Topic: . - page 7. (Read 24764 times)

The "startup" costs of these energy types are very high. As a result one would need to invest a lot of money in order to build a coal or a nuclear plant. It also takes many years to build these types of plants verses a week (possibly) to order, receive and setup a solar panel

Cooling is important factor. You do not only need to produce something. You also need to make sure machine won't overheat.

Interesting part is, even though we usually use electricity for it, there are other solutions.

Out of curiosity, how much energy does your typical ASIC need? I'm planning to plop down a few windmills on the boat I'm buying soon, and it might be fun to have one running entirely on wind. Just as a proof of concept and bragging rights if nothing else.

Price.
Obviously today is as it is now, with a lot of scope for improvement. Looking some years down the road my point is that RLG tech is incredibly efficient because it recycles electricity within the circuit needing only a negligible top-up. While fossil and nuclear prices continue to rise there will be a crossing point where renewable energy sources will out-compete conventional sources.  I think for ASICs this is <10 years away.

As a dane, let me just say that I am insanely jealous of the cheap electricity everyone else has. It's at $0.45 here.

Low power devices will be run with sustainable electricity sources, such as solar cells, making the whole concern about energy consumption an academic debate.

Price of electric is different around the world. Not to mention all kind of ways to optimize it.

A future generation of ASICs could be made with reversible gates which means that electricity use becomes far smaller as heat dissipation becomes negligible. (Note that the application suggested here is classical CMOS, not quantum computing).


http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_VHDL_99/tran888/lecture003-reversible-logic.pdf
"Power dissipation of reversible circuit, under ideal physical circumstances, is zero."

http://www.ermt.net/docs/papers/Volume_2/issue_5_May2013/V2N5-129.pdf

As the Bitcoin fx rate climbs the incentive to push the envelope in chip design is ever stronger. A SHA-256 hashing circuit is far simpler than a general purpose CPU. Hopefully, Bitcoin mining will be at the forefront of reversible gate technology in a few years making the whole mining network orders of magnitude more energy efficient.

(Mentioned this elsewhere, but had no feedback on how the tech is progressing...)

Shouldn't this be then, our long awaited intrinsic value of BTC ?

Also, is everything correct with units ? It looks like they're not cancelling right.

Your equation is (assuming rational miners / no free electricity / continuous network hash) :

N * X = P * Q

N - number of mined bitcoins per day having unit of [ BTC / day ]

X - exchange rate having unit [ $ / BTC ]

P - total network electricity consumption measured in [ MWday ]

Q - price of electricity measured in [ $ / MWday ]

So:

N = block_reward * number_of_blocks_per_day ~ 25 * 24 * 6 (because roughly 10min per block) = 3600   BTC / day

Q ~ 150 $ / MWh  = 3600   $ / MWday

So:

3600  [BTC / day]    *    X  [$ / BTC]  = P [ MWday ]  *    3600 [ $ / MWday ]

Right side units cancel to $, but left side units don't cancel to $. but to $/day ?! Is something missing ?

Add 50% to that price/kWh assumption:

+1

The assumption that the rational actor mines whether or not they can make today's profit and only today's profit via electricity is somewhat flawed.  That would be true in a certain controlled environment and to some extent many miners do wake up and make this decision each day, but.....

In the long term a rational miner makes plans over the course of months including the price of the miner and the price of electricity in relationship to the price of bitcoin.  Excluding the price of miners from your equation would only be true if no new miners came into play ever.  That simply isn't the case.  New miners have constantly and are constantly coming into play.

A person can't just make a theory saying that electricity is the only cost that factors into the price of bitcoin.  That simply isn't the case.  Big companies take into consideration electricity prices, but small home miners are locked into their electricity supply so it is irrelevant to them.  But a large amount of miners are driven into and out of mining much more so by the price of miners, than the price of electricity.  Clever and experienced miners carefully time what miners they buy and when to maximize their advantage.  


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otherwise I appreciate your insight and thinking this out.  it is a very cool idea

Death rate due to coal burning is mostly cancer and respiratory illness.  Mercury toxicity from coal causes neural damage, especially damaging in early development.  A survivable and humane environment is a green environment, AGW notwithstanding.  When economic development is low, you've got bigger fish to fry, but as soon as you can afford intelligent cancer-free children, you're likely to want to spend your developed income on that.

Economic incentives aside, there's really no reason why miners can't be restricted to renewable energy as available.  The network is global, and the Earth turns.  There would always be mining occurring somewhere.  It's only the compulsion to amortize the plant, and to maximize earnings, that compel miners to operate 24x7.

EDIT:  But there is a novel technique for burning coal with iron oxide that essentially eliminates fly ash, if I recall correctly.  It was a research press release, so it might be overblown, and I don't recall much detail -- it was about 2 years ago.

If price doesn't increase consumers break down the doors of the electric company and City Hall. Price will increase damn fast when people don't have electricity. I am here in Davao, Mindanao and we are having rotating brownouts. The people and businesses are ready to strangle the necks of the politicians and so yes the price has risen and the new coal powerplants are being built (200MW to come online next year and more coming).

I agree price may not rise if the damn socialists who want subsidies are in control.


Man-made climate and global environmental change is the most irrational thought a person could have. Start here on the definition of the scientific method.


I assume you are referring to this point:


You must have flunked Economics 101 because you forgot opportunity cost.

They can sell the hardware. Factor that in and you see my point was relevant.

Obviously for ASICs you are correct, but general purpose computers you would not be. That is another reason a cpu-only coin is needed.

The amount of energy consumed will be much less than the current banking system consumes which, hopefully, bitcoin will replace. This doesn't even take into account the millions of lives (and productivity) saved when nation states can no longer print money at will to finance their endless wars.

The OP is nonsense. Here is why.

If it was a typo, then the number is wrong. It's not done by buying a PV module. I guess Germany is a good place to look at for PV. http://www.photovoltaik-guide.de/pv-preisindex says they're at 2$ per Wp.
And it's still not done because you need some kind of power management. If you run in island mode (off-grid, to avoid paying grid fees) you need a battery to get most out of your gear, add another >2$ per Wp.

Or - of course - you let the german public pay: Feed your PV into the grid, get a subsidized price, and then buy coal power to run your rig ;-)

OK. But iceland cannot supply the 7% (or 14%?) of global electricity.

Well, you're right, that's not what I was talking about. I only estimated the energy used for the financial sector.
But if your point is to equal fiat with spent energy, how would bitcoin make things different?


The decrease in mining rewards will followed by increasing gains by fees. Or bitcoin security will weaken.

We can only agree to disagree on this point. Especially, because there are alternatives to PoW.

Still you can create more green solution. But consumption is still not high enough to worry about

Just Two.

An old cougar that caught me when I was young and naive. As I got older and my SMV went up, I negotiated the right to take a second wife. All three of us lived together in Nairobi for a short time, that was a total disaster. Feminism vs. Femininity...some day I might write an article on it.

Just curious.  How many do you have?  One is more than enough for me.