Pages:
Author

Topic: . (Read 24764 times)

donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
.
February 03, 2015, 12:06:05 PM
The above comments does not apply to the initial mining period when new coins are issued.

Well since the subsidy will not go to zero for another 120-130 years most discussions about costs, energy, and sustainability deal with the period from now until ~2140.   Even after the next couple halvings the subsidy will play a major impact in the cost of the network.
hero member
Activity: 896
Merit: 1000
January 30, 2015, 11:35:25 AM

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.

The cost of mining is equal to the fees incurred. When the value rises, the percentage of fee will drop. I agree the total cost of mining will rises but not linear to the value of BTC. The above comments does not apply to the initial mining period when new coins are issued.
legendary
Activity: 1358
Merit: 1014
January 29, 2015, 12:32:12 PM
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.  


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.


If something costs 0, you have right there a big reason to think it's a scam.
hero member
Activity: 896
Merit: 1000
January 28, 2015, 04:37:52 AM
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.  


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.
legendary
Activity: 1204
Merit: 1028
January 27, 2015, 07:05:45 PM
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. 


Thiss so hard. The amount of effort put into generating Bitcoin is justified, we are talking being backed by math there boys. The result will be an harmonic one, and not a catastrophe (fiat).
sr. member
Activity: 370
Merit: 250
January 27, 2015, 10:02:47 AM

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


Not so
It is not 2jobs it is vertical integration
And quite safe as investment as you diversify and get flexible as to what to produce bitcoins or electricity depending on where you get more value.
Iwould first deploy solar panels and on a second phase the miners and iterate reinvestment on around robin fashion.

A note on heat extraction : powerplants can reuse heat because they produce highly concentrated heat, miners produce heat of low value.
A note on green energy, best use energy sources that provide dc so as to skip conversion and related loses, solars are the best type imho to drive circuitry
legendary
Activity: 1078
Merit: 1006
100 satoshis -> ISO code
January 27, 2015, 06:00:12 AM
This thread is about the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network, not about new ways to produce electricity which may or may not be more renewable and/or less expensive than the standard ones. So please don't start this discussion again, unless you have a new answer to this simple question : https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/--520977

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.

Yep. Considering the OP still contains this major factual error.

.. 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)
legendary
Activity: 1264
Merit: 1008
January 27, 2015, 02:54:15 AM
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. 

hero member
Activity: 714
Merit: 662
January 26, 2015, 05:23:08 PM
I seriously doubt that "reusing heat from miners" has any sound foundation, I think that cooling miners is just an extra cost. Heat extraction and concentration may well be uneconomical in most cases, Also converting ac to dc adds to inefficiency.
It could well be that having solar powered miners in sahara even with the added cooling costs may be preferable than expending electricity in say norway and tapping into byproducted heat

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.
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.
sr. member
Activity: 370
Merit: 250
January 26, 2015, 03:25:07 PM
I seriously doubt that "reusing heat from miners" has any sound foundation, I think that cooling miners is just an extra cost. Heat extraction and concentration may well be uneconomical in most cases, Also converting ac to dc adds to inefficiency.
It could well be that having solar powered miners in sahara even with the added cooling costs may be preferable than expending electricity in say norway and tapping into byproducted heat
hero member
Activity: 714
Merit: 662
January 23, 2015, 09:44:11 AM
I repost what stdset replied on https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=920007.60

Quote
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

I have checked his model with today's input, and it match with reality. I have not seen any flaw in his reasoning.
My question was : why do you think POW energy consumption to be unsustainable ? It was a very good response I think.
However, we won't reach the problem until bitcoin cost 1 Million $ in 12 years Wink
Even if "6% of total electric power is a bit much" is highly subjective depending on the utility of bitcoin. Also the heat can be reused.

The input he took are conservatives, making them more realistic cost more energy.
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
January 15, 2015, 12:13:20 PM
why they can't redicrect the energy dissipated, to something more useful, right cure the cancer or something

Why can't a bank guard also cure cancer at the same time?   Not to be snarky but POW has certain important properties:
1) it needs to be cryptographically related to the current and prior blocks (which is why we hash the blockheader)
2) it needs to be a probabilistic process (any hash can solve a block but on average it will take a huge number to do so)
3) the difficulty of the solution needs to be adjustable
4) the solution on average needs to take a large amount of work to solve but take a very small amount of work to verify
5) a potential solution should be reached by any person with only access to the blockchain and memory pool (no central authority)

This is a very difficult set of requirements which is why POW is the "magic" that made Bitcoin possible.   ecurrency is various forms existed prior to Bitcoin but they required a central authority as the idea of there was no solution on how to achieve a distributed consensus among untrusted peers.

Still the heat can be used for additional work.   I think as ASICs become more commodity based (i.e. when I can buy a reel of them for immediate shipping at digikey) and energy costs dominate we will see integration of ASICs into systems that heat a house or hot water tank with the waste heat.
legendary
Activity: 3248
Merit: 1070
January 15, 2015, 11:41:40 AM
why they can't redicrect the energy dissipated, to something more useful, right cure the cancer or something
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
January 15, 2015, 10:57:39 AM
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.

Probably not (although difficulty may decline some).   What is more likely is a rotation.  Older obsolete hardware getting scrapped and higher electrical cost miners being replaced by lower electrical cost miners.   The boom prices lead to some pretty weak miners.  There were miners setting up shop in UK with $0.25+ per kWh.  The OP talks about an average price of $0.15 but I think the upper end is going to be closer to $0.10 and the average somewhere around $0.05 per kWh.
hero member
Activity: 489
Merit: 500
Immersionist
January 15, 2015, 10:37:21 AM
Many megawatts I have personal knowledge of (air cooled) have been switched off recently. If this will be "compensated" by newer hardware coming online (hardware that was already in the pipeline) remains to be seen short term.
hero member
Activity: 686
Merit: 500
December 25, 2014, 05:59:57 AM
AsicMiner testing an 0.25 W/GH board.

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


This appears to still be in the very early testing phase and will probably not be available for some time. Also more efficient miners will only result in overall higher hashrate on the network which means a higher difficulty, not a lower amount of electricity used
legendary
Activity: 3248
Merit: 1070
December 24, 2014, 10:46:02 AM
AsicMiner testing an 0.25 W/GH board.

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

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

they would rise the price of it, until it won't roi for sure, just like they did with their previous stuff

but it's cool to see something x3-4 more efficient
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 260
December 24, 2014, 09:34:37 AM
Interesting. Note taken.  Wink
hero member
Activity: 980
Merit: 509
December 15, 2014, 08:40:51 AM
We can look at the (necessity of building more) nuclear plants as positive externality of Bitcoin. Smiley
Might even stimulate Fusion research.

This is a good alternative energy that can be used to support the massive electricity consumption

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


What a great information here, gonna note this !
hero member
Activity: 896
Merit: 1000
December 15, 2014, 07:51:32 AM
AsicMiner testing an 0.25 W/GH board.

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

If it is implemented in miner, that would be interesting.
Pages:
Jump to: