago
  The upperbound is the transactions fee + the mined blocks. Let's imagine someone makes a $1000 transaction with a $10 fee and a $10 block reward. This means a miner is at most willing to pay $20 worth of electricity to get that block. Increasing mining efficiency only gives you an an advantage over other miners. It does not increase the profit per watt because the difficulty will automatically rise until the desired interval between transactions has been reached. Increasing or decreasing the amount of transactions per block or interval does not directly change the energy consumption. Increasing the blocks per second by 10x means reducing the difficulty by 10x for each block but the total difficulty stays the same.
glenstein 9y ago
I have no problem with itemizing the electricity usage of various things computers do. But is there any particular reason to single out the energy usage of Bitcoin as opposed to say, email, or Google's ad network, or Clash of Clans, or the estimated average electricity usage generated by a single Trump tweet? By all means, let's scrutinize electricity usage, but I don't know what coherent set of priorities puts Bitcoin at the top of the list for scrutiny.
- swalsh 9y ago
  It makes sense, People will keep buying and adding computational power until the return on running the machines is lower than the cost of electricity. when the "cost of a bitcoin" rises faster than the cost of electricity it can directly lead to an increase in use. So unlike any other thing we run on computers for profit... bitcoin has a direct cause and effect relationship.
  - glenstein 9y ago
    People feel their computers return value in all sorts of ways that have zero connection to a monetary return on investment. The value of being able to communicate, to do research, to store their cat pictures, etc. No one is isolating out the marginal added value of additional cat pictures and measuring it against the cost of electricity. And even for the small subset of computer users just interested in bitcoin mining, they just have to know their own electric bill, not the resource usage across the entire network. So I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about.
- rtpg 9y ago
  because we can compare the energy usage for Bitcoin with that of the next comparable thing: credit card transactions. This is useful when judging whether Bitcoin is a good replacement for other payment networks.
  - glenstein 9y ago
    We can't compare electricity usage of Clash of Clans to Castle Clash/Clash Royale/Clash of Lords?
vinniejames 9y ago
The fundamental flaw in the argument in comparison to Visa or MasterCard is the fact they don’t take into account the energy consumption of the entire organization. Visa/MasterCard employ tens of thousands of employees (maybe more). Each of those employees have to drive to work everyday, consuming energy. Then sit in brightly lit office buildings, each running a computer sucking down power. Those buildings have to be built, using time energy and resources. Without taking into account all of the energy overhead required for these organizations to function the argument is meaningless. If cryptotocurrencies continue down this path, it’s quite likely these types of organizations could cease to exist. Resulting in a huge energy savings. It’s also extremely likely crypto currencies will reduce energy consumption by moving to more efficient transaction validation methods like Proof of Stake
- Mr_P 9y ago
  > If cryptotocurrencies continue down this path, it’s quite likely these types of organizations could cease to exist. Resulting in a huge energy savings. These people will still be employed, and other people will be consuming energy maintaining bitcoin farms, designing new mining hardware, etc.
- genericacct 9y ago
  ..Because crypto miners do not operate in buildings that have to be built & lit, right?
  - gonvaled 9y ago
    Do you have any indication that bitcoin is as labor-intensive as traditional banking?
    - dmitriid 9y ago
      What Bitcoin offers is a fraction of what "traditional banking" does. A lot of "labor intensiveness" in banks comes from various forms of what can be described as customer support. Consider just one thing that Bitcoin doesn't offer: applying for a house loan. Even in an internet-only bank (such things exist) there will be a live person handling your case who will guide you through various processes.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ephimetheus 9y ago
What amazes me the most is that the average household sits at 900kWh per month. That's about what I use per YEAR!
subterfudge44 9y ago
I am sorry to harsh words but this is really bad bad journalism. Objective of tech articles should be to educate an average person and not to deliberately confuse him/her/it. This is not clickbait but worse than that. One Bitcoin Transaction = "Energy used to mine one bitcoin". A novice might read this as "Energy spent if I buy something worth $10 using bitcoins. When miners are mining bitcoin it is not a mindless pursuit of a digital currency. They are also doing the extremely important work of keeping the records aka blockchain. Easily the total value addition here is lot more than the cost of energy involved (else no one would do it).

100 points by mortenjorck 9y ago

The title of the article is incredibly misleading. According to the content of the article, you could use, "as much energy as your house [uses] in a week," to mine a bitcoin and still make a profit off of it due to the current price of bitcoin. That's a very different thing from a single transaction using that much energy.

ajross 9y ago
No, that's not what it's saying. Here's the quote: > [Bitcoin total power consumption] averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, I didn't go to primary sources to confirm those numbers, but if they are correct the title is accurate. The bigger point here isn't the price per transaction, it's to point out the absolutely absurd liquidity mess that bitcoin has become. To first approximation, no one uses bitcoin to buy anything anywhere, ever. They just park coins as investments, hoping to cash out at some point in the future. Except of course that won't work, because when it comes time to cash out, everyone will realize that there is no one out there to buy your coins. The crash, when it comes (and it will) will be catastrophic. And also, yeah, it's wasting a ton of energy.
- danbruc 9y ago
  No, you got it wrong, the Bitcoin total power consumption is unknown but it can be bound from below by the hash rate and the most efficient mining hardware available and from above by the price, block reward, and energy costs assuming nobody is mining at a loss. Reread the paragraph before your quote. [...] estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually [...]
  - ajross 9y ago
    All estimates I've seen are that bitcoin mining in practice is extraordinarily efficient and that new capacity comes online to track price increases quickly. You have evidence to the contrary that miners are leaving money on the table?
    - danbruc 9y ago
      If that is true, then the actual energy consumption would closely track the theoretically expected maximum. This shifts the question to how accurate the discussed estimate is but it still does not give the total energy consumption. But we could probably agree that it is probably on the same order of magnitude.
- cgmg 9y ago
  > The crash, when it comes (and it will) will be catastrophic. Your statement is unfalsifiable and meaningless. When will the crash come?
- dr_win 9y ago
  I just preordered Trezor T (hardware wallet) and paid with bitcoins. So your statement "no one uses bitcoin to buy anything anywhere, ever" is provably false.
  - ajross 9y ago
    There, uh, was a clause immediately preceding that statement. The point isn't that it never happens, it's that the total value of bitcoin transactions used for "money" is dwarfed by those used to simply "buy coins".
- harpiaharpyja 9y ago
  Did you read the paragraph just before that, where they state how they came up with the "[Bitcoin total power consumption]" figure? What I said, is what they are saying.
- senectus1 9y ago
  I know a guy that used his bitcoin to buy a 3D printer, and eBike and some other bits of tech. Then Sold a huge chunk off to pay off his mortgage. Does this not count as using bitcoin to buy things?
danbruc 9y ago
The lower bound given by the current hash rate and the most efficient miners available is only about a factor three lower. So it might be only two days instead of an entire week but that doesn't really change the overall numbers and message.
- harpiaharpyja 9y ago
  That doesn't excuse making an observation about how much energy used per transaction would be profitable, then turning around and saying that's the actual amount of energy used. The impact of the message is lost when it's given without any sensible basis. Until your comment I didn't really know what a realistic estimate of the energy usage would be - I couldn't use their claim, since it was obviously garbage. If it's two days then they should say two days.

tananaev 9y ago

It would be nice to have an estimate on how much resources would be used on the same bank transaction.

nonbel 9y ago
# kilowatt-hours per transaction # https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change btc = 215 # Transactions per day tpd = 3e5 # convert btu to terawatt-hours # http://www.dvirc.org/how-much-energy-does-an-office-building-consume/ officeEnergyPerYear = 1.4e9*.293071/10^12 # https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/10/05/24-7-wall-st-banks-with-most-branches/16648133/ nBankBranchUS = 94725 # Convert to kw-h to tw-h btcEnergyPerYear = btc*tpd*365/10^9 > btcEnergyPerYear/(officeEnergyPerYear*nBankBranchUS) [1] 0.6057412 I have no idea if the source numbers are correct, but this is a better statistic. Mining uses the same amount of energy as used for ~58k average office buildings. So the worldwide bitcoin mining energy consumption is about half of that currently used for banks only in the US. This is assuming banks are "average" (probably higher due to security concerns) and of course that banking doesn't consume energy in any other way.
apetresc 9y ago
Well, Mastercard ALONE processes well over 3.5 billion transactions per day, compared to Bitcoin's 300,000. So without knowing anything at all about how energy-efficient they are, we can say it must be many, many thousands of times better, considering that otherwise there wouldn't be enough energy on the planet to power them all.

blunte 9y ago

Their approach of attributing cost per transaction doesn't really make sense for bitcoin. I don't know the edge case of zero transactions within a block timeframe, but for 1+ transactions, a block will certainly be generated. And the generation of that block has very, very little energy cost associated with transaction validation. The vast majority of time spent is on hashing over and over until the outcome has the lucky leading zeroes (and thus winning the privilege of writing the block). Whatever throughput solution is devised, unless the fundamental block-writing-lottery rules are changed, energy use will not change significantly. Also, you can't just sum up all bitcoin mining energy costs and project how that energy could otherwise be spent. Energy transmission is complicated and wasteful over great distances. If some mining operations are in areas of low habitation, then they aren't necessarily taking from what could otherwise be given to more productive uses. Finally, assuming _some_ mining is done with local renewable energy, then that energy is not necessarily being wasted any more than sun that falls on unused dirt is being wasted.

thisisit 9y ago
While I can't comment on the exact stats they are pulling up but I don't understand your logic here. Transaction is not "valid" until it is part of a block. So, validation is not separate from block generation, it's a part of it. A good read on this topic: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/49531/concept-of-validating-transactions https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/49531/concept-of...
- blunte 9y ago
  Correct, validation is certainly part of block generation. But the act of validating a transaction is a minimal effort compared to the (many times of) hashing that goes on as part of the proof of work. My point is that for all practical purposes, the transaction validation is so insignificant that it makes little sense to try attribute the energy cost of making one block to the transactions within that block. Stuffing more transactions into a block doesn't change the fact that a new block will be created about every 10min, and that the energy cost of writing that block will be about the same. Seeing this cost from a per-transaction perspective is questionable. The reason this whole process is so expensive is because of the design goal of relative immutability and the proof-of-work scheme that aids in this reaching this goal.

prostoalex 9y ago

He's right to question the environmental footprint, but "worldwide Bitcoin mining could power the daily needs of 821,940 average American homes" only in the world where high-power lines cost zero to build, span enormous distances across oceans and mountain ranges, and are fairly reliable to allow for zero maintenance costs. In certain places of the world the electricity costs are approaching zero (or negative).

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

Well, since bitcoin only supports a maximum of 3.5 transactions-per-second [1] we at least have an upper boundary on its excessive waste. 1. http://www.altcointoday.com/bitcoin-ethereum-vs-visa-paypal-transactions-per-second/ http://www.altcointoday.com/bitcoin-ethereum-vs-visa-paypal-...

BLanen 9y ago
That's not at all how it works... 3.5 Tx/s stays steady and the price increases the power it takes will only increase because miners will turn on more machines but due to increased difficulty will mine the same amount of bitcoins. A clear example of tragedy of the commons. Where the commons is new blocks. And the tragedy is the waste of electricity and labour.
peterisza 9y ago
Let me add here that Ripple doesn't have a traditional blockchain, sending money is essentially free compared to Bitcoin, and can handle up to 1000 transactions per second (https://ripple.com/dev-blog/ripple-consensus-ledger-can-sustain-1000-transactions-per-second/ https://ripple.com/dev-blog/ripple-consensus-ledger-can-sust...).
thisisit 9y ago
The upper boundary should be on the bitcoin difficulty and not tps. More difficulty = more hashes needed to mine 1 bitcoin = more machines added = more difficulty = more hashes....you get the idea.
imtringued 9y ago
The upperbound is the transactions fee + the mined blocks. Let's imagine someone makes a $1000 transaction with a $10 fee and a $10 block reward. This means a miner is at most willing to pay $20 worth of electricity to get that block. Increasing mining efficiency only gives you an an advantage over other miners. It does not increase the profit per watt because the difficulty will automatically rise until the desired interval between transactions has been reached. Increasing or decreasing the amount of transactions per block or interval does not directly change the energy consumption. Increasing the blocks per second by 10x means reducing the difficulty by 10x for each block but the total difficulty stays the same.

glenstein 9y ago

I have no problem with itemizing the electricity usage of various things computers do. But is there any particular reason to single out the energy usage of Bitcoin as opposed to say, email, or Google's ad network, or Clash of Clans, or the estimated average electricity usage generated by a single Trump tweet? By all means, let's scrutinize electricity usage, but I don't know what coherent set of priorities puts Bitcoin at the top of the list for scrutiny.

swalsh 9y ago
It makes sense, People will keep buying and adding computational power until the return on running the machines is lower than the cost of electricity. when the "cost of a bitcoin" rises faster than the cost of electricity it can directly lead to an increase in use. So unlike any other thing we run on computers for profit... bitcoin has a direct cause and effect relationship.
- glenstein 9y ago
  People feel their computers return value in all sorts of ways that have zero connection to a monetary return on investment. The value of being able to communicate, to do research, to store their cat pictures, etc. No one is isolating out the marginal added value of additional cat pictures and measuring it against the cost of electricity. And even for the small subset of computer users just interested in bitcoin mining, they just have to know their own electric bill, not the resource usage across the entire network. So I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about.
rtpg 9y ago
because we can compare the energy usage for Bitcoin with that of the next comparable thing: credit card transactions. This is useful when judging whether Bitcoin is a good replacement for other payment networks.
- glenstein 9y ago
  We can't compare electricity usage of Clash of Clans to Castle Clash/Clash Royale/Clash of Lords?

vinniejames 9y ago

The fundamental flaw in the argument in comparison to Visa or MasterCard is the fact they don’t take into account the energy consumption of the entire organization. Visa/MasterCard employ tens of thousands of employees (maybe more). Each of those employees have to drive to work everyday, consuming energy. Then sit in brightly lit office buildings, each running a computer sucking down power. Those buildings have to be built, using time energy and resources. Without taking into account all of the energy overhead required for these organizations to function the argument is meaningless. If cryptotocurrencies continue down this path, it’s quite likely these types of organizations could cease to exist. Resulting in a huge energy savings. It’s also extremely likely crypto currencies will reduce energy consumption by moving to more efficient transaction validation methods like Proof of Stake

Mr_P 9y ago
> If cryptotocurrencies continue down this path, it’s quite likely these types of organizations could cease to exist. Resulting in a huge energy savings. These people will still be employed, and other people will be consuming energy maintaining bitcoin farms, designing new mining hardware, etc.
genericacct 9y ago
..Because crypto miners do not operate in buildings that have to be built & lit, right?
- gonvaled 9y ago
  Do you have any indication that bitcoin is as labor-intensive as traditional banking?
  - dmitriid 9y ago
    What Bitcoin offers is a fraction of what "traditional banking" does. A lot of "labor intensiveness" in banks comes from various forms of what can be described as customer support. Consider just one thing that Bitcoin doesn't offer: applying for a house loan. Even in an internet-only bank (such things exist) there will be a live person handling your case who will guide you through various processes.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ephimetheus 9y ago

What amazes me the most is that the average household sits at 900kWh per month. That's about what I use per YEAR!

subterfudge44 9y ago

I am sorry to harsh words but this is really bad bad journalism. Objective of tech articles should be to educate an average person and not to deliberately confuse him/her/it. This is not clickbait but worse than that. One Bitcoin Transaction = "Energy used to mine one bitcoin". A novice might read this as "Energy spent if I buy something worth $10 using bitcoins. When miners are mining bitcoin it is not a mindless pursuit of a digital currency. They are also doing the extremely important work of keeping the records aka blockchain. Easily the total value addition here is lot more than the cost of energy involved (else no one would do it).