6 ms·

"If it keeps increasing at this rate, Bitcoin mining will consume all the world’s electricity by February 2020"

by macawfish 9y ago

bufferoverflow 9y ago
Technically it doesn't need to increase at all, it can decrease even.
- cesarb 9y ago
  It follows the price, so as long as either Bitcoin increases in price or electricity decreases in cost, the amount of electricity consumed should increase. According to https://fork.lol/reward/blocks https://fork.lol/reward/blocks the average reward per block is at the moment around USD 100k, so Bitcoin miners should consume on average 100k USD of electricity every 10 minutes. Sadly, I expect the demand for Bitcoin (and consequently its price) to increase once the Lightning Network gets ready for use by average people.
fiatjaf 9y ago
ahahah, I was going to point out this too. In which world do journalists live?
- danbruc 9y ago
  Nobody of course believes that this will actually happen, it is just to illustrate how quickly the growth is. Admittedly people are notoriously bad at dealing with exponential growth and so that number may very well provide a misleading image to many people but at least it communicates that things will change within the next few years.
thinkloop 9y ago
I usually dislike extrapolation stats (all growth starts aggressive then necessarily slows down with scale), but that's interesting.
- cwkoss 9y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/7e6603/daily_discussion_monday_november_20_2017/dq3erax/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/7e6603/dail... If Bitcoin continues growing at the rate is has for the past 60 days, each coin will be worth over $1M by 2019-01-07. (Obviously extremely unlikely, but interesting to think about)
  - zipwitch 9y ago
    To my utterly unscientic perception, these exponentials scream "Crash Imminent". Is it possible to acquire reasonably reliable short options on bitcoin 2 years out?
    - cwkoss 9y ago
      Bitfinex offers shorts and margin trading, but many question their stability. They are still working off their debt from the last time they were hacked. Possible, but use at your own risk.
hamandcheese 9y ago
Relevant: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
imartin2k 9y ago
In theory, everyone involved with BTC should stop what they are doing. Obviously, no one will (including me). How can this be solved? Should one actually hope for a massive crash, just so the planet can be saved?
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >Should one actually hope for a massive crash, just so the planet can be saved? The only reason anyone would bring up BTC regarding climate change would be to distract from the harm caused by oil, gas, mining, and oceanic shipping companies.
  - rspeer 9y ago
    That's whataboutism. Other harms existing does not make it okay for you to do harm.
    - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
      There's limited effort in fighting these things. If you're choosing your fights intelligently, it's terrible to switch off to go kill BTC's electricity usage because it's a small part of the ongoing problem. Just because it's not significant doesn't mean we have to forget about it. We can always tackle BTC's problem later.
- alexasmyths 9y ago
  "Should one actually hope for a massive crash, just so the planet can be saved?" Yes, and for many other reasons, rooted in the fact that especially since BTC is not really used as a currency, the effort is de-facto wasted and that we should likely be putting the energy to better use. You know the about the Pacific Island, similar to Easter Island, that depleted all of their resources building massive stone heads?
  - leot 9y ago
    Economic paradoxes are a real thing.
SilasX 9y ago
You're probably joking, but to explain why that doesn't follow: PoW/Bitcoin has the same dynamics as gold mining under a gold standard. There is a return to spending a marginal resource in bitcoin mining, vs something else. As you add more resources to bitcoin mining, the return becomes low compared to the "something else" options, and no more is invested. You reach some equilibrium. There's no reason that equilibrium would be the entire economy; most likely, some small fraction of it. But note, network costs scaling with the size of the global economy is not a point in Bitcoin's favor! Proof of work does, in a way, rely on the entire world spending enough computational work on the blockchain that it becomes infeasible for any one person to spend more. So it does have much of the dynamics of an arms race. Edit: The same logic explains why the problem will affect most attempts to have an "eco-friendly" PoW Blockchain, like Bram Cohen's proposal: https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/chia-network-cryptocurrency/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/chia-network-cryptocurrenc... That just shifts the arms race to something else: in that case, on spending economic resources on faster ways of doing a lookup. Still should reach equilibrium at a stable fraction of the economy and produce the same waste, although perhaps in the form of hyper-optimized DB lookups and the related hardware and labor for it, not energy.
- cryptodogemoon 9y ago
  There's an irony in proof of work as means of producing a currency supply to thwart centralized financial institutions when the people with existing capital are in the most advantageous position to take over the minting and infrastructure of Proof of Work.
- kristianp 9y ago
  Speaking economically, I have read that the price of bitcoin tends towards the price of mining a block times the number of bitcoin mined per block. It's a quote from satoshi apparently (1). Although he does say "in the absence of a market to establish a price". Conversely, if it weren't worth so much, less people would be competing to mine bitcoin, the difficulty would be much lower and the energy used would be less. Not a very useful observation to make though as it doesn't help the problem off high energy usage. Using hard drive space instead should use less energy at the expense of using more chip fabs and more silicon. (1) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404164.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404164.0
junkscience2017 9y ago
Oddly, accelerating climate change in such a manner might actually cause a catastrophic event in the near term that would finally force people to take notice and act. Otherwise we are told the temperature will rise by 2° by 2100...and let's be honest, that isn't scaring anyone into action.
jokoon 9y ago
Imagine the end of the world being caused by a crypto currency. If you think about it, if one can transform energy into money, humans will end up capturing all the energy they can to do so.

"If it keeps increasing at this rate, Bitcoin mining will consume all the world’s electricity by February 2020"

bufferoverflow 9y ago

Technically it doesn't need to increase at all, it can decrease even.

cesarb 9y ago
It follows the price, so as long as either Bitcoin increases in price or electricity decreases in cost, the amount of electricity consumed should increase. According to https://fork.lol/reward/blocks https://fork.lol/reward/blocks the average reward per block is at the moment around USD 100k, so Bitcoin miners should consume on average 100k USD of electricity every 10 minutes. Sadly, I expect the demand for Bitcoin (and consequently its price) to increase once the Lightning Network gets ready for use by average people.

fiatjaf 9y ago

ahahah, I was going to point out this too. In which world do journalists live?

danbruc 9y ago
Nobody of course believes that this will actually happen, it is just to illustrate how quickly the growth is. Admittedly people are notoriously bad at dealing with exponential growth and so that number may very well provide a misleading image to many people but at least it communicates that things will change within the next few years.

thinkloop 9y ago

I usually dislike extrapolation stats (all growth starts aggressive then necessarily slows down with scale), but that's interesting.

cwkoss 9y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/7e6603/daily_discussion_monday_november_20_2017/dq3erax/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/7e6603/dail... If Bitcoin continues growing at the rate is has for the past 60 days, each coin will be worth over $1M by 2019-01-07. (Obviously extremely unlikely, but interesting to think about)
- zipwitch 9y ago
  To my utterly unscientic perception, these exponentials scream "Crash Imminent". Is it possible to acquire reasonably reliable short options on bitcoin 2 years out?
  - cwkoss 9y ago
    Bitfinex offers shorts and margin trading, but many question their stability. They are still working off their debt from the last time they were hacked. Possible, but use at your own risk.

hamandcheese 9y ago

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/

imartin2k 9y ago

In theory, everyone involved with BTC should stop what they are doing. Obviously, no one will (including me). How can this be solved? Should one actually hope for a massive crash, just so the planet can be saved?

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>Should one actually hope for a massive crash, just so the planet can be saved? The only reason anyone would bring up BTC regarding climate change would be to distract from the harm caused by oil, gas, mining, and oceanic shipping companies.
- rspeer 9y ago
  That's whataboutism. Other harms existing does not make it okay for you to do harm.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    There's limited effort in fighting these things. If you're choosing your fights intelligently, it's terrible to switch off to go kill BTC's electricity usage because it's a small part of the ongoing problem. Just because it's not significant doesn't mean we have to forget about it. We can always tackle BTC's problem later.
alexasmyths 9y ago
"Should one actually hope for a massive crash, just so the planet can be saved?" Yes, and for many other reasons, rooted in the fact that especially since BTC is not really used as a currency, the effort is de-facto wasted and that we should likely be putting the energy to better use. You know the about the Pacific Island, similar to Easter Island, that depleted all of their resources building massive stone heads?
- leot 9y ago
  Economic paradoxes are a real thing.

SilasX 9y ago

You're probably joking, but to explain why that doesn't follow: PoW/Bitcoin has the same dynamics as gold mining under a gold standard. There is a return to spending a marginal resource in bitcoin mining, vs something else. As you add more resources to bitcoin mining, the return becomes low compared to the "something else" options, and no more is invested. You reach some equilibrium. There's no reason that equilibrium would be the entire economy; most likely, some small fraction of it. But note, network costs scaling with the size of the global economy is not a point in Bitcoin's favor! Proof of work does, in a way, rely on the entire world spending enough computational work on the blockchain that it becomes infeasible for any one person to spend more. So it does have much of the dynamics of an arms race. Edit: The same logic explains why the problem will affect most attempts to have an "eco-friendly" PoW Blockchain, like Bram Cohen's proposal: https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/chia-network-cryptocurrency/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/08/chia-network-cryptocurrenc... That just shifts the arms race to something else: in that case, on spending economic resources on faster ways of doing a lookup. Still should reach equilibrium at a stable fraction of the economy and produce the same waste, although perhaps in the form of hyper-optimized DB lookups and the related hardware and labor for it, not energy.

cryptodogemoon 9y ago
There's an irony in proof of work as means of producing a currency supply to thwart centralized financial institutions when the people with existing capital are in the most advantageous position to take over the minting and infrastructure of Proof of Work.
kristianp 9y ago
Speaking economically, I have read that the price of bitcoin tends towards the price of mining a block times the number of bitcoin mined per block. It's a quote from satoshi apparently (1). Although he does say "in the absence of a market to establish a price". Conversely, if it weren't worth so much, less people would be competing to mine bitcoin, the difficulty would be much lower and the energy used would be less. Not a very useful observation to make though as it doesn't help the problem off high energy usage. Using hard drive space instead should use less energy at the expense of using more chip fabs and more silicon. (1) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404164.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=404164.0

junkscience2017 9y ago

Oddly, accelerating climate change in such a manner might actually cause a catastrophic event in the near term that would finally force people to take notice and act. Otherwise we are told the temperature will rise by 2° by 2100...and let's be honest, that isn't scaring anyone into action.

jokoon 9y ago

Imagine the end of the world being caused by a crypto currency. If you think about it, if one can transform energy into money, humans will end up capturing all the energy they can to do so.