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BitcoinEmissions – A project to calculate CO2 emissions of mining bitcoin
- pavlov 12y agoSo, to offset a Bitcoin, plant 1.6 trees and keep them alive for a century [1]. [1] "On average, one broad leaf tree will absorb in the region of 1 tonne of carbon dioxide during its full life-time (approximately 100 years)." http://www.carbonfootprint.com/plantingtrees.html http://www.carbonfootprint.com/plantingtrees.html
- kevinsimper 12y agoYes, do that every 25 second as they github repo says that is how often a bitcoin is released.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- danbruc 12y agoAnd that is on average 1 Bitcoin every 24 seconds.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Intermernet 12y agoPersonally, I'd recommend just planting two. I can never work out which 0.4 of the tree not to plant.
- kaybe 12y agoAnd then bury it so it doesn't rot and rerelease the CO2. Otherwise you're just moving the problem to the future.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- zitterbewegung 12y agoUnless the tree burns down you realize that it incorporates the CO2 in its structure right?
- wongarsu 12y agoMost trees die at a certain age (or due to other factors). By default this leads to the tree falling over and starting to decompose, a process which releases most of the CO2 formerly stored in that tree. The obvious solution is to plant an entire forest to ensure that new trees grow to replace old trees.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- avar 12y agoIf you kept planting and burying trees you'd be taking oxygen out of the atmosphere in addition to carbon, which would cause other problems.
- kaybe 12y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis n CO2 + n H2O + photons → (CH2O)n + n O2 carbon dioxide + water + light energy → carbohydrate + oxygen Even if the single oxygen per carbon stayed buried, we'd lose a maximum of 400ppm[1] of oxygen, of currently 20.95 % volume of oxygen. That does not even affect the last digit of that rounded number, and the number is normally not given with more digits because it changes with the season and stuff. No carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would probably be really bad for further tree growth (among other things), so it is naturally limited. [1]http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo
- odiroot 12y agoShameless plug: you can help by using Ecosia -- https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/ Ecosia is helping people help the environment. Currently planting trees in Burkina Faso as a part of Great Green Wall. Full disclosure: I work at Ecosia.
- tinco 12y agoJust a heads up, the video on /what doesn't work on Chrome+Win8.1
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- dlss 12y agoCarbon is what gives trees their mass, so no need to wait 100 years -- just until it's fully grown :)
- perrygeo 12y agoActually, trees grow faster and sequester more carbon the older they get: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140115132740.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140115132740.ht...
- rndn 12y agoIsn't the problem that trees do not permanently bind the CO2? You would have to burry the trees when they die so that the carbon does not get released into the atmosphere again. (I might be wrong though.)
- ufo 12y agoIf you take an area without forest and plant a forest on it then when the tree dies a new one grows in its place. A mature forest is roughly carbon neutral but reflorestation is taking a bunch of carbon from the atmosphere and converting it to tree trunks.
- lgieron 12y agoDoes that mean that the Amazon rainforest is carbon neutral?
- nols 12y agoIt was a major carbon sink, but as the climate warms up trees die earlier and release more carbon so it's becoming a carbon emitter. It's obviously hard to calculate an exact plus or minus, but it's not looking good, especially with the amount of deforestation occurring.
- ufo 12y agoFor now, the biggest contribution of the amazon rainforest in terms of climate is improving rainfall. If you cut down all that trees that regious would pretty quickly turn into a big desert (in fact, the forest is actually recent in geological terms)
- graycat 12y agoMost green things add to topsoil which has to be heavily carbon. E.g., from my experience growing up, a healthy front lawn can add ballpark one inch of topsoil in 15 years. Similarly for prairies and forests. Also a major fraction of trees, ballpark 50+%, have leaves and drop them once a year, and the leaves contribute to topsoil. Even if a forest burns, the burned trees create ash which has carbon and adds to topsoil. Some of the topsoil gets washed into rivers and lakes, becomes mud, gets covered over by more mud, and, thus, essentially buries its carbon. There is more that is similar: a major fraction of the surface of the earth has, within 1000 feet deep, a lot of limestone, and that is partly, largely, or mostly just old sea shells where the animals pulled carbon from the water or what it ate and converted it to calcium carbonate, that is, buried the carbon (disclaimer, I'm no geologist). In simple terms, basically, net, the earth's biosphere grabs and buries a lot of carbon including CO2 from the atmosphere. Note: Nowhere here have I made a remark of any kind about the effects on climate of CO2 in the atmosphere.
- taf2 12y agoyeah, but i want to make a billion bitcoins?
- williamcotton 12y agoWell I guess it is too bad for you that they're capped at 21 million.
- zanny 12y agoThere will only ever be 21 million bitcoins, and we will be about 90% of the way there by 2025.
- panarky 12y ago> ~1602 kg of CO2 by May 1st 2015 You'd have to plant 1.6 trees every year, in perpetuity and keep all of them alive for a century.
- andrewdietrich 12y agoI think this calls for a planting trees as a service company. Ideally delivered via drones. Talk about efficiently planting the trees needed ;)
- draugadrotten 12y agoThere is such a company: Viskogen or viagroforestry (sounds like spam doesn't it) They plants-trees-as-a-service. In 2013, 4,118,064 trees were planted http://www.viagroforestry.org/what-we-do/agroforestry/ http://www.viagroforestry.org/what-we-do/agroforestry/
- sova 12y agor. o. f. l.
- comboy 12y agoAnd so will AC systems in local banks. The problem is not that something consumes energy if there are people willing to pay for that energy. The problem is how we generate electricity. It's getting better, but it has nothing to do with bitcoin.
- engendered 12y agoAnd so will AC systems in local banks. You can essentially include the entirety of operations of the bank, and the lifestyle of the people employed by the bank. There are literally millions and millions of people throughout the world who do nothing more than manage and monitor a system that moves numbers around and deals with proxy derivatives like bills and coins. Not that bitcoin is a panacea -- personally it seems completely untenable -- but if we want to talk waste, the current regime is extraordinarily wasteful.
- ncza 12y agoBut how much (dare I say little?) of it would be unneeded if bitcoin succeeded?
- tormeh 12y agoIt can't succeed. Cryptocurrencies might succeed, but not bitcoin. It's not even inflationary; it's a cross between a payment system and a pyramid scheme. Its a bit pedantic, but please don't say bitcoin when you mean cryptocurrency, as bitcoin is a pretty bad one.
- calinet6 12y agoMaybe a naïve question, but are there any good ones we should support instead?
- oafitupa 12y ago> It's not even inflationary And that's exactly the whole point, and is the very reason it's working. > a pyramid scheme Then every other successful investment is a pyramid scheme. Gold is a pyramid scheme! Storing food for catastrophes is a pyramid scheme! Paintings are a pyramid scheme!
- Kenji 12y agoThe waste is incredible. It seems like the nash-equilibria of a currency are far, far from a social optimum. In other words, the price of anarchy is very high. This has always been an off-putting aspect of bitcoin to me.
- comboy 12y agoI sincerely don't understand why do people call it wasted energy. If your car runs on electricity, is taking your from place A to B waste of energy? That energy is used to secure transactions. And even with its decentralized nature which is usually less efficient that centralized systems (but more reliable, and without single point of failure), it seems to be so far doing it more efficiently than banking systems.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- danbruc 12y agoIt is wasting energy because a Raspberry Pi could easily handle one or two transaction per second(1). If you are worried about having a single point of failure, use ten or a hundred. Bitcoin is paying an enormous price for its decentralized nature. (1) I am of course ignorant of peak loads here.
- mattmanser 12y agoPeak as in mountain peak. To reach a peak, or top. Not peek as in to look. This is one of those annoying misspellings that is making the rounds recently, especially on reddit.
- danbruc 12y agoOf course, fixed. Confusing heterographs is quite easy if you are not writing in your native language so maybe don't be to harsh with them.
- blfr 12y ago
- h43z 12y agoI would love to see bitcoin having zero waste and impact on our environment but even now in it's current state it is much cheaper and environmentally friendly [1] than other methods like Gold Mining, Gold Recycling, Banking System Electricity Use, Paper Currency & Minting. [1] https://www.academia.edu/7666373/An_Order-of-Magnitude_Estimate_of_the_Relative_Sustainability_of_the_Bitcoin_Network_-_3rd_Edition https://www.academia.edu/7666373/An_Order-of-Magnitude_Estim...
- quonn 12y agoI have not fully read the text you linked to, but it is not necessary to do so to reject at least the part about the Banking System Electricity use: common sense suffices. Sure, the system requires much more energy, but it also does much, much more than Bitcoin. In fact, almost everything it does is not related to the currency itself and would still be required if Bitcoin were to become popular.
- jrockway 12y agoI'm sure the Chinese bitcoin farms are buying high-quality carbon offsets, so no worries.
- alextgordon 12y agoI would have thought miners are more likely to set up in areas with hydro, because electricity is dirt cheap in those places.
- grubles 12y agoSome have. One datacenter that I am aware of is the Toomim Brothers Bitcoin Mining Concern Ltd.[0] which uses hydro-electric power. [0] http://toom.im/ http://toom.im/
- thomasfoster96 12y agoThe most important take away I think is that computing uses a helluva lot of more energy compared to what people think it does. Loading Facebook on your phone and seeing a newsfeed uses a fair bit more power than just the fraction of a percent of your battery's storage. Multiply that by 1.3 billion users and by a few thousand request per user per month - I suspect that's a lot of energy. I think a lot of climate change action includes to a degree a reduction in energy usage - but I don't see that happening any time soon. Unless computers get dramatically more efficient in their energy usage, energy demand will continue to grow. Renewable energy source growth will have to beat it.
- s_kilk 12y ago> Unless computers get dramatically more efficient in their energy usage... Or developers get dramatically better at writing efficient code. Or both.
- thomasfoster96 12y agoI don't think many developers optimise ( or would know how to optimise) for less energy usage. :)
- xpda 12y agoA Google data center near my home uses the equivalent of 1.5% of a nearby coal-fired generating plant's output to produce nothing but zeros and ones. To be fair, Google spends extra money to get electricity from renewable sources, and I'm happy to have them because I like their service. But that's a lot of electricity! Amazon, Microsoft, and other large data centers are similar.
- Tycho 12y agoThing is - as all that is being produced is information, you could generate all this power in the desert with solar power, run the machines out there, and just send the information along fibre-optic or microwave channels. There's absolutely no need for the operation to have a high carbon footprint, no matter how much power it needs. You can't say that about most things.
- brianbreslin 12y agoSolar has its own environmental impact too. Don't forget the factories and mining and energy requirements to produce photovoltaics.
- xyby 12y agoCreating Bitcoins is a side effect of processing transactions. I don't know how many transactions are currently processed when one Bitcoin is generated. But that would be the interesting figure. What I would find interesting is to compare the power consumption per bitcoin transaction with other currencies. Power consumption per transaction will probably always stay pretty low. Because one way or another the users of Bitcoin have to pay for them. And they won't use it, if it is expensive. Energy efficiency is one of the few areas I think should be handled by the government rather then by the individual. If using up energy is cheap but bad for the environment: tax energy higher. Everything will fall into place then in just the right proportion.
- jamestnz 12y ago> Creating Bitcoins is a side effect of processing transactions. I don't think that's a particularly useful characterisation of the situation. It makes it seem like some kind of "processing" on the transactions is where the real computationally expensive work occurs, with a side-effect of creating bitcoins. In reality, mining is pure mathematical busywork. A miner spends time trying to find a valid block (a valid hash with enough zeros at the start, as determined by the current difficulty level). This is a mathematical task unrelated to any "processing" of transactions, and is independent of the number of transactions or their complexity. While the miner is performing this busywork (trying hash after hash waiting for a valid one to come up) a number of transactions are occurring and are flying around the network. The miner is noticing these and caching them up. Eventually, if the miner should "find" a valid block, he publishes it to the network, and crams into it all his cached up transactions. So creating bitcoins isn't really a side-effect of processing transactions, per se. Rather, both the approval of transactions and the creation of bitcoins are side-effects of running a mathematical algorithm (mining). As such I probably wouldn't usually describe transactions as being "processed" at all (which would tend to imply computation related to the transactions themselves), but that they get "included" into a mined block. >I don't know how many transactions are currently processed when one Bitcoin is generated https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block That graph shows the number of transactions per block over time. You could then divide by the block reward to find transactions-mined-per-bitcoin-generated figure. >Power consumption per transaction will probably always stay pretty low. Because one way or another the users of Bitcoin have to pay for them. And they won't use it, if it is expensive. Well the mining "difficulty" level (which essentially dictates how much power is needed on average to find a block) is controlled by rules programmed into the bitcoin system, in such a way that the higher the total mining power contributing to the network, the higher the difficulty (adjusted every 2016 blocks, so that the entire mining network on average discovers a block every 10 minutes). Here is a graph of how difficulty has evolved over time, as the aggregate mining power has ebbed and flowed https://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty https://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty
- PythonicAlpha 12y agoMore interesting than the CO2 release per Bitcoin is the CO2 release per transaction. I guess this is still substantially higher than for normal bank transactions -- but how much? Normal money and living also releases CO2. When you use your big car to drive to the bakery 0.2 miles away, you release a lot of CO2 and all to buy some rolls worth 0.0...? Bitcoin. When I understand the system right, the number of transactions possible per generated Bitcoin should also rise in the same speed (or higher?) as the CO2 release does.
- larrydag 12y agoNote that the assumption of 500 gCO2/KWHe comes from an IPCC report which, according to another wikipedia article, has had its fair amount of criticism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_IPCC_Fourth_As...
- shillster 12y agoHow much CO2 is released to mine an ounce of gold?
- leni536 12y agoHow is it comparing to mining and melting gold into bricks?
- Adlai 12y agohttp://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-gold-production/ http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-gold-productio...
- leni536 12y agoSo it is roughly 20t/kg CO2 emission. 1kg gold is roughly 5 BTC at the moment, so normalized to BTC it's already 4t/BTC CO2 emission for producing gold.
- DennisP 12y agoThis is one of the reasons that people are working on proof-of-stake, which secures a cryptocurrency without mining. There are some good technical articles on the ethereum blog, eg: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/05/stake/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/05/stake/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/01/10/light-clients-proof-stake/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/01/10/light-clients-proof-sta...
- Adlai 12y agoSadly, proof-of-stake has some fundamental flaws undermining its reliability as a consensus mechanism: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf
- ikeboy 12y ago>if you are tired of opponents of proof of stake pointing you to this article by Andrew Poelstra, feel free to link them here in response https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/01/28/p-epsilon-attack/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/01/28/p-epsilon-attack/ Achievement unlocked!
- oco101 12y agoI'm tired this is another article that address nothing as stake argument. Nothing at Stake - Nothing to Fear : http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/08/Nothing-at-Stake-Nothing-to-Fear/?r=refer-o-matic http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2015/01/08/Nothing-a...
- higherpurpose 12y agoDoesn't proof of stake fundamentally ensure that the "rich get richer"?
- wongarsu 12y agoAt least in theory, the poor get richer at the same rate, so it's more like inflation. Practical problems make it not that easy, but it's not a fundamental flaw of the idea.
- wtbob 12y agoIt seems to me that this should be easily addressable with a proof-of-burn system (c.f. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn). This simulates the property of burning energy to have a chance of generating coins by instead burning coins to have a chance of generating coins (I don't think it's a pyramid scheme: rather, it'd incentivise burners to contribute to the network, just as miners are incentivised). Anyway, it's a very neat idea, and it'd make all this much more energy-efficient while still costing burners quite a lot (and hence making it expensive to try to attack the network).
- johndevor 12y agoThere's the argument that fiat money enables wars because nobody pays for them directly. The rise in bitcoin could bring this to an end. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq supposedly matched as much oil as India uses each day to run. I think in order to examine Bitcoins Co2 impact you need to look at the alternatives in great detail.
- dalke 12y agoThat argument doesn't make sense. I think about the wars of Alexander III of Macedon, the Mongolian wars, and the wars of Rome, and wonder how they could have existed without fiat money. Or is the argument that they would have been more successful with fiat money? For that matter, how would the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and Incans been enabled by fiat money when the accumulated wealth of those empires effectively gave Spain the ability to mint its own commodity money? In "Debt: The First 5, 000 Years", David Graeber makes a convincing argument that the introduction of commodity money helped the king raise larger armies. The king pays soldiers in gold or silver, then requires people to pay taxes in the same. Otherwise the soldiers, who are effectively strangers, don't have access to the credit economy of small communities.
- uptown 12y agoMaybe some of the "waste" heat could be used to heat homes: https://medium.com/re-form/heat-your-home-with-data-ab27fe7d6f01 https://medium.com/re-form/heat-your-home-with-data-ab27fe7d...
- fnordfnordfnord 12y agoHow much CO2 is released hauling bags of coins and notes around? How much is released keeping the rest of the currency system running? Bitcoin may or may not win on these questions, but if we're going to ask them about Bitcoin, we should also ask them about the way we're doing it now.
- stuaxo 12y agoI dunnow, but when I carry around £150 it's not usually in coins, just a few notes..
- fnordfnordfnord 12y agoI was thinking more about this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunbar_armored_car.JPG http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunbar_armored_car.JP...
- div 12y agoBut there _are_ coins, wether you carry them around or not is irrelevant, someone does.
- nctr 12y agoThere are alternatives, Proof of Stake for example, or gridcoin, where the computing power to "mine" gridcoin goes towards scientific projects via BOINC.
- skriticos2 12y agoFor me this tells that we as a species are still horrible at producing electricity in an environmentally balanced way. Especially stuff that's on the grid (like stationary computers) should be easy to run on regenerative energy and as Bitcoin is a global currency, it should not be a problem to do so 24/7 (the sun always shines somewhere). On a related note: why is fusion still 50 years away? Nobody seems to put proportional effort in that sector. ps: I think a satellite that is dedicated to compute Bitcoin with solar energy (no atmosphere/night to bother out there) would be awesome!
- eropple 12y ago> On a related note: why is fusion still 50 years away? Nobody seems to put proportional effort in that sector. Why is P=NP unsolved? Nobody seems to put proportional effort in that. Oh wait, they do, but J. Random Citizen doesn't know about it...? Huh!
- skriticos2 12y agoI did not mean to say that it's an easy problem to solve, just that I don't see an overwhelming political or societal will to push for a solution here. Flying to the moon was also a hard problem, but resources got allocated and things got done. If I'd see that 5% GDP would go into the project with proper focus and aim, I have the feeling it'd be faster. PS: and the money could be made with carbon taxation to push fossil fuel cost into perspective.
- eropple 12y agoYou're criticizing people for not gosh-darn inventing things fast enough when we don't even know that it's possible. There are things we know are possible, which people are doing, while other people are researching blue-sky technologies.
- theOnliest 12y agoI'm not an astronomer, but presumably a satellite would still have night to contend with. Anything orbiting the earth is going to spend half its time in Earth's shadow, right? I remember a Radiolab [1] where they describe the ISS going from daytime to nighttime every 45 minutes. [1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/242184-dark-side-earth/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/242184-dark-side-earth/
- EGreg 12y agoAs the price of mining goes up, the difficulty goes down. Was that taken into account? I still think that using proof of work as a part of a consensus algorithm is terribly wasteful. The rich get richer by way of buying energy in an arms race and the externality is pollution.
- joncp 12y agoColor me skeptical. I believe the author merely looked at the mean of the CO2/KWh stats on Wikipedia for all generation. That leads to misleading numbers. For example, I recall hearing that a large number of miners have set up shop in Iceland, where the electricity is all low-impact geothermal (and cheap). To get accurate numbers, one would need to figure out what types of electricity sources the miners are ACTUALLY using.
- DavidSJ 12y agoThis model is fundamentally flawed. It assumes (highly) exponential increases in hash rate with time but constant energy efficiency. However it is nearly entirely increases in efficiency that have driven the higher hash rates. If those efficiencies stop increasing (and we've probably picked the low hanging fruit already with ASICs), then hash rate growth rate will dramatically slow.
- antiics 12y agoThis kind of project speaks to a major strength of Bitcoin. The transparency that is built in to the Bitcoin protocol allows us to actually understand (albeit through rough estimation at this point) the complete resource cost of the network. This transparency allows us (humanity) to actually have discussions on how we can go about managing our resources in the 21st century. What is the total CO2 cost of <Large Payment Processor X>? No one knows - the network is opaque since that kind of information is a competitive advantage. Which is fine, the core competency of the payment processor isn't understanding their CO2 footprint. However, from a policy maker point of view, a system where total resource cost is verifiable by a third party audit makes for a compelling argument in favour of the open network.
- Lerc 12y agoIt's an odd thing but transparency of this sort often causes a bias in criticism because the problems are apparent. Wikipedia has a similar issue, with the perennial comments about the information being unreliable. People interpret a known level of unreliability as more unreliable. Similarly with bitcoin, a known cost is assumed to be more than a hidden cost.
- _Marak_ 12y agoWhen first investigating Bitcoin in 2011 I was highly concerned with it's energy consumption for the sake of crunching arbitrary calculations. It's a huge waste of natural resources. This is one of the main reasons I have been a big supporter of Peercoin. Peercoin eliminates the need for massive energy consumption and dedicated server farms. Both of these features will be very important in the future. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercoin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercoin Bitcoin is a huge innovation, but it can be considered the first major crypto-currency. In the long-run, alternate solutions like Peercoin will play a larger role in the market. Full disclosure: I have investments in both Bitcoin and Peercoin.
- yarrel 12y agoHow much energy do ATMs, banking mainframes, security trucks, HFT, chip & pin machines, accounting PCs, minting etc. consume? Let's compare like to like.
- alex_duf 12y agoIt's not the same economy scale though.