Topic: . (Read 24755 times)

The above comments does not apply to the initial mining period when new coins are issued.

Well, if we agree on the fact that if bitcoin rises to 1million USD in 12 years, it will consume 6% of power (according to the model I posted from stdset), the question becomes : will this provoke an incitation to move to POS cryptos ?
I am not sure about that, because if it rises to 1million, the cost of migrating to something else are astronomical and might outweigh the cost of energy.
However, if the price of Bitcoin would make some business model impossible, I would expect migration to happen.

We can slow down the process with energy reuse, but it does not solve the question, only post bone it.

Cost of production of money is 0, but the money transmission is huge due to the cost involved in running the banks and data centres.

Last century:  Cost of production of money: 0 watts.   Massive waste of all resources results.

This century:  Cost of production of money: determined by public currency mining market.  Efficient use of resources results.  

Last century:  Cost of production of money: 0 watts.   Massive waste of all resources results.

This century:  Cost of production of money: determined by public currency mining market.  Efficient use of resources results. 

The question was "If you have 1000 (BTC, k€, whatever) and a possibility to get ASICs delivered to you, what will be your optimal allocation of capital ?"

And the only sensible answer is "100% on ASICs".

Mining Bitcoin is a job. You can be good at it and earn money.
Producing electricity is a job. You can be good at it and earn money.

Mining Bitcoin AND producing electricity at the same time is TWO jobs. You can't be good at both. You will lose money

What question? My post above already answers the vague "See?" in the bottom of that post and you may notice I didn't mention wind in that and stuck to relatively stable methods that allow consistent operation.

One for you in turn, why is it you attack any mention of renewable energy usage? Its starting to sound like you have some sort of agenda with this, that was a reply to a direct question on a relatively dead thread that's on-topic with the threads title. Minings energy consumption is considered a problem and every problem can be seen as an opportunity.

.. that the network consumes something like 600MW. That is one third of the electric capacity of the plant of Fessenheim that made the news today (in France)

Heat recovery is used in some power plants to get efficiencies over 90%, usually providing heating for towns, not many of them and circumstances have to be ideal for those kind of figures though. Maybe something like that could work though, many large offices are using heat storage and biomass burners for heating to offset carbon charges and mining could integrate well with that both in heating and biomass drying (drying wood chip, etc. has high costs).

Makes more sense to locate where there's an abundance of renewable power though, solar, hydro, geothermal, all better than loading up the grid.

Frankly speaking, this topic doesn't belong to this board.
However, we can estimate Bitcoin mining power consumption in 12 years, provided that Bitcoin replaced all M1 money supply in the world, what is very unrealistic, but we want to make a conservative estimate. As of 2009 M1 was about 20*1012USD http://dont-tread-on.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/SmallGlobalMoneySupply.png
In 12 years block reward will be 8 times less than now, let's assume that fees still constitute a minor part of block reward, i.e. block reward is 3.125 BTC, that means 18.75 BTC created per hour. Value of 1 BTC equals roughly 1 million USD of 2009 purchasing power (in 2027 USD doesn't exist already, since BTC completely replaced it). Let's now assume, that miners spend half of their revenue to pay for electricity (that's rather unrealistic, but we want to make a conservative estimation), so we have 9.4*106 USD per hour to pay for electricity. If we take a reasonable price of 0.07 USD/kWt*h, that results in 1.3*1011 Watts of total power consumption by all miners in the world. In 2007 the world produced about 20*1015 Wt*h of electric power, or 2.3*1012 Watts on the average. We can see that under such unrealistic conditions bitcoin mining consumes less than 6% of total world electric power.
Hope I didn't make a mistake in calculations.

BTW, we can conclude that even in 12 years Bitcoin is unlikely to replace all money in the world, since 6% of total electric power produced in the world is a bit much, I'd say that bitcoin will need not less than 16 years to achieve that  Smiley

why they can't redicrect the energy dissipated, to something more useful, right cure the cancer or something

If my theory is correct, and the price stays where it is now ($200) the difficulty should drop A LOT at the next adjustment.
We will see.

AsicMiner testing an 0.25 W/GH board.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9794133

If it is implemented in miner, that would be interesting.

We can look at the (necessity of building more) nuclear plants as positive externality of Bitcoin.
Might even stimulate Fusion research.

Here's my take.

The Math: (extract from an internal report)

• First difficult y drop seen in 2 years occurred 2 Dec 2014
• Over the next 85 weeks (21 months) a total of 2.1 million Bitcoins will be mined
• USD $735 million at $350/BTC, $1 billion at $500/BTC, >$2 billion at $1000/BTC
• 280 MW estimated Bitcoin network size today (compared to Google's estimated 260 MW, Facebook 78 MW)
• Block reward halving ETA July 2016 (85 weeks, 5 days as of today)
• Bitcoin output from 25 BTC to 12.5 BTC per block (next halving estimated 2020)


Historical Bitcoin Network Data:

Nov/Dec 2014 (today):

Hashrate:                     290 PH/s    (+35%)
Total Megawatt:                 280 MW   (home mining almost gone)
Megawatt Industrial/Data Center:    270 MW   (+35% 0.85W/GH new capacity)

August 2014:

Hashrate:                     214 PH/s    (+375% or 94%/month)
Total Megawatt:                 214 MW
Megawatt Industrial/Data Center:    200 MW    (>1000-2000%)

April 2014:
Hashrate:                     57 PH/s
Total Megawatt:           250-500 MW    (mostly at home miners)
Megawatt Industrial/Data Center:    10-20 MW

AsicMiner testing an 0.25 W/GH board.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9794133