6 ms·

https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/881472/worldwide-bitcoin... 40% of latest

• lettergram 4y ago
  I’m going to go out on a limb and say I don’t believe this. I simply don’t believe anywhere near the figures people use for the energy used to mine Bitcoin. Drive down your street, look at all the businesses with their power on, all running computers. Every home running lights, fans, computers, video games, TVs, etc. then we have industrial manufacturing, etc. You mean to tell me there’s some people in a warehouse around here with racks of servers running hashes? Just hashes, not a data center. We’d need hundreds of those warehouses to be 1% of the On-grid power. Sorry, I don’t buy it.
  • pclmulqdq 4y ago
    There are thousands of those warehouses, but they are concentrated in areas where power is really cheap.
  • lucb1e 4y ago
    That's fine, please run the math again then. (Edit: I did not downvote, it's a legitimate question /edit) I've done it myself also in the past because, like you, I couldn't believe it either (this was around 2018 I'd guess). It's a fairly simple calculation to take an energy-efficient graphics card and see how many SHA2 hashes per second you can get from that, see its energy consumption (ignore the rest of the computer and connectivity to support the GPU for now), multiply that with the hash rate, et voila you get some ridiculous number (don't remember, but something like half the world's energy consumption). This indicates that all Bitcoin miners are using ASICs. Now the question becomes how efficient a Bitcoin ASIC is, and when you hunt for that number and plug that in, the result is in the same range as what the news has been saying. Edit: if you want to take a shortcut and use a readymade hashes per gigajoule value from last summer, see figure 1 here https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/methodology https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/methodology </edit> It also roughly works out when you look at kWh costs versus Bitcoin profit per consumed kWh, so the figure is not unreasonable. People would be leaving money on the table if their real electricity consumption were lower, because then they could add more equipment and make greater profits. Everything points towards this unbelievable waste to be real, unfortunately.
  • msk-lywenn 4y ago
    Took me less than a minute to find an article showing one of those farms and it dates 2014. So yeah, today, it wouldn’t be a surprise if there were thousands. https://www.nwnewsnetwork.org/economy-business-finance-and-labor/2014-04-07/central-washington-home-to-nations-biggest-bitcoin-mine-more-coming https://www.nwnewsnetwork.org/economy-business-finance-and-l...
  • pengaru 4y ago
    > You mean to tell me there’s some people in a warehouse around here with racks of servers running hashes? Just hashes, not a data center When you can be profitable running a datacenter without even needing to find customers to pay for your services on actual servers, why wouldn't you just run miners instead? Clearly the incentive is there for this to be the reality.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    Then that's just willful ignorance, because you don't have to blindly "believe". You can calculate it yourself. It doesn't matter what you see driving down the street. There are widely available stats on how much energy mining takes (based on GPU energy usage, nobody's lying about this, you can run an energy meter yourself) and how much mining is done (verifiable with actual Bitcoin stats, this can't be falsified). And obviously the warehouses aren't evenly distributed. They're concentrated where costs are cheapest (mainly energy costs).
    • dragonwriter 4y ago
      > There are widely available stats on how much energy mining takes (based on GPU energy usage, nobody's lying about this, you can run an energy meter yourself) What does GPU energy usage have to do with Bitcoin? Isn’t it predominantly mined by ASICs? (Though GPU and even CPU is possible, but uneconomical unless someone else is paying the bill...)
      • zekrioca 4y ago
        And what do you think all these Ads from all sorts of websites on the web and compromised "free wifi hotspots" do with the javascript runtime in your browser?
      • fbdab103 4y ago
        GPU energy gives you an order of magnitude estimate using consumer hardware. These numbers are well publicized and hard to manipulate. From there you can offer a fudge factor (eg ASICs are X% more efficient) and there you go. Alternatively, you could find some posted stats on ASIC hardware, that should get you to a more robust number, but relies upon using what I consider to be more dodgy sources (someone selling ASICs or someone trying to claim higher/lower energy usage)
  • ineedasername 4y ago
    The math really isn't complicated here. If your gut feeling differs than that's on you & your mathematical competence to evaluate independently. But I'll get you started: The estimate I find from various publications, both crypto friendly & otherwise, estimate around 1,500 kwh/bitcoin. Multiple out from there to the ~40% network hashrate capacity in the US and divide by total US kwh output. Alternatively you can find a bitcoin profit calculator of choice and use its inputs to work backward. Buy it or not. Your gut feeling doesn't have to correspond to the math, and I'm mostly okay with your gut being wrong (unless you're in a position to make policy decisions or something. Doubtful though...)
  • arcticbull 4y ago
    The math is really easy. Take the network hash rate, the take the latest AntMiner S9's MH/J. Multiply it out. Weep. That's gonna be your best case too, btw, assuming nothing less efficient is on the network.
    • maybe_pablo 4y ago
      That's not the state of the art but a 5 year old miner, there are now miners with 10x the hash rate of the AntMiner S9[0]. [0] https://www.asicminervalue.com/miners/bitmain/antminer-s19-xp-140th https://www.asicminervalue.com/miners/bitmain/antminer-s19-x...
      • arcticbull 4y ago
        Indeed, I didn't mean to use the S9 per se, I just meant to use the latest/most efficient/most popular miner, whatever you'd like to use in your estimate. I was certainly not clear. Re the S19: it's not the hash rate that matters, it's the hash rate per unit energy. The S19 consumes 3X as much power as the S9 and yields 10X the hash rate so it's only 3.33X as efficient. Of course efficiency here is purely transitory as old miners are thrown into the rubbish bin and replaced with these new lotto scratching machines - and the network difficulty adjusts to consume the new efficiency.
  • FormerBandmate 4y ago
    I know people who have worked with investors to buy up entire power plants to do this. It definitely happens
  • TomSwirly 4y ago
    > I simply don’t believe anywhere near the figures people use for the energy used to mine Bitcoin. Why do you think your belief, unsupported by any facts, sources or calculations, has any value? > Drive down your street, Can you explain why this is some sort of reasonable way to find data centers? Why would you expect these data centers to be on streets where people live?
• shrubby 4y ago
  Nice comparison. IMO average should be ditched and median used instead for personal emissions for a country. Even in reasonably low inequality OECD countries the difference between average and median is substantial as a low percentage of people drive the average high.
  • lucb1e 4y ago
    Good point; I agree but I don't have this figure handy. The "this many persons" was more of a fun aside, though. The main thing to know is that it's 1% of electricity in the USA as well as a big impact on the world's CO2 budget.
    • shrubby 4y ago
      Oxfam Extreme Carbon Inequality had something like 16 ton average and 8 ton median for the US. Here in Finland it's around 7 and 11 but we're one of the most equal countries but still the difference is big. I'm too tired to look up the sources but OECD ones can be found from the stated report though a few years old by now.
• tromp 4y ago
  > as the hash rate rate drops, your individual profitability will rise This is not quite accurate. As the hash rate drops, the next difficulty adjustment will lower the difficulty, and that is what improves profitability. At a given difficulty, it doesn't matter how many other miners join, that just makes blocks arrive faster; it doesn't change the frequency at which a given miner hits the difficulty target, which is what determines their profitability. The last adjustment was around Dec 19 [1], and the next one is normally 2 weeks after, but with 3/5 of the former hashrate, blocks will arrive 5/3 slower, so it will take longer to adjust to a lower difficulty, in early to mid January. [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-difficulty.html#3mo https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-difficulty.html...
  • lucb1e 4y ago
    Sorry, your reply coincided with my editing that out. I saw another comment in in this subthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34140409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34140409 that indeed pointed that out already and then edited my post just before you replied.
  • lazide 4y ago
    Eh, not quite. There is an important distinction here in how it actually works. The Bitcoin chain difficulty is essentially the number of random lottery tickets ‘issued’ for a given block (size of hash space hashes will be generated in). The first miner to get a winning lottery ticket wins the block rewards. (Each hash being a ‘ticket’). The space is typically insanely large, think 10’s of trillions. Sometimes that happens really fast, sometimes it takes a long time. The difficulty (number of tickets) adjusts at periodic intervals to keep the average winning frequency at around 5 minutes based on the current quantity of hashing, but the actual win rate varies a lot. So cutting actual hash power in half (by taking half of miners off line) gives any single miner remaining twice the odds of getting a block reward. But it will likely take twice as long hashing, and the blocks will mine about half the speed of usual (think 10 mins avg instead of 5), unless the difficulty resets.
    • trifurcate 4y ago
• epolanski 4y ago
  To give it another way to visualize it: every 25 hours the US pollutes as much as burning an entire 50 car long train full of coal for Bitcoin mining alone.
  • lucb1e 4y ago
    Wow, that's one heck of a visualization indeed. Is that based on the CO2-equivalent amount of coal or based on the amount of coal actually used in the USA grid? (Not saying that the former is 'inactual' or whatever, just to understand what this figure means.)
    • epolanski 4y ago
      Equivalent.
      • HN_is_for_gemes 4y ago
        [flagged]
      • dragontamer 4y ago
        Perhaps it'd be more accurate to say "X BTUs of energy". BTU is the American unit of energy after all. And then say that "50 railroad cars of coal" is equivalent to X BTUs. I'm being pedantic. I think its well known that the US Grid is a complex mix of solar, nuclear, wind, and fossil fuels. It is also known that its mostly fossil fuels (natural gas, coal, and petrol), despite our best efforts to the contrary. So I think the visualization is pretty good. But a few additional words for clarity here would probably be better?
        • reisse 4y ago
          > BTU is the American unit of energy after all. Come on, it is literally British!
  • yieldcrv 4y ago
    that really conflates energy use with emissions thats not how the bitcoin mining sector works, its like you heard about one recommissioned coal plant in new york and assumed that was representative of anything it isn't economical for miners to operate that way, whereas it is economical at some sources of renewable energy or redirecting energy from polluters - reducing emissions - so thats where the miners are
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  uhmmmm not all bitcoin mining emits CO2 though about 40% of bitcoin mining is either reducing emissions from another source or using renewable like hydro name another industry with similar numbers aside from hydro/solar/wind itself? Not trying to defend it, I’m sure the e-waste of the hardware is a problem, the CO2 thing is not accurate
  • danans 4y ago
    > about 40% of bitcoin mining is either reducing emissions from another source I'm skeptical of this. The only way I know that Bitcoin mining can reduce emissions is if all else equal, the waste heat from a mining facility is used to displace fossil fuels that would otherwise be used for heating purposes. That amount can't be significant in the context of Bitcoin mining's overall massive energy use. If you are referring to demand smoothing by filling demand with mining when other types of demand fall, that has more to do with avoiding short cycling of fossil fuels based generation facilities and thereby maximizing their utilization/revenue and little to do with cutting emissions. At most you could argue that avoiding peak load periods by curtailing mining is avoiding the worst emissions, but that is again a drop in the bucket of the massive emissions. Care to explain or cite this claim if you have examples of reducing the emissions of other fossil energy sources?
    • yieldcrv 4y ago
      I’ll explain and you’ll have enough information to find corroborating citations, for most of this its a symbiotic relationship at fracking sites, where some byproducts are flared into the atmosphere, this is called flare gas methane (worse than CO2) and hydrocarbons are flared directly into the atmosphere bitcoin mining companies move operations on premise and use the gas directly to power their machines before it is flared, thereby reducing emissions. Some but industrial catalyctic converters reduce the emissions substantially, leaving some H2O and some CO2 flare sites have problems growing due to state and federal regulations if their emissions are too high, so their desperation results in many ways to help make mining company presence a sweetheart deal in the energy rates the miners receive. (but they still arent expanding, yet, as they get exemptions from the regulations and are courting miners because of the threat that the exemptions will stop. Currently mining reduces emissions, and this is only a matter of accuracy, criticisms about the possible future of too much mining/fracking equalizing into no net benefit are accurate) in any case, thats before selling to the grid which brings me to the next point, there are 1) grid connected flare gas miners 2) non-grid connected flare gas miners you probably wont find much literature on the 2nd type as they are off the grid but the 2nd type is also not subject to your form of criticism