Topic: Could massive use of Electricity be the end or new high for Bitcoin - page 2. (Read 985 times)

It's all just FUD. Just think of the massive electricity savings when all the banks close down.

Yes, we adapt so fast to situations that you would not even remember a problem ever existed. We will start seeing a lot of changes happening in most place and power issues will end up solved even if they tend to sound more of a problem. Like you said, there are so many alternative source of electricity and if that would end up paying more than using the main power source, it is as simple as making use of the alternative sources.

There's a critical logic error in the article that leads to the most shocking claim. The article purports that at the current growth rate, Bitcoin will consume all the world's electricity by Feb 2020. That should immediately be discounted as preposterous and impossible; obviously Bitcoin can never consume all the world's electricity. Its is physically impossible. The authors mean to say that if Bitcoin's growth continues, by Feb 2020 it will consume as much electricity as the world currently does. That's not the same thing, and also extremely unlikely.

First, they took one data point and extrapolated it 26 months into the future. Anyone with a little statistics knowledge should be able to tell you the folly in making a conclusion based on only one data point. The smaller your subset, the more likely your data point is an outlier or not indicative of a true trend. Second, as energy demand grows, energy supply grows, so increasing Bitcoin demand for electricity would spur the world to create more capacity. Third, the diminishing return on very large numbers means the growth of electricity consumption has to slow from Bitcoin-related sources. That means it's highly unlikely that the growth rate they extrapolated an be maintained long enough to reach the energy consumption it is predicted to in 26 months, and even if it did, for the other reasons it wouldn't constitute all the world's electricity consumption.

Because they get these basic things wrong, it's hard to take anything else they said too seriously.

Is electricity was supposed to be the end of bitcoins then it should have been the end of human civilization as well but we evolving to create alternatives to tackle this problem..thus we now have renewable sources of energy that are producing electricity and there are countries where 100% electricity is being created from wind electricity thus I think in the future.. bitcoin mining might adopt this norm..well not just bitcoins ! But the whole world will soon run on renewable sources of energy thus I don't think it will be the end ..rather name it an evolution.

Electricity will not be the reason to bitcoin ceased to exist. If desired, you can increase the block size. This will reduce the consumption of electricity. There are ways to resolve pressing problems. The main thing is to learn to find a consensus within the community and to set a goal. Renewable energy sources will never replace traditional.

I’d rather they stop or reduce the mining rate for Bitcoin than letting it affect communities negatively. There are more important reasons why we may need electricity, and the most important is hospitals. The government wouldn’t like anything that will affect their country in a bad way, and that’s the reason most of them has banned/stopped bitcoin.

Maybe no, electricity could not be the only reason for Bitcoin to collapse. There so many factors that can lead to BTC's end, for example the internet. Humans keep pushing forward and keep on inventing new things. If bitcoin was created out of theories and scientific inventions, then we can also assume that their could be an alternative on creating new energy source.

AGREED, if there will be a shortage of power or any kind of issues because of mining probably miners will find a new source of energy and i think not only miners but every business in the world will shift to renewable energy, i just hope technology will become more friendly with nature as soon as possible

You don’t even know what you are saying– banks making use of electricity won’t create any bad effect in any way, cause their usage rate is just like a normal house electricity usage. In banks, you just find the normal working equipment you will usually find in offices just like printer, photocopier and computers.

A miner is different from all these and only a single miner consumes electricity more than they can ever do. Come to think of it when there are lots of miners (a farm)…I wonder how much of power that will consume.

You are right that it aint a problem at all because of the reasons you stated. When bitcoin becomes mainstream, there might be new mining devices by that time that consumes energy only equivalent to what a household appliance consumes to solve the problem at hand. Also by that time there will be many improvements to the technology of the world, probably by that time someone will invent a more cost energy source.

I don't get why you think a massive consumption of electricity would be good in any way for Bitcoin. The less electricity needed the better in my opinion!

The truth is that those who own the energy they may control the mining power of crypto farms and at that point it will be reflected in the price and volatility of cryptocurrency.

I think this is incorrect, and if you compare bitcoin network electricity cost, and the fiat network electricity cost, you will probably realize that fiat is way more expensive than bitcoin itself. Electricity management is a problem for the environment, but every case should be analyzed by it's ratio in energy cost/utility for society. Bitcoin has an amazing potencial, and it's energy cost is justified for it's uses, and like I said, it's probably less than the cost to support our broken fiat model. Renewable sources of energy should be used, but that is important for everything and not just bitcoin mining.

Yes it could be because the way we are using electricity for mining purpose is insane and hence the global warming is getting aggressive because of bitcoin. We really need to think different eco friendly ways of mining the bitcoin and other crypto currencies or these programs could be shut down very easily by protestor of environment. They are very concern about the heat emission that is occurring from the machines during the mining operation. For them to cool down we are using big HEPA machines which produce ozone killing CFC gases which makes the situation even worst than the previous one. So yeah may be ewe need to be sure that we wont harm the earth environment on mass scale while doing our great trading strategies and investments. Everything could shut at one glance.

Like anything it's just supply and demand. If the demand for electricity to mine BTC keeps increasing then the price of electricity will go up. Eventually it will be uneconomic to mine BTC and hence the demand for electricity will drop. The only reason that so much power is being used on bitcoin is because so many people are mining and hence the difficulty level keeps increasing to keep the block rate the same. Once all coins have been mined then that will be the end of bitcoin mining.

Yes I have seen similar article but not this one and in that one the complete estimation of the bitcoin production and USD production was given. And there was not single chance I would have taken the side of bitcoin after reading the article because it is the most costliest thing ever to produce in the market. The electricity cost that needs to print or virtually mine the bitcoin is higher than producing the USD currency and its more than 60% efficient than bitcoin. So this is putting lot of stress over the electricity boards and in the time to come when the bitcoin circulation will be even more and the trisections will increase a lot then this stress might just outburst to create fallen legacy of the crypto currencies. There is no way to save bitcoin in that situation if government finds out that the mining is not enough and nothing can be done for it.

I have also read the information about coming 2020 and the usage of all global electricity for Bitcoin mining. I suppose it may really lead to the situation when each country will simply increase price for its electricity.

I believe future cryptocurrency would slowly moved away from heavy electricity power consumption activities that just bring nothing but profits only to existing cheap electricity miners, the current scenario is focusing only on mainstream crypto like bitcoins or Ethereum, soon or enough new equipments capitalizing on them would be improved in terms of efficiency, i think future cryptocurrency could be just blockchain network maintainable on any computers as longthey had sufficient storage and network, POS, POW should replace some of them thus the problem wouldn't persist that long i believe.

It will make the price even higher in the future, this is very certain.

Look ethereum, to avoid electricity consumption, they're leaving pow style. They're passing to pos style just to get rid of electricity cost.

And do you honestly think there is going to be enough energy from solar and wind for everybody?
Especially since we're going to also drop petrol cars? A single 300 km journey will consume more power than the average households does in a month.

In my country there was a period in February where there was no sun and no wind.
Energy production from "green" sources dropped to 0. We bought energy from the neighbors (guess what they were burning).


And?
The cost will go lower, the profits will be higher , more rigs > more consumption.
Don't you realize that mining in limited only by the amount of electricity consumed vs the reward for mining?
If the daily reward is 10 $ we will burn ~ 10 $ of energy if its 10 trillions we will burn 10 trillions of energy (of course minus the costs of equipment and stuff  but you get the idea)