Bitcoin isn't green - page 2. | Bitcointalksearch.org

Xmufa23X

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Quote from: arne on March 27, 2012, 01:01:40 PM

Bitcoin needs mining. Mining costs a whole lot of electricity. Electricity still mostly comes from fossil fuels.

Ergo, bitcoin isn't green.

I can rephrase that, and play with words all day as well:
Bitcoin needs mining. Mining costs almost no electricity. Electricity can come from microwave lasers from solar satellites orbiting our Earth.

Ergo, Bitcoin is space age and the future!

Now the facts:
Bitcoin needs mining. Mining uses electricity. Electricity comes from energy.

Ergo, bitcoin is energy.

Your logic is flawed.

RandomQ

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BTC will have a new green option in the future www.greenbtc.com (Coming Soon)

realnowhereman

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Quote from: z3rohour on March 27, 2012, 05:57:51 PM

Once after FPGA comes online, it'll be lower

No, it won't. Well maybe for a few people, for a while as FPGAs distribute through the network.

The network adjusts difficulty, and miners buy more buying power until the block cost equals the block reward. The technology used is, I'm afraid, not a factor.

Cost per transaction will go down as the average transactions per block goes up or as the reward per block goes up (measured in dollars). Nothing to do with the hash rate.

What we do get is a more secure block chain for the same cost -- hurrah.

nedbert9

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Inactive

Quote from: benjamindees on March 27, 2012, 10:57:07 PM

Energy economics is a difficult field to wrap your mind around. Don't assume that ASICs will make the number lower. A large portion of every dollar spent on mining hardware ultimately ends up being consumed as energy as well.

Every last economically-recoverable bit of fossil energy will be burnt with or without Bitcoin.

Think of the level of waste due to mal-investment, for instance, in maintaining Dollar hegemony or the global derivatives market. Bitcoin is insignificant in comparison, and always will be.

@ OP. ^ was exactly my point. If Bitcoin becomes what it was intended to be the energy cost would be minuscule compared to the large financial institutions.

So, Bitcoin, potentially, is massively greener by comparison, so worrying that is not green is obtuse.

01BTC10

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Producing electronic like the computer we use or FPGA is not green. But once produced FPGA is greener than GPU.

TheStig

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What isn't green?

joshv06

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Bitcoin mining with GPU/CPU's isn't green, but mining with FPGA's is XD.

benjamindees

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Energy economics is a difficult field to wrap your mind around. Don't assume that ASICs will make the number lower. A large portion of every dollar spent on mining hardware ultimately ends up being consumed as energy as well.

Every last economically-recoverable bit of fossil energy will be burnt with or without Bitcoin.

Think of the level of waste due to mal-investment, for instance, in maintaining Dollar hegemony or the global derivatives market. Bitcoin is insignificant in comparison, and always will be.

jmm5699

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it's okay bitcoin, I'm not green either Sad

bitcoinsarefun

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What currencies are considered green now?

Anillos

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Quote from: arne on March 27, 2012, 01:01:40 PM

Bitcoin needs mining. Mining costs a whole lot of electricity. Electricity still mostly comes from fossil fuels.

Ergo, bitcoin isn't green.

Any thoughts about this?

I think that everything is not green if We don't have green electricity.

Windpower and solar energy are becoming cheaper, and in a few years We will have more green energy.
Hydropower is another interesting energy, because there are lots of small sources that could be used without a expensive cost, there are lots of small dams on rivers or canals that are wasting energy.

A small example:
http://maps.google.es/?ll=41.958597,-4.977837&spn=0.034083,0.055189&t=h&z=14&layer=c&cbll=41.958493,-4.977831&panoid=bCr2PMWPCqJ_QGsOIu_Gwg&cbp=12,65.15,,0,-2.59
- Power line: yes
- Dam: yes
- Water: yes
- Electricity: NOT. Embarrassed

Kush

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It will be way lower soon.

Xmufa23X

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No thoughts at all, OP. Grin

z3rohour

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Once after FPGA comes online, it'll be lower

DeathAndTaxes

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Gerald Davis

Quote from: ribuck on March 27, 2012, 02:56:31 PM

Quote from: arne on March 27, 2012, 01:29:58 PM

You mean that when I send .1 BTC from one wallet to another that costs $5 of electricity?

The electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network is much the same whether or not you send your .1 BTC payment, so there's no incremental cost. But if you divide the total electricity consumption by the current level of transactions, it comes out around $5 of electricity per transaction.

Therefore, if you had ten times as many transactions, each one would only be associated with approximately $0.50 worth of electricity.

In the longer term, the electricity consumption will vary according to the hashing power of the network, which will be driven by the exchange rate and also by mining fees. But in the short term, more transactions equals less electricity per transaction.

To see this, consider that the block reward of 50 BTC is worth over $200. So miners would be happy to spend up to $200 of electricity to mine a block. If the block contains 40 transactions, that comes out to $5 per transaction. Sure it's not quite that simple, for example because people pay different amounts for electricity, but that's the rough idea.

Good explanation I would also add that the rise of FPGA, sASIC and ASICS will mean more hashing power per watt and lower the electrical consumption per tx. So hypothetically someday the network could have an electrical consumption 1/10th compared to today despite higher hashing power. If tx volume was also 100x higher then combined effect (less consumption and more tx) would put the electrical cost per tx below 1 cent.

Gabi

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If you want to walk on water, get out of the boat

Quote from: arne on March 27, 2012, 01:01:40 PM

Bitcoin needs mining. Mining costs a whole lot of electricity. Electricity still mostly comes from fossil fuels.

Ergo, bitcoin isn't green.

Any thoughts about this?

Nice! So, do you have any better idea? What, no?

ribuck

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Quote from: arne on March 27, 2012, 01:29:58 PM

You mean that when I send .1 BTC from one wallet to another that costs $5 of electricity?

The electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network is much the same whether or not you send your .1 BTC payment, so there's no incremental cost. But if you divide the total electricity consumption by the current level of transactions, it comes out around $5 of electricity per transaction.

Therefore, if you had ten times as many transactions, each one would only be associated with approximately $0.50 worth of electricity.

In the longer term, the electricity consumption will vary according to the hashing power of the network, which will be driven by the exchange rate and also by mining fees. But in the short term, more transactions equals less electricity per transaction.

To see this, consider that the block reward of 50 BTC is worth over $200. So miners would be happy to spend up to $200 of electricity to mine a block. If the block contains 40 transactions, that comes out to $5 per transaction. Sure it's not quite that simple, for example because people pay different amounts for electricity, but that's the rough idea.

jake262144

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Naturally them bitcoins aren't green - they be golden, silly.
They might get green-ish when they lay around for a while, like the bacon in my fridge Cheesy

To be sure, there must be a good reason why miners get VIP customer status at their power companies and some of them even lovely thank you letters attached to the boxes with the invoice print-outs, but on the other side the miners are also the only people I heard of who have calculated the energy consumption of their entire households and seriously contemplate the idea of shaving off a few watts per year by removing the status LEDs from all devices.
Even the most miserly of Scots don't get that far - they are entirely satisfied with disabling the fridge light bulb.

Seriously though, we're talking of quite possibly the most innovative project since the damned TCP/IP protocol, man.
A project that could very well integrate the financial system and the Internet very tightly without the need to trust any third party.
Surely, mining looks far less wasteful in this context, doesn't it?

arne

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You mean that when I send .1 BTC from one wallet to another that costs $5 of electricity? Wow..
But if the total number of transactions rises that could drop to how much? It has to get much lower or else there wouldn't be enough electricity in the world to keep the whole thing running...

ribuck

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The mining cost per transaction is currently around $6. Assuming miners are operating at a small profit, perhaps $5 worth of electricity is being consumed for each transaction. That means around 50 kilowatt-hours, or 180 MegaJoules, per transaction.

That's a lot of electricity! But as the number of transactions per block rises, the electricity per transaction will drop.

Topic: Bitcoin isn't green - page 2. (Read 2534 times)