Topic: At what point do we stop kidding ourselves? Bye Bye mining farms. (Read 4477 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.

They can, they can put it up in sky and fuck it right through between if they have the power to. They will only have power if there is no strong support behind them. We need to be that strong support.

While I do agree with this you have to consider banks are already doing this themselves. They want to cut costs as much as we do. Every chance they get they move to more electronic ways of doing things. Idk about you all but i already rarely if ever have cash on me or need to go to an atm. I have direct deposit like most people so i also rarely physically make deposits. Hell even back in 2008 i had a completely electronic bank of america account. Banks are not nearly as far behind as you would suggest.

Thank you!

I agree that it a sense it increases security by dictating that a 51% attack would require that much more hashing power from a new party, but yes in the sense that an Existing farm make an attack having already had a good portion of the net hash makes it less. So its a give and take depending which argument you wish to follow.


How do we DE-centralize this trend? Or at least slow this trend down? We would need hardware available at competitive rates when they are still at competitive speeds or it will never happen. Produce ONLY one type of miner? Which would increase the hell out of competition. Idk i'm all for input. ASIC was a huge mistake imo. It should have never been allowed on the network. As I look over at my S5's shaking my head lmao.

Exactly. Also, governments are controlled by people with money, the bankers.

In short, mining is really unprofitable now and wasting this amount of electricity is uneconomical too. 

When doing these calculations one has to take into consideration that the bitcoin system may replace large bank datacenters , ATM machines , millions of big power hungry cash registers . CC terminals and scanners will eventually all be replaced by low power tablet devices. Plus , no longer the expenses of producing , securing , transporting cash , all of these are very expensive so ultimately alough bitcoin mining requires a lot of energy once it goes mainstream the overall energy consumption will be way less than the current fiat value transfer systems we use today.

Exactly. While many thinks that an increase in hashrate directly leads to an increase of security. Which is wrong. However we can't really say that it does not increase it at all.
I would say that it partially increases the security, because if someone new decides to do a 51% he would need many more miners. Although the downside here is obviously that a farm which is close to the necessary amount of hashrate for an attack could go rogue.

I do not see a way for mining to become decentralized again?

Satoshi predicted these events.
He said that btc could one day increase costs of things to sustain it.

I say let it run

We have proved here in this thread that centralized mining regardless of hashrate does not increase security it decreases it. Please read comments.

Another post inspired by the psuedo-science of global warming. Carbon footprint is irrelevant...I don't care if the network uses 1.21 GW of energy, if it makes Bitcoin more secure.

It is illegal in the usa to run any form of private currency. Cite the liberty dollar experiment that went south back in 2008.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/us/liberty-dollar-creator-awaits-his-fate-behind-bars.html?_r=0


This just goes to show, if it gets big enough, and it threatens what congress has set in place... they will slap the hammer down. We can't even get politicians to audit our IRS nor our federal reserve to see how much gold we actually have. To expand our 'federal reserve' that holds gold and prints money, is a private bank, with strong interest in this country. I'm not saying they are unbeatable but they will put up a huge fight. Considering they are basically holding our country hostage right now...

Well take america for example... We print money to cover debt. Which further increases inflation and the national debt, which we in turn print more money to cover. It's a vicious circle. But on that basis alone, america would be unable to adopt bitcoin as  currency (with the inability to print it at will) without going completely bankrupt We don't want that along with every country that we do business with. Now like its been mentioned it's possible they backbone on the blockchain... this still doesn't eliminate USD and it wont.

Mining Gold is infinitely more expensive, both monetary and environmentally. The impact on the terrain can make huge damage to anything that lives close to it. The annoying noise of the machines which cannot be covered inside a building.. etc etc. BTC mining is nothing compared to that.

The answer is quite simple, although this might be a little off the topic. They are never going to adopt something that they can not control. If everyone were to use Bitcoin this moment, the banks would start dying out pretty quickly in my opinion. They could only die if someone were to start offering loans in Bitcoin (like banks do).

Actually they are trying to find ways to use the blockchain technology because it is cheaper for them. I wonder how much power banks waste compared to Bitcoin?

then why governments are not adopting bitcoin, it would be a win win situation for them, if the cost are vastly cheaper, is only regualtion that prevent this? or there is something else...

i think they just don't like to not have the control over money

Dude.

http://www.coinwarz.com/calculators/bitcoin-mining-calculator

I already cited my predictions thread. You can't sit here and tell me its 'barely' profitable when one of the original profitability calculators is spelling out that it's (mining) is 200% profitable over electricity cost. Places like washington (all hydro power) are like 400% profitable. Unless you live in the EU or New York.. you should do just fine for while yet. I don't anticipate a jump in hashrate until the block reward halves. It's possible it might slightly pick up before then but i doubt it. I think the price of bitcoin will drop slightly over the next few months going into Q3 and when Q4 hits i expect KNC to launch whatever shenanagins they have planned and then we will see some action. Using the last 180 day horizon as reference we are lucky to have seen a 4% increase in hashrate per month, with 3-4 drops in diff. I think this is attributed to people changing out less efficient miners for more efficient miners. People have actually decreased hash power but with a lesser electricity cost so its more over profitable in the long run.

 It's a free market。 In China, miner work in the remote frontiers because low electricity fee.

 Fortunately, it seems that miners are concentrating in places that have hydroelectric power.  I would imagine that any environmentally responsible person who was mining Bitcoin in an area that is serviced with electricity from other-than wind, solar or hydro-electric generating stations has already shut down their miners or bought sufficient carbon credits to offset their output.  Gov'ts don't need to concentrate their efforts specifically on shutting down Bitcoin mining, they only have to make any industry that uses fossil fuel prohibitively expensive by adding the carbon tax and it's already happening.

Shhhhhh

The Sun wastes about 3.846 × 10²⁰ MW. I don't see why humans must bear responsibility for such an piddling amount.

You are correct.  However, there is still a psychological bias toward buying into a currency that had real work done to create vs a premine.

First, if I gave 144 people 25 bitcoins each, and they sold them, what would happen to the price of a bitcoin? According to you, the market would collapse because it cost them nothing to gain those bitcoins. Obviously, it wouldn't because there are enough free bitcoins to affect the market. You can't generate an unlimited number of bitcoins, so you can't drag the value down to the marginal cost.

Second, suppose Bitcoin was premined and 1 bitcoin was given to each of 21,000,000 people. Would the value of the bitcoins forever be 0? What if other people wanted some? What if people wanted two or more? What if one person managed to collect 10,000 and got someone to trade two pizzas for them? Would the value still forever be stuck at 0? No.

Don't you see? The value of a bitcoin has nothing to do with the cost of creating it. The supply of bitcoins does not depend on their value and bitcoins are not consumed. The economics of gold, oil, and other commodities do not apply to bitcoin.

how?  it's already risen to the 400,000,000 level three months ago and hasn't moved beyond it.  as you said, it's 'almost unprofitable' (or else it would be rising further).  it may do so later , for example of the btc price rises, but for now, it ain't.

The mining farms are going to exist as long as they are breaking even and the mining continues to be profitable. The price of bitcoin would have to drop very low (<$100) before they go away.

How? I suppose its a matter of interpretation. It's still quite profitable in my area as well as many areas. Undervolted I would be over 50% profitable.

already happened.


https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

I do expect btc to rise as well. Not exclusively though. Hashrate will rise to an almost unprofitable state, and hopefully the btc value follows suit. I can say this is the first quarter in the history of bitcoin that we've actually seen decreases in difficulty which is promising. That's for a different discussion though. I cover quite a bit of that here --->   https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11695012

Take part or don't. Thank you for contributing yet another off topic reply though!


Plenty of people contributed to this discussion in a helpful way. Only one person said some stupid ass shit that had nothing to do with the discussion and he was called on it. Action. Reaction.

no one can touch bitcoin, enough said!!!

I'm expecting the price of BTC to rise as a result ..

How can you expect to have a quality conersation when you immediately come off defensive and with a nasty attitude? Calling people fools and idiots because they don't agree with you is a great way to keep people away.

True but you are missing my point. They (the government) are getting paid for it. Twice. Taxes in america dude.

Whereas they are not with bitcoin. Unless people are claiming mining on their tax returns now? 

This is exactly my point. Governments do not care about who is responsible for using more electricity and "pollution on a massive scale".

Haha well you are missing a huge part of what gaming is and who that market belongs to

Three biggest names in gaming?

1)Steam

2)Microsoft

3)SOA


All three operate and pay taxes in america.




I mean I agree. And believing in free market I cant even disagree with what they are doing. I just see it as harmful in the long run. But perhaps i'm just too paranoid.

How about you actually read the thread before posting?

Well this is something that one should get used to. Humans are flawed. They are greedy and are going to abuse just about anything that they can.
It's unfortunate to see this happen but not much can be done to prevent an ASIC company to mine with new hardware before releasing it, right?

And what are your proposals to have a secure blockchain and network?

No, it is not responsible as human beings to waste electricity. Bitcoin is an experiment to revolutionise the global monetary system. It has the potential to save millions of people's life-savings, help overseas workers save fee remitting money home. Innovations do not come without costs. The electricity used are costs of technological advancement.

I would be safe to say that the global gaming industry (PC/console/mobile) uses more energy than Bitcoin does. Are they also irresponsible playing too much games and using more electricity than needed? Will governments come together and put an end to this?  

A cryptocurrency that cost nothing to make will eventually worth nothing, because it is voluntarily participated. Why should I pay 200 dollar for something that cost nothing to make??? Suppose that you can generate 1 bitcoin today with a cost of 1 dollar, then everyone will immediately go to generate coin and sell it on market for $199 of profit right away, that will drag the price down to 1 dollar

This is the big difference between bitcoin and fiat money, which can hold its value without any cost, because average people are not allowed to produce fiat money but forced to use it

And you need huge amount of resource to ensure the security of the network, that is the mining cost. Anyone can make a fake bitcoin with just coding, but they can not fake hash power, so the hash power will prevent anyone from attacking the system and modify the transaction. In fact the huge energy cost is just a byproduct of the large hash power, it has to be there to ensure the security of the network when millions of funds are transferred in the network

In fact, the huge cost in electricity is not a must, suppose that someone invented a quantum miner, with only 100w of power it can solve a block average 120 minutes, then the network will be very green with 12 such miner. However, he might need to spend billions of dollars to produce such a miner, and the wealth invested might be much higher than electricity cost of ASIC miners, so the cost still stays high

I agree with you that more hash-rate would increase security in a decentralized aspect. Although this is not the behavior we are seeing. We are seeing asic companies actively centralizing the network by creating farms and mining on their own hardware. Counteracting the very purpose of bitcoin (decentralized network).

Lol I think we see that.

Hashing power will continue to rise over the years, as more people buy the junk from the industrial companies, and the industrial companies continue to break through with tech.

That's quite interesting. I've never had a problem with it and it has always shown me the correct information.
However I do not agree with you on the point where governments are going to take action vs farms. You're free to spend your energy in any way you want as long as you're paying for it, right?

More hashrate does increase the security if we consider the possibility of a 51%. To be more specific, more distributed hashrate (not concentrated) increases the security. I haven't seen a good proposal to solve the issue of a potential 51% attack so far.

I'm still waiting for that "Bitcoin should use PoS like Peercoin" post. 

51% seems like an issue we shouldn't worry too much about. The whole network is pretty spread apart now, sure some are pretty large but not 50% large.

Here is Gavin's blog I believe you were talking about.

http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2012/05/neutralizing-51-attack.html

You are correct. They are not. The 51% shouldn't be an issue unless any one miner company creates an extremely efficient miner, which knc claims to have done. They literally state on their website 1/10th the energy consumption of today's hardware. Again when the block reward halves, some companies will deem that the time to get out is now. When they do that they will sell there power slowly, or they will simply shut down. That open hashrate will distribute back to the network. That is more likely the time when we are going to see a majority share. A company buy out.. or a company that creates state of the art technology that gives them the hardware edge.

This was an interesting read. Not sure how legit it is but a good read.

I do recall this! But its been a while.

Gavin blogged about some ideas on stopping 51% attacks but  I think his ideas were far from water tight.

Monetary freedom followed by bankruptcy once a 51% attack occurs.

Yes, the military and their various War Pigs use much more power than the Bitcoin network.
Three cheers for monetary freedom! 

I'm aware. As should everyone here who's ever joined a pool. I see it on the horizon than I see it just possible. But that me man. My proposal? I don't have one. I'm looking to the people on this one. We probably have the least amount of nodes we ever did. At least in the past we had every person in the usa with an ATI video card running nodes. Now its down to who can afford asic's for basically fun, and large farms.

You are correct. I got mine off of the same place. No idea why i pulled that number though.

So 88MW is more along the lines of 160MW.

100 MW  of power is nothing globally. If you are worried about effects on environment, just consider how many households are still using
old type lightbulbs, where most of the energy is converted to heat. And thats only one example which globally wastes more power than whole bitcoin network.

cheers

It's called a 51% attack.  Yes, its possible.

What's your proposal?  Mine less?? huh?

My whole point was that the entire bitcoin system uses less power then a single building in other industries. If you look at all other industries regardless of their product bitcoin is just a drop in a very big lake, and it much more eco friendly then other industries.

AND.... I am not even sure where banking came into this conversation.

Again you are all making a classical mistake under the assumption that added hashrate equals more network security. It DOES NOT. Individual nodes do. You know the individual miners that started this whole thing with GPU's.

Consider Farms will expand until they can no longer. Large mining farms start buying out other mining farms (Free market you keep raving about). A monopoly is possible. Don't you dare say its not. The second its not profitable some people wont mine at all. Others will for fun but their hashrate will be outweighed by the large farms that will consolidate over time.

What happens when the majority of network hashrate is owned by one farm? Your security is fucking gone and the largest farm really is the central bank now isn't it? They can manipulate the network at will REGARDLESS of overall hashrate. What matters is who owns what % of OVERALL hashrate. More hashrate does not equal more security. It means nothing.

How are you guys blind to this.

WE ARE NOT COMPARING CURRENT BANKING SYSTEMS TO BITCOIN. FOR THE FOURTH TIME. READ COMMENTS IF YOU PLAN ON CONTRIBUTING TO THIS DISCUSSION.

Your taking an entire community and comparing it to one company. A government can hold a company liable for pollution it creates. They have absolutely NO way of holding a community liable for the pollution it creates.

All of your rational is very logical but its applied in the wrong way.

I would for the second time state and agree that it creates less pollution than current systems. Again this argument is not about gold vs btc. Nor current banking vs btc. Its about solely the pollution created by mining. Lets stay OT.  That been said I think we could all agree that bitcoin is not nearly evolved enough to maintain an entire world of banking systems. Its ready to make an appearance but its not owning the show any time soon.


People just like with bitcoin, make lots of money on international banking. Like petrol.. don't expect it to go anywhere anytime soon. Not until bitcoin is a MASSIVE competitor and even then probably not.

There is the 16nm 3D chip KNC claims to have developed. Don't expect to get your hands on one without a group buy. They plan on self-mining the shit out of that hardware. The claims for that are 1/10th the power usage. Maybe. Probably not. That would revolutionize computation in general much less bitcoin.

Where did you get this number from?


This might seem like a lot of power to you, but it actually isn't. Couldn't you say the same for everyone wasting power playing games or contributing to projects online?
There are a lot of projects out there that work similarly to Bitcoin (e.g. you can donate processing power). Can you really say that energy is being wasted when it is used for operating the network?

At least hardware is becoming more and more efficient, especially compared to the first ASICs.

I'm a believer in the free market.  I don't think we need any central planners telling us there's limits to what's "acceptable". 
If people want to spend money/energy on Bitcoin mining instead of something else, I don't see anything wrong with that.

I think you meant the hashrate will HALVE or the price will rise. If you have more hashrate, then will be harder to mine bitcoins.

And the total power generated by the US alone is about 4,093 billion kilowatthours of electricity, so I think the bitcoin effected on wasted energy is insignificant.

And the banking system also use computers and ATM and stuffs that use electricity, how much power they consume, for comparation?
 

The total cost of mining is usually similar to the block rewards.

It is still cheaper than cost of maintaining today's banking system, many many folds.

You've assumed that the creation of electricity will create polution, there is zero need for me to have a logical argument.   All of the power supplied to my city is from a massive waterfall.

1. Regardless of the efficiency of the mining equipment and the cost of electricity, the total value of the energy used will be around the value of the bitcoins mined. If mining equipment becomes more efficient, the amount of energy used won't go down, the amount of mining equipment will go up.

2. Halving the block reward subsidy will halve the value of energy spent on mining (assuming that the price stays the same). It will not increase it as you claim.

The government will not shutdown a company for polluting, they just regulate it.  I have worked with oil/chemical companies for many years.  The government allows so much pollution and if you have a spill or go over that it is usually just a small fine.  Of course disaster like Exxon Valdez are a different story, but the extra pollution on a day to day is easily allowed.

I can tell you 1 chemical plant can easily use well over 88.9MW of power just 1, some of the large data centers have 100MW.

88.9MW for an entire planet of BTC mining is nothing in comparison to other industries or even a single facility.  I would say by your math you just proved BTC is more eco friendly then stuff we use everyday.

Edit: I found this after the fact. Chemical Companies alone back in 2002 use 3.7 Quadriillion BTUs of energy or converted 1,172,284,280 MW. http://www.eia.gov/consumption/manufacturing/briefs/chemical/

You're an idiot. Everyone else's reply was a contribution. You just look dumb.



I just want to clarify, in no way do i think the way our economies work today is sensible. Everyone plays a middle man part and tacks on their percentage to make it worth while which only drives up overall cost and work through-put.

This is not an argument of gold vs bitcoin. Please don't turn it into that. I created this thread for real-future-speculation.



I totally considered this. Until i found this...

http://solarcoin.org/en/front-page/


I haven't looked into it much but it appears you are rewarded coins for mining using solar energy exclusively.

Here we go again. In fact bitcoin mining is no more harmful than the wastefulness of mining gold out of the ground, creating gold bars from in, and then putting it back in banks again.
Not to mention the building cities or creating other things is the waste of energy as well. Printing and minting all the various fiat currencies, guarding it with people who could do something else etc.
I would say that as far as mediums of exchange go, bitcoin is actually quite economical of resources, compared to others.

For worldwide use the wattage isn't that bad, I mean if we take the top ten nation that consume power we get 13615000MWH if we take 88 and divide it by that number we get .00000646345942 that's not a lot in global usage now is it.

I mean one Solar farm in arizona makes 290MW, as technology increase and we produce more green electric I don't see this being too much of a concern.

In terms of environmental impact, Bitcoin does have a few benefits to consider over traditional banking.  It doesn't require petroleum or diesel fuelled secure/armoured vans to transport cash or gold to and from bank vaults because everything is sent digitally.  No need to use sea or air transport to move gold reserves abroad.  We aren't wasting masses of paper by sending out monthly account statements.  Investment banking tends to involve market manipulation in sectors like agriculture and the housing market which can potentially impact the environment in a negative way.  Bitcoin may have its issues when it comes to the environment, but it certainly isn't all bad.

if the wattage will go down because of a better efficiency, then more miners will be added = the same result as today(with more hashpower, but same consumption), you can't escape from that equation

the only thing to reduce it would be that bitcoin will remain at current price(after the halving), therefore miners need to shut down 50% of the total hash, unless they manage to double their efficiency in 1 year

so there is a percentage of possibility that nothing will change with the reward(besides the difficulty), highly unlikely though

Okay I myself mine. So just hush. I'm not here telling anyone what they should or shouldn't be doing. I'm just saying think about it. Be mindful. Instead of not giving shits like you clearly do.




To the gentleman who cited a Nimitz class aircraft carrier traveling at full speed....

You do realize that's a nuclear ship right? And nuclear carbon footprint is non-existent until it goes boom?


Most of the world is running oil or coal for power buddy. Even the nuclear reactors we've put in america we realized were a huge mistake. Try apples to apples.


You would have to be a complete moron to assume that monetary freedom isn't worth a lot. But even a moron can tell you there's a limitation to whats acceptable. I love bitcoin. I love mining. Again i'm not putting bitcoin in the spotlight. I'm putting all of our competitive mining in the spotlight. Mining farms. People driving the net-hash beyond where it needs to be in the act of greed. Don't even try to tell me KNC is in it for the monetary freedom. They are located in one of the most private countries in the world... They are in it for the $$$. Do you think they are paying there power bill with BTC? No. Its being converted into fiat to cover overhead probably along with their salaries. I'm sure they are banking lots of btc. But they aren't in it for the love of btc. A fool could tell you this.

Efficiency will keep increasing and we can hope that the wattage used goes down but when more people get involved and bitcoin use increase there will probably be an increase of miners but that's just standard growth to use.

I hadn't considered government action due to the adverse ecological effect of mining. However, Bitcoin was designed so no government could easily shut it down. If the US and Chinese governments made both owning and mining Bitcoin illegal it would probably be enough to severely damage or destroy Bitcoin. But I doubt they would do that soon because the US already debated making it illegal in 2013 and decided not to, plus the US regulated it in New York with the Bit License. They wouldn't have done that if they were considering making it illegal. Chinese industry causes so much polution they have terrible smogs, so I doubt the Chinese government has time to worry about the environmental effect of Bitcoin mining.

does using proof of work to secure a decentralized currency seem responsible, even if it costs a lot of energy?

I say yes.

Besides, it's a free market.  Who are you to tell others where and how to spend their money?

I rarely see discussion on the impact of bitcoin. No, not financially, not from an economic standpoint.

How about the eco-system?

Our network hashrate for bitcoin alone (there are also many alts out there) is 177,943,954.

Now lets assume that everyone mining right now is rocking the best of the best hardware (they aren't) grabbing 0.5w/ghs. FYI electricity cost in washington is cheap. REALLY CHEAP. Due to all the hydroelectric power. That been said its about .04$ on an industrial tier. Which means they can run really inefficient hardware by our standards and still be profitable so this is a lot worse than iv'e calculated. I should note EVERYONE is flocking to washington right now with their miners. That means with bitcoins total hash-rate of 177,943,954 GH/s that its energy consumption would be around 88,971,977 Watts or 88.9 Megawatts of power.

Again these numbers are likely far below actual. I would tack on an additional 30% even for people running older hardware.


88.9 MEGAWATTS OF POWER PEOPLE

We can only assume that with the reward drop coming up that either hashrate will double or the price of bitcoin will have to rise. Maybe a bit of both as im speculating but regardless.

Does this seem responsible? We are basically polluting on a massive scale to make pennies on the dollar.

You have to assume at some point governments will come together to put this to an end?


EDIT****


WE ARE NOT COMPARING CURRENT BANKING SYSTEMS TO BITCOIN. FOR THE FOURTH TIME. READ COMMENTS IF YOU PLAN ON CONTRIBUTING TO THIS DISCUSSION.