Topic: At what point do we stop kidding ourselves? Bye Bye mining farms. (Read 4478 times)

Well, you HAVE TO compare the current banking systems to bitcoin for this to be meaningful.  Because bitcoin is the service Bitcoin presumes to replace.

If miners are flocking to places like Washington with dirt cheap hydro electric power, wouldn't that be a good thing? After all hydroelectric is one of the most environmentally friendly forms of power generation.


LOL. You think you can source several MW worth of power without paying taxes? Good luck with that.


You've admitted bitcoin is more environmentally friendly than current banking systems, and "well it's not environmentally friendly enough" isn't really an argument so I think this thread can be concluded.

Thanks for the corrections!  Even given the corrected numbers, we're still talking about a rather minuscule amount of the total energy production the world over.  According to http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Nuclear-Power-in-the-World-Today/ there are currently 435 operational nuclear power facilities in the world with over 375,000 MWe of total capacity.  They provide just 11% of the world's total production.

So every single bitcoin miner on the planet would consume 69.72% of a facility that represents 0.13% of the 11% of total capacity the world over provided by nuclear plants.  This is assuming I didn't make another mistake in my math

You need to fix your units. There is confusion about the difference between power and energy, and the units used to represent them.

Power is the rate at which you can generate or expend energy. The units of power are watts (W). Units of energy are Watt-hour (Wh) and joules (J). 1 watt-hour is 1 watt for 1 hour (as well as ½ W for 2 hours or 2 W for ½ hour).

There is no such thing as 502 MW per hour, unless you are talking about changes to power. You meant to write just "502 MW" and "12,048 MWh of energy". A 502 MW power plant outputs 502 MWh each hour, or 12048 MWh per day.

Finally, 350 MW is 70% of 502 MW.

You pose an interesting question here.  What are the environmental impacts of mining?  First, I think your numbers are a bit low.  The network hash rate is far closer to 350PH/s than the 177PH/s you quoted.  We certainly haven't seen a doubling of the hash power in the past 4 days since you wrote your initial post, so I'm not entirely sure where you got that value.  Assuming the vast majority of the network is between 0.75W and 1W per GH/s, the total power consumption on a daily basis is between 262.5 MW and 350 MW.

I don't know enough about energy production to speculate, but here's an example.  The smallest nuclear plant in the US (located in Nebraska) can produce 502MW per hour.  So, in a day, that's 12,048 MW of power.  Even if every single bitcoin miner on the planet was powered by this single facility, it would only consume 2.9% of the facility's capacity.

No they don't you need to read this topic in its entirety. And anyone who mines is doing it with some form of asic tech. Check your facts man. wtf.

ASIC's make the network EVEN more secure.. if we use coins that are on GPU a super computer could dummy them..

The idea we don't want to move into ASIC's is a silly idea.

THE PROBLEM IS EVERYONE IS SEXUALLY OBBSESSED WITH PROFIT AND NOT ACTUALLY DENCETRLIZING THE NETWORK OR YOU'D ALREADY OWN AN ASIC AND BE MINING...

But you only care about profit. Don't give me this it is expensive shit either, you can buy a U3 or an S3 off of Amazon/kijiji for cheap.  It just won't turn you a massive profit so you won't get it.

then they can only go with cryptonigh, because even there gpu has no advantage over cpu, so it is a fair play for everyone

because there is no any other algo, where gpu are good but asic not

Well your numbers aren't really correct. For the PS4 vs XONE it is 112 watts versus 137 watts. What's stabbing me in the eye is that you're saying that the average consumption of power for PC gamers is 100W.
What are they playing, emulated Super Mario? If we look at modern games, even playing with the minimum required specifications you need a PSU capable of 400-500W at least.
Enthusiast PCs are probably using over 1kW of power. I myself am using around 800W when doing some hardware heavy work.
Actually numbers suggest that there are about 1-1.7B people that are playing video games.

Anyhow, the point is that you can't say that the power is really wasted since it is being used for something. Currently the network isn't really spending that much energy.

The algorithm has to be GPU friendly, not CPU friendly to discourage botnet.

PoW algo isn't going to change anytime soon.

Regardless, your post doesn't make sense.
The whole point of a botnet is taking over PCs, not ASICS.

Bitcoin can add another PoW algorithm which is difficult to implement in ASIC and can be mined by most people but not botnet. This will help solve the cetralisation problem.

More energy is spent on watching cat videos than on mining bitcoins. Sorry, no citation. You'll just have to believe me. 

PS4 or XONE consumes ~100W when playing games. Also casual gamer PC consumes same amount of power (not to mention enthusiast PC). In every second there is at least 10M players worldwide (propably alot more). That equals to 1GW of power wasted just for fun. You say Bitcoin network is wasting power?

To expand the community is the key to success, but mining concentration definitely does not help to get more people involved. Bitcoiner usually started with mining, and get to know the other aspects later on. We need good more businesses to sell millions of miners to individuals to let them experience money creation in bitcoin ecosystem, and they will feel the difference with fiat money system where no one except the banks are allowed to create money

Yeah I agree! Solid input guys! I really enjoyed reading your reply.

These are good arguments

Your first assumption is exactly like those chinese miners with free electricity, they can dump their cheap coin on the market to make a quick buck. But since the bitcoin supply is extremely limited, a large hedge fund would still be possible to raise the market price by 10 fold regardless of sell pressure out there (They can anticipate how large the sell pressure can be)

However, after the rally is over, the hedge fund cashed out and went for vacation for two years, now we are left with all the miserable bitcoin investors seeing a falling market. In a falling market, many of bitcoin's promises are broken, so the demand will also shrink significantly. In such a time, how much should a bitcoin worth becomes very important for people's decision making. And naturally, a common indicator is the mining cost: If the coin worth more than mining cost, miners will sell, if lower, miners will hold, that will adjust the supply. And this is what happened during 2014, exchange rate kept going down until they got close to mining cost

And as you said, if there is no new supply, then even the cost is zero, the coin could still worth something if there is certain amount of demand. I'm not totally sure about this reasoning, but this reasoning can work if the demand of this coin is unique, can not be replaced by anything else(like diamond), or the demand is forced on many people (like fiat money). Bitcoin is not forced on anyone, so that leaves us with only the "unique demand" requirement, and there is indeed a unique demand: anti-inflation currency. Non of the other fiat currencies in the world are anti-inflation. However, any other cryptocurrency can also be anti-inflation

So what makes bitcoin different than any other alt-coins would be its large community. If this community is large enough, everyone prefer to use bitcoin for transaction, then bitcoin will work like fiat money, automatically hold its value without production cost. But to be honest, most of the community consists of speculators, real bitcoiners are minority, so the community and its value are very unstable, depends on the price movement

If there is any new coin generation, or fee generation, and people are possible to participate the mining, then the mining competition will raise its cost to the market price. Imagine that when one coin worth 1 million dollar while mining each block will give you a fee of 1 bitcoin, the mining cost of each block would get close to 1 million dollar due to competition

Actually you can also use this to explain the price rally: When this community expands very fast, the demand surge and the price of bitcoin will rise exponentially, causing the mining infrastructure to expand, mining cost to rise. And when price is going down, the community also shrinks very fast, the demand goes down and price crash further, but get some strong support around the mining cost

No i'm not ignoring it i'm assuming you already have it.. as do i. ROI and profitability are slightly different my friend. The ROI calculator iv'e created has many other aspects than just price involved. Heavy speculation is needed.

Aren't you ignoring the cost of mining gear? 

Obviously its marginally profitable.  How else would you explain the fact
that the hashrate hasn't risen meaningfully in 3 months.

Yeah I agree. It would be short-sighted to say they Can't do this or do that. They can do whatever they please given enough motivation to do so. In other news a bit OT, we (USA) just legalized same-sex marriage on a federal level.