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I've conducted the most detailed and precise energy estimate of Bitcoin miners and bounded it to 5.61-10.93 TWh/year as of 28 Jul 2017: http://blog.zorinaq.com/
by mrb 9y ago
I've conducted the most detailed and precise energy estimate of Bitcoin miners and bounded it to 5.61-10.93 TWh/year as of 28 Jul 2017: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ Today it's probably closer to ~15 TWh/year which represents ~0.01% of the world's energy consumption.
However this article claims 29.05 TWh/year, basing it on Digiconomist which is the work of an amateur and known to overestimate by ~2×: http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/
- chris_va 9y agoSo it kills about 675 people per year :/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities
- gowld 9y agoAre you assuming most Bitcoin mining is on Chinese coal electricity? Other forms of electricity are 5-10x safer.
- polskibus 9y agoAren't most large bitcoin mines located in China though?
- visarga 9y agoSoon to be located in Africa - more sun, cheap panels.
- sgt 9y agoI think solar would have to become cheaper before this becomes viable. Luckily trends show that this will happen soon, but other challenges posed in Africa is political stability (e.g. government decides BitCoin mining is illegal or imposes unreasonable taxes due to lack of understanding), lack of competency, and other types of infrastructure. The only countries I can see that are suitable are South Africa and Namibia.
- mrb 9y agoNot everyone mine with coal. «A signifcant concentration [of Bitcoin mines] can be observed in the Sichuan province, where miners have struck deals with local hydroelectric power statons to access cheap electricity» p. 94 of https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/research/centres/alternative-finance/downloads/2017-global-cryptocurrency-benchmarking-study.pdf https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/research/cen...
- dbrgn 9y agoAlso, coal in China is much cleaner than coal in the US, for example. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2017/05/15/432141/everything-think-know-coal-china-wrong/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2017/0...
- flashdance 9y agoMany are located in Georgia and WA (honourable mention goes out to Labrador), which have cheap hydroelectricity.
- rebuilder 9y agoDoes it matter, really? If Bitcoin mining wasn't run on chinese hydro power, some other industry could use that power but now instead uses a more polluting option.
- StavrosK 9y agoGood point, so Bitcoin is actually killing no people, and we need to stop that other industry asap.
- imtringued 9y agoThe excess electricity could be used to burn less coal.
- StavrosK 9y agoSure, but we could also game less to burn less coal. I hardly think Bitcoin is the most useless thing we do with energy.
- akvadrako 9y agoThat probably isn't true, which is why that power is so cheap.
- mrb 9y agoDecorative christmas lights kill more people than that because these lights consume more energy than Bitcoin (see conclusion of my post)... if we are willing to spend X gigawatts on decorative lights, surely we should be willing to spend X gigawatts on a censorship-resistant decentralized payment system that changes the world.
- lobf 9y agoHow do poor people utilize it?
- Crespyl 9y agoRoughly as easily as they utilize cell phones.
- ersii 9y agoOn the positive side, that would be way less than the amount of people Democratic nations kill each year! Yay!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eganist 9y ago> probably closer to ~15 TWh/year or 1.71ish gigawatts -- https://www.google.com/search?q=15+terawatt+hours+per+year+to+gigawatts https://www.google.com/search?q=15+terawatt+hours+per+year+t... I'm pretty impressed google handled that conversion. I mathed it out independently but not even wolframalpha got it.
- majewsky 9y agoSince we're talking about energy consumption, you can get the same result without involving dozens of servers by typing this in your Unix terminal: $ units -v "15 TWh/year" "GW" 15 TWh/year = 1.7111933 GW 15 TWh/year = (1 / 0.58438752) GW
- stefco_ 9y agoI've always suspected such a tool must exist in a typical *nix environment but never bothered to search for it. This is very helpful. Thanks for the simple example!
- majewsky 9y agoThere's also an interactive mode if you leave out the positional arguments. That's my go-to CLI calculator, it knows enough arithmetic and the understanding of units is a nice bonus.
- kelnos 9y agoWolfram Alpha did ok for me on my first try: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=15+TWh%2Fyr+in+GW http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=15+TWh%2Fyr+in+GW
- eganist 9y agoThat might be why. I typed it out as 15 terawatt hours per year to gigawatts
- 9y ago
- erikpukinskis 9y agoWhy are you and the article using TWh/year? Why not just use watts? By my math... 15 TWh/year = 15000 GWh/year = 41 GWh/day = 1.7 Gwh/hour = 1.7 GW Which is approximately one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grand_coulee_dam_aerial_2.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grand_coulee_dam_aerial_2...
- kemiller 9y agoBecause energy is routinely priced by the watt-hour.
- aqme28 9y agoI'm still curious why it's priced by the watt-hour instead of the Joule
- 6nf 9y agoIt's easier for a consumer running a 100 watt appliance for 2 hours to calculate the cost.
- badosu 9y agoProbably because power consumption of utilities are measured by watt, so watt/h gives more intuition on how much energy was consumed.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoI think because consumer devices are rated in watts, and consumers can easily guess how many hours they use a particular device.
- BurningFrog 9y agoWithout knowing anything specific about this, but knowing a lot about how the world works, I'm fairly confident this convention predates the wide acceptance of the Joule unit.
- flashdance 9y agoYour blog is excellent, but your BM1387 numbers are a hair off. BM1387 has worse performance than 0.10J/GH @ the wall in practice. Bitmain has released 3 BM1387 based miners (S9, T9, R4). Only two are intended for industrial use and should seriously be considered (home mining is dead): * The S9 is advertised as pulling 0.098 J/GH +10% at the wall on a 93% efficient PSU. [1] * The T9 is advertised as pulling 0.126 J/GH + 7% at the wall on a 93% efficient PSU. [2] However, measured performance in the field tends to be a better indicator. BlockOperations tested the T-9 and S-9 with wattmeters and discovered that the Batch 16 12TH S-9 burns 1329W at the wall and the 11.5TH T-9 burns 1352W, for an efficiency of 0.111 J/GH and 0.117 J/GH respectively at a fairly cool (60F) room temperature [3]. If the room is hotter (most mines are) the fans spin harder and the efficiency gets a tiny bit worse. Only the earliest batches of S9s that had fixed frequencies achieved 0.10 J/GH, but they had serious issues with reliability and stability so bitmain switched to variable frequency, which helped the reliability and stability but hurt the efficiency. Another thing you might want to factor in is that the actual hashrate of the bitcoin network is higher than the network difficulty indicates. Remember, roughly 2% of generated blocks are orphaned and never counted, so you should adjust your estimate upwards somewhat to account for that missing hashrate. [1] https://shop.bitmain.com/specifications.htm?name=antminer_s9_asic_bitcoin_miner https://shop.bitmain.com/specifications.htm?name=antminer_s9... [2] https://shop.bitmain.com/antminer_t9_asic_bitcoin_miner.htm?flag=specifications https://shop.bitmain.com/antminer_t9_asic_bitcoin_miner.htm?... [3] https://blockoperations.com/power-comparison-antminer-t9-antminer-s9/ https://blockoperations.com/power-comparison-antminer-t9-ant...
- mrb 9y agoThanks, I'll revise.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gtrubetskoy 9y agoI did something similar [1] though not nearly as detailed, whereby as of Sep 2017 I estimated the total hash power to be equivalent to 712,672 S9 miners, which roughly adds up to 8.584 TWh/year 8.584 / 109613 = 0.00008 = 0.008% (109613 TWh is the annual world consumption number you used) [1] - Electricity cost of 1 BTC https://grisha.org/blog/2017/09/28/electricity-cost-of-1-bitcoin/ https://grisha.org/blog/2017/09/28/electricity-cost-of-1-bit... P.S.: I think this is a high estimate, because companies like BitFury have access to much more energy efficient asics which they're keeping secret. We should at least re-calculate this using the new DragonMint miner numbers instead of S9.
- joosters 9y ago...the work of an amateur And you’re a professional bitcoin power consumption analyst then?
- mrb 9y agoI am/have been a professional miner, founded a mining hardware integrator, done angel investing rounds in mining ventures. Nothing really big (I invested between $1 and $2 million over the years). But, yes, I do work in the crypto mining space professionally and part of my job is to analyze miners' business plans. The kid who edits Digiconomist is a fresh finance grad with no tech background and who has zero mining experience.
- oh_sigh 9y agoDoes your analysis include the energy expended by all of the people who are mining bitcoin in a very inefficient manner, like with CPUs because they loaded some shady JS while visiting a popular webpage?
- Fnoord 9y agoDo you happen to have comparison charts with how long it takes to be profitable like the article has?