Topic: Bitcoin is now consuming 1% of the world's electricity. Is that sustainable? - page 5. (Read 13960 times)

in a fiat financial collapse. $10 goes from buying 10 loaves of bread. to only buying 1 loaf of bread.
(look at zimbabwe dollar a trillion dollars buys you a bread crumb)
or to flip the mindset a lof of bread goes from $1 to $10+

what will happen is bitcoin will go up to trillions of dollars. but the purchase value of goods, assets or services wont match the amount of goods or services 1btc can buy today

this is why we need to start measuring bitcoin against cost of living.. or even just a 'bread loaf value' to detach away from the dollar so we can see a real btc vs goods value

as for people waiting to buy at or below $5k range. bar a temporary fluke of stupidity where a whale sells at a loss.. i dont anticipate a sub $5800. and ill explain why

firstly. if a miner that mines to hoard. is happy to spend $6.1k mining. if they see the market drop to under $6100. they will just divest some of that electricity money and just buy btc from the market and save themselves a couple hundred dollars and ofcourse time.

since november 2017 (retested end of june2018) the community has had 10 months to sell below $5800 .. ample oppertunities. and they havnt taken up that option.(thus market community acquisition cost consensus =$5,800+)
ontop of that if you do the math of mining costs of a BTC. that too sits at over $5,800.(thus mining community acquisition costs consensus =$5,800+)

this basically makes the market and mining both support the rational consensus to not sell below their costs (not stupid to sell for a loss)

i would have said the maths of september is more like $6100+... but its too soon to say that, because 5800 was only a couple month ago so too soon to raise the bottomline to 6100 without giving the community ample option to test. so im cautiously sticking with $5800 for a couple more months

In principle, there is nothing surprising in order to earn bitcoins you need to spend a lot of electricity. I think these figures will grow, but it was worth expecting.

If you look at this point of view, then the electric cars needs to be locked out. We are saving energy

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This is a topic that should have discussed previously but I am glad we are doing it right now because the main idea to implement Bitcoin in the world is to provide a efficient and effective transactional method with better security and less interrupt but even it has achieved today the concept of sustainability and to reduce of energy consumption was some what abundant until this year I saw many projects regarding sustainable and power saving Bitcoin mining methods so the above is true but it doesn't mean that BItcoin should not be used because the bad effect can be reduced using today technology 

Yes, Bitcoin has been created to give an alternative to traditional FIAT system, but it is now mainly been used to speculate so as to increase one's holdings in FIAT, which is quite perverse given the original mission. So what would happen in the case of a financial collapse is totally unpredictable.

I think if the developed world becomes modernized, there are many infrastructure to develop, replacing the whole bank. As a result, Bitcoin's power consumption will be much lower than that of banks. In fact, there are too many banks in the world, electricity is huge.
Bitcoin, online transactions, no intermediaries, etc. That is the transaction of the future.

First of all we are yet to see what would happen to Bitcoin under a financial collapse because Bitcoin was adopted after the recession (better yet in response to it). We have observed when stocks fall, Bitcoin also falls as in the many signs of 2018. 5200 is a very random buy order. Why not $900 or $4200? Just random.

Still waiting at 5200 with my buy order. Come lower pls. Remember, it doesnt matter at what price you bought BTC, it matters that you have it in financial collapse.

Those anti-POW criticisms have a misdirecting argument.

The generation of electricity cannot be stored or "saved" because the world does not have the technology to "hold" all that energy yet. Once it is generated, it should be used, or the costs used to generate it would be wasted. The only "wasted electricity" is unused electricity.

I wonder if it's real or someone just trying to impact bitcoin image around the world

The statistics and forecasts of the power consumption of the Bitcoin digging network are extremely complex, and are not simply based on conventional approaches. Increased demand will boost the development of new power plants, and many power plants will burn fossil fuels. However, it will reduce the electrical energy from cash printer and some Bitcoin replacement machines.

I think it's temporary. This is a big environmental problem, but I think it will be solved in the future. In extreme cases, bitcoin can be transferred to pos mining.

It is sustainable because we haven't calculated how much of electricity is wasted by currency traditional money transferring systems waste world electricity due to there ineffective systems and processes and if we do that we will definitely find what is the best way to transfer currencies and I am very sure that Bitcoin will win because no other technology in the traditional financial system can compete with Bitcoin at the moment 

Good answer.
I was unaware that so much of the Chinese electric is hydro - this changes things of course. And even more does the icelandic geothermal one, which cannot even be blamed to warm up the atmosphere.
And as for gold, I could add to what you have said that modern gold extraction is using Cyanide (CN) which is very polluting and its massive use in gold mones devastating for the environment.
Luckily there is still no Proof of Cyanide protocol in Bitcoin.

I think maybe some sustainable alternative energy sources can be the solution. I want to believe that bitcoiners are environmentally friendly and think for future generations.
From an ecological point of view this sounds bad and something must be done. Still I believe there are other things that consume more energy than bitcoin.

That cost is being too high and it is not known if in the future, mining bitcoins will remain profitable.

I don't worry about it too much. As time progresses, mining rigs will become more energy efficient and the electricity consumption will go down. Right now electricity represents a smaller share of the overall mining expenses, but that is changing. So reducing the power consumption has become more of a priority.

@franky1: I pretty much agree that 1% is way too much. But which timeframe are your kWh calculations based on? Year, month, day, hour, second?

0.3 kWh per household seems a strange figure ... I guess it's per day, but it seems too low for a day but too high for an hour. In industrialized countries (from China/South America upwards) households use about 2-10 kWh/day. But I don't know the figures of really poor third-world countries.

So let's take another figure: the 21000 TWh world electricity consumption per year, according to CIA World Factbook.

Bitcoin's consumption should be about 30-70 TWh (upper bound: Digicoinomist index, lower bound: upper bound of Marc Bevand's numbers for January 2018, considering all studies still yield an hashrate and consumption increase, despite of the bear market).

So you're basically right, but more with the upper bound of your figures (I get  0,14 to 0,33 percent of the 21K TWh), and considering total electricity consumption, not only "private households".

1. my calculation was using ONLY residential electricity (peoples homes) where compared to ONLY peoples homes bitcoin uses 0.029-0.1%..

if i included world corporation and industrial. the bitcoins use would be even further lower % (making even better results for bitcoin).

2. bitcoin mining is done in regions of china that use hydro. in iceland that use geothermal and also in area's of america that do hydro. so although media says "CHINA electric is only X% hydro...".. thats just chatter about china the country.. however bitcoin is using the hydro supply.

3. unlike gold. think about it. there are no electric excavators, they are diesel based. there are no solar powered sluice machines, again thats diesel. and same for the dirt trucks. diesel.
bitcoin is high majority renewable and gold is very high diesel.

electricity consumption is not a problem for bitcoin especially for bitcoin miners, because for now electricity can be obtained from various renewable sources, such as solar cells, wind and water flow