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There's been a number of articles and papers on this topic, but I've yet to see one that attempted to look at the energy mix miners use. It's virtually entirel
by pstrateman 6y ago
There's been a number of articles and papers on this topic, but I've yet to see one that attempted to look at the energy mix miners use.
It's virtually entirely renewables, hydro, wind, solar.
Bitcoin mining is a perfectly elastic operation, one of the only energy consumers that will turn off when rates are high.
- mod 6y ago> The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482,456 people living at the German standard
- pstrateman 6y agoThey assert that without making any attempt to analyze the energy mix of the miners. They just assume that they're running on the world average energy mix, which they most definitely are not.
- mod 6y agoIt is my understanding that they are talking about literal, physical waste (perhaps miners that quit working). Not waste of energy.
- afavour 6y agoI’d be interested to see a citation on that. But even still, couldn’t those renewables be used for other applications if Bitcoin isn’t using them? > will turn off when rates are high But doesn’t Bitcoin directly contribute to rates rising? Supply and demand, and all that.
- pstrateman 6y agoI'm the citation, I've done large scale mining. Storage exceeds the value of the energy now and for the foreseeable future. The energy being used is largely not wasted, it's simply excess.
- yardstick 6y agoI didn’t realise miners were that sensitive to electricity pricing. Does this make a 51% attack easier if you can spike power prices in key mining regions? Also is there a good graph somewhere showing BTC online mining capacity over time?
- lern_too_spel 6y agoIt's even easier than that. Since the majority of mining happens in China, the CCP can control the chain by fiat.
- xg15 6y agoI don't think this would really make a difference: Even if miners work only with renewable energy, they waste energy that could be used for other things. I think the unique thing with bitcoin (and what offsets them from other large-scale energy consumers) is that the technology is intentionally spending as much energy as possible - at it's core, bitcoin mining is quite literally a race about who can access the most energy. As such I see the environmental danger in bitcoin in a potential to undo efficiency wins everywhere else: If we make the rest of the economy more energy efficient, then the surplus energy could be used to grow the economy without impacting the climate or might not even need to be produced at all. Now there are incentives to dump this energy into crypto-mining instead.
- ancientworldnow 6y agoActually this ramping up and down when the price is profitable is good for utilities who need to keep power supply and demand in check. When electricity is cheap to produce, they need demand to go up to balance the grid - sort of the opposite of peaker plants when demand outpaces supply. This is partially why a few electrical companies run their own Bitcoin mining farms.
- xg15 6y agoOr they could invest in storage technologies so that the surplus electricity can be given back when there is excess demand instead of simply vanishing.
- pstrateman 6y agoThe storage costs more than the energy does. It's not worth doing except in places where utility rates are artificially inflated to make it worth doing (CA/NY).
- xg15 6y agoIt's not worth doing this for the energy company with market prices. This doesn't mean it wouldn't be useful for society as a whole if done.