Topic: Debunking the waste of energy argument against Bitcoin (Read 1000 times)

Bitcoin will never replace credit cards if you ask me.

I think Bitcoin´s main value proposition is the fact that it can be a store of value due to
its unique characteristics that make it a form of sound money (hard cap on the total
amount of BTC, predictable issuance schedule, scarcity...).

Credit cards will always be more efficient in terms of transaction volume per second, because Bitcoin is designed in a way
that requires a trade-off between efficiency and decentralization/security.

2nd-layer solutions might change that in the future, however they will run into the same issue
when they are designed in a way that leads to a decentralized system.

Fortunately, this isn't really a big issue:
1) you can distribute your mining plants on several sites on Earth, using daylight on different longitudes. This would obviously increase the incidence of hardware costs in the profit equation, but at good sites with high insolation you would have also smaller electricity costs than grid-connected farms.
2) there are solar electricity generation methods like "concentrated solar power" providing the possibility to store energy so they can also work at night. The Andasol plants I mentioned, for example, work with this principle.
3) if CSP isn't possible, batteries may be an option - their costs are also falling.

The BTC network does around 3-4 transactions/s with the costs of electricity of an entire country. Meanwhile Visa can process 2000/second with the costs of running a normal datacenter. What do you thing will happen when BTC will actually get used like Visa or Mastercard is? I pay everything right now with a credit card, even 2$ transactions.

Also the BTC vs cash money comparison is flawed. It should be BTC vs wire transfers vs credit cards.


solar energy has the huge downside of being dependant on weather and time of day, while mining requires constant 24/7 energy. At night the powergrid would overload. The only way to sustain the mining requirements are coal and nuclear plants.

I highlighted what I was initially trying to get at in terms of comparing fiat and Bitcoin and which one "wastes more energy".  Yeah, if you are looking at the numbers at face value, you can argue Bitcoin "wastes" more energy, I guess, in terms of how much hash power is securing the network.  You could also argue it doesn't take tetra watts upon tetra watts to print dollar bills, and that in it's self should be a good enough reason to confirm that fiat is the better way to go in terms of not "wasting energy" and therefor harming the environment, wasting resources, etc.

But if you see below what's at face value, and you see just how the dollar still has the ability to maintain any purchasing power whatsoever, you could see how there needs to be wayyyyyy more resources, effort, *energy expenditure*, etc. to make sure that 'country Xs' fiat money has purchasing power behind it on a global scale.  Easiest one to compare in that regard is how the US maintains purchasing power, not because the global economy believes in the US economy; but it's more due to military strength and making sure the global economy basically runs on the USD in terms of purchasing oil, natural gases and the like.

The market can regulate that, in a way that only large solar fields in very sunny and sparsely populated areas (with low land property costs) are profitable. I've already mentioned some regions - an ideal region for that would be the Altiplano/Atacama Desert in South-Western South America (Argentina/Chile/Bolivia) with extremely sunny conditions and not too much heat. There are 1-3 persons per square kilometer there, or even less.

And as I've said - the required total space for a "mega solar field" that would generate the whole energy for a $2 million Bitcoin (see my calculation some posts ago based on the Andasol plants) would be probably not much larger than a small US state of ~10000 square km.

I think in densely populated regions you may be right, there could be restrictions, like a mining tax, or local governments refusing authorizing large solar fields only for mining. But in many regions of Europe anyway a wind/solar combination may be better. And I don't think countries like Morocco, Bolivia, Argelia, Argentina or Chile would restrict solar mining in their desert regions. It would be too lucrative to simply tax these miners ... maybe even the State would mine in these regions.

The cheapest electricity is produced by nuclear power plants. At the moment, I see no alternative. Talking about the great environmental risks of such power plants is a myth. The struggle for ecology has long been turned into a business. I think nuclear power is the cheapest and the most environmentally friendly energy. It seems to me that investing in mining equipment is more profitable than investing in the construction of wind and solar power plants.

There are a lot of problems with solar, and this is why I refuse to think of it as a solution.
Population growth means more square feet for each new inhabitant, for housing, for food for everything.
And more energy, and more space needed for solar panels.

Each household in the UK consumes 4500kwh, in China only 1300kwh.
When they will finally afford all the things an European has, imagine this x3.
And we're also adding electric cars to this whole mess, 1kwh  for each 5km.
And on top of this ...let's add a few TW for mining:P No, it won't work.

Speaking strictly of miners, do you think in the next decade countries and governments will just let miners spread solar panels all over the place, and not intervene?
They will either tax it or simply ban private solar fields from certain regions as they will need this energy fro themselves.

If BTC will stay around this price for a little while, (as in 3 years till the next halving) we will probably avoid one hell of a mess. If the price will jump to 100k we are going to se a another gold rush of epic proportions.

nice spot there huh?😂😂😂 this is the problem when someone's throwing stone to others when the truth is he deserves to be the one to be thrown..every energy uses in cypto has been paid for consumption so what the fuck is their problem with that,and as far as i know,more miners now are using solar power or some energy providing system just to save cost or to help environment

My hopes for solar/wind energy are based on the "utopia" that most miners could produce their own energy for their farm in a few years. In many countries, using solar energy for own consumption is already cheaper than using grid electricity - but yes, the "cheapest grid electricity" is still cheaper, so that change won't take place tomorrow.

These miners could install their farms in countries/regions with high solar/wind energy potential, like North Africa, South-Western U.S., the Central Andes or Patagonia. As they would live off the grid their operation wouldn't influence local grid stability. Hardware costs could be higher for these farms, as they wouldn't run 24/7 (if they don't buy electricity storage capacity) and so the hardware would not use their full potential all the day, but eventually they would produce a better ROI than conventional farms connected to a local electricity grid because the "cost per hash" would be lower.

Fact? I'm supportive of the idea that less energy-intensive Byzantine fault tolerance mechanisms can succeed. I haven't seen evidence that there are alternative systems that can even begin to approach Bitcoin's security guarantees.

One of the problems is that POS analysis depends on massive, unproven assumptions. It will be a decade or more before we can have an honest discussion of the merits of ideally-designed POS vs. POW. There simply isn't real-world evidence to back up the assumptions or suggest true hardness from a network security perspective.


If POS is unproven or cannot presently provide the same security guarantees as POW, that doesn't mean that Vlad Zamfir is stupid. The recent rise of POS coins doesn't mean anything except that the market wants them, for better or worse.


This gets back to the original problem. Obviously, if a POS system can provide security guarantees as strong as Bitcoin's, that would be preferable. I disagree that POW's energy waste is "wrong" given the lack of energy-sustainable alternatives.

Oh, I looked for this post about an hour and then I gave up, just to run into it a minute after.
I remembered somebody told me about solar and I wanted so much to reply to it ....but it took me a while ...mainly because I spent 36 hours with no electricity in my town.

But leaving the power grid aside, do you know what the production of all the solar panels was during this week?
A peak of 14MW, out of an installed capacity of 1790MW in the whole country.
Eolian energy was also down because ironically enough the wind speed was too high ...
Guess what rescued the situation?
Good old coal, producing almost 40%.

I understand you want to put those panels only where snow storms don't happen but what country will do this?
Depending entirely on imports? No, it will never happen.
And if it does, it's going to be ugly when there will be an emergency.

I support PoS (and PoC) research, and as I said in my last post I don't rule out that at the end it could be a better mechanism and PoW would then be regarded as "useless". But PoW without doubts has some advantages to PoS, like a higher "objectivity" when determining the longest chain (it is a full consensus method, while PoS can achieve only partly consensus and needs some subjectivity, in all its variants), and as a possibility for a relative "fair" coin distribution (compared to ICOs).

So I would be careful to describe it as "obsolete". For me, the discussion between PoW and alternative security mechanisms is still ongoing. It's not that I support theft, but I would really like to see an attack on a big PoS coin (let's say, NEM or Cardano) only to know how it plays out.

1. So what? Being the foundation of the network doesn't mean its not wasted. Knowing for a fact that there are better alternatives (PoS v3, for example), we can argue that it is possible to sustain a secure crypto network without wasting huge amounts of power.

2. Can you prove that? Can you? Or is it just your belief? How do explain the recent rise of new PoS coins, and even the ETH plans to transition to PoS? I'm guessing all these guys are stupid... right? PoW is an obsolete consensus mechanism, there are better alternatives. Period!

3. Comparing BTC with the US military is so ridiculous I'm not even going to bother with any comments...

4. This is just ignorance, nothing else. Wake up, man! Most of us have been using plastic money for the last 10~15 years! Do you still believe in huge armored convoys, SWAT escorts, helicopters flying to protect bags filled with coins and bank notes? That's in the movies! In the real world, those movements occur very seldom and their cost cannot be compared to BTC's energy waste.

5. Yes, it is. So what? You justify one mistake with another? What a nice argument... PoW's energy waste cannot be excused because oil, gold or diamond companies are also wasting power. They are all wrong!

Some arguments are good, but the first two paragraphs are a bit shallow.

Myth 1 ("Miners are spending tons of electricity performing a useless calculation") could be "not so much a myth" if we found out that other mechanisms like Proof-of-stake and Proof-of-capacity are secure enough for a cryptocurrency (and it seems so ...). In this case, the calculations are somewhat useless, because there are methods that achieve a similar security with less waste. For example, a steam engine today is almost useless because we have much more efficient engines.

Regarding Myth 2 ("Energy use scales with number of transactions"), I would criticise that a higher transaction rate should be at least correlated with a higher price (Quantity Theory of Money!), and that a higher transaction rate also means higher transaction fees because there is more competition for block space. So there very likely is a correlation between transaction rate and miner income (and thus, miners' waste). But I agree that it would never "boil the oceans".

Myths 3 to 5 are OK, I agree there. As I said earlier, I have some hopes for large scale renewable-energy mining facilities being a possible solution for Bitcoin's energy waste.

Coincenter´s attempt to debunk the waste of energy argument against Bitcoin:
https://coincenter.org/entry/five-myths-about-bitcoin-s-energy-use

They make some good points, too.

No one is disagreeing with what you say here, but it also has nothing to do with this thread!
Bitcoin is a massive waste of energy. All comparisons are unfair, as nothing else runs purposely so inefficiently.  Bitcoin could be run on a laptop, instead it uses as much energy as a country.

The hilarious thing about comparing it to fiat though, is that in the case with the US dollar, the value of the dollar is based on trust in the state which is:

• Ensured by the government, whom we can't even trust to run efficiently with our tax money (i.e: causing shut downs over petty politics)
• Protected by the military, who wastes so much effort, time, money and resources on government "contractors", which is a shit show in itself.  Seriously though... if you are interested in listening to a 1hr+ podcast on the topic I recommend listening to this one from Congressional Dish.
• Purchase power of the dollar comes directly from our involvement in making sure that our currency is the currency all other currencies have to use in order to purchase oil, gas, etc (a.k.a. the "petro dollar") ... This is makes it funny just based on the amount of pollution that comes from carbon fuels.

fiat is the root of all evil in mind, and always will be until I'm proven wrong.

The way they want to distribute a PoS coin is by having an ICO behind it. It fills the developer's pockets and assures them that they have some payment for their work and it can fund the project for years. I am not saying its a bad model to acquire funds, but it is open to corruption.

If they have a PoW distribution stage, mining has go on for years to have a moderately fair distribution. Ethereum is a good example. But why dont new projects use Proof of Capacity for their distribution stage? Its cheaper.

I don't want to "shill" for PoS here, but: It's always possible to distribute the coins via PoW in an initial stage, like Peercoin did. But your criticism applies to the biggest PoS coins (Cardano, NEM, Waves, Ardor/Ignis/Nxt).

Just yesterday I wrote a post about PoC in another thread (it may have been buried by spam already, as it was in the "Altcoin Discussion" forum). I assume that PoC is really more energy-efficient than PoW, but I would like to see an in-depth calculation how big the difference is.

I assume that the relation of 1/500 (Burst transactions using 0.2% of Bitcoin's energy) that is cited on the Burst homepage is wrong and that the difference is smaller, because you have to take into account the energy wasted when the hardware is produced, and because I doubt the calculation is really fair (that means: one has to compare a Burst blockchain with the same security level/attack costs than Bitcoin).

Such a nonsense. Besides, people actually USE paper money. Nobody uses bitcoin. 150k BTC transactions per day currently, remove the broker/trading related transactions, how many are left to actually pay for goods? Pretty much nobody uses it, yet it already costs 51 Twh/year, more than a country like Portugal uses!

Thanks, i'll read up on that.

[edit]
Ah yes, i was aware of this system, we just don't see it much yet.
[/edit]

My point wasn't to put forward PoS as ultimate solution.
We should just always be looking to improve.
Which Bitcoin has stopped doing 8 years ago.

Omg this x1000. You would never be able to accurately figure out how much it would cost in fiat, to make fiat, because it's all denominated in the currency that you're creating. That just boggles my mind. How do people not realize that moving metal and paper across the country and creating it so sooooo expensive!?

You are wrong. The problem with pure PoS blockchains is the initial distribution of coins. How do we know the coins were distributed fairly and how do we know no one owns 51% or more of the coins.

A good Proof of Capacity implementation is a better solution than both PoW and PoS. Its cheaper, more energy efficient and doesnt cause environmental pollution as much.

Educate yourself.

A PoC and PoS comparison

Why Proof of Capacity should be taken seriously part 1

Why Proof of Capacity should be taken seriously part 2

Why Proof of Capacity should be taken seriously part 3

And then there's modern Proof-of-Stake.

All Proof-of-Stake arguments and hate is from bitcoin maximalists that keep bringing up 5 year old arguments for issues with PoS that have long been solved.
It can actually be argued that modern PoS with decent distribution is more secure and more expensive and difficult to attack than PoW.

It does not matter if the energy is used or wasted. Superior alternatives are available and we should make use of that and not hold on to the past.

Debunking the debunking

1. This point doesn't tell us anything. The energy consumed could be twice or twenty times as much and you could still claim the same
2. The superiority of the PoW model is not evident. PoW may be better than some PoS implementations but it is by far more energy-hungry
3. You can compare only comparable things. Comparing the energy consumption of the US military with Bitcoin mining is meaningless
4. Most money today exists in cashless form anyway, so this argument doesn't hold either
5. See point 3

In a nutshell, you have picked up some as random as irrelevant points and then proceeded to conclude that Bitcoin "may actually be less energy-intensive than traditional fiat currencies". Your only argument which can theoretically make sense is about security advantage of PoW over PoS, but, first, that remains to be seen, and, second, that has nothing to do with fiat currencies. Try better next time

Its not. PoW is perfectly sustainable, as soon as mining integrates into power infrastructure, and is performed with zero energy waste. In the long run, it could be done by municipalities as a public service - to support the world financial network - without mining profit being the driving factor.

We are not there yet, but if we are speculating about the future, lets be a bit more creative and don't assume everything in the future will be exactly as it is now, with only the numbers being bigger.

Yep. However, we can use also a more "ecologic" source for the comparison: solar energy. And then it becomes less scary.

Let's take Andasol, a solar concentration plant in Spain. It generates 150 MW or 110 GWh/year, on 56 ha. To get the 1,38 TW of the most pessimistic assumption, solar plants of the same efficiency in the same climate (and Andasol-1 is already 10 years old) would have to cover 56 * (1380000/150) = 515200 ha or 5152 square km. This is less than the size of the US state of Delaware.


Most likely they would use their smartphone during the night, when it's connected to a power source, and their PC during the day. Or, as I already said, their router - in a "Bitcoin-as-a-world-currency-world" there would be sure router manufacturers that included LN and Bitcoin into the router's firmware, as Bitcoin would be one of the main Internet applications.


I also follow PoS and other possible competitors to PoW, like PoC (proof-of-capacity). PoC is, in reality, a form of PoW, but the cost structure of "validators" and the economics are different, and I assume it's more energy-efficient as hardware costs in PoC are more important than electricity consumption costs to determine its security.

However, we still don't know for sure if the Nothing-at-stake problem (PoS) and memory-time-tradeoffs (PoC) could not make these algorithms too insecure for a big cryptocurrency - although I'm cautiously optimist here and that's why I also support some PoS and PoC coins (well, afaik there's only one PoC coin as of now ...).

But in order for the network to become a success it NEEDS users online. So it can only become a success with high energy costs. Sure, people could start selling custom LN devices but I think it's reasonable to assume a lot of people would just use their PC. Smartphone would be possible too indeed, but it would drain a lot of battery. Most phones die within 5-6 hours of activity already.


Obviously it's hard to really calculate it correctly. But fact of the matter is that it's a HUGE waste of energy, just because someone invented a strategy that pays more if you spend more energy. I really hope that, and assume, that the winning coin will use something like PoS instead of PoW. This is really unsustainable.

Obviously it's a rough calculation and takes into account only mining, but I don't believe the "continuously online LN devices" would make much of a difference. And no, not all users using LN have to be online all the time, only those that want to be part of the infrastructure. LN could also run on a smartphone or on another low-powered device that is always online (routers!).

But I won't get into details because it's outside of the scope of my post. To avoid misunderstandings, I'll clarify that I talk only about mining, not about other energy consumptions.
The source I used, Marc Bevand, believes the Digiconomist calculation to be false - but even then: it uses TWh/year, not TWp. Values are not so different between both sources if you take this "little fact" into account: The 500 MWp that Bevand assumes to be the consumption of BTC mining mean it consumed 4,38 TWh/year in February/March 2017. Digiconomist calculated 9 TWh/year for this point in time - about doubling Bevand's average calculation, and only about 1,33 times above his upper bound.

Folks, all your calculations and all those fears are based on the wrong assumption the energy spent on mining will be immediately lost - evaporated into nothingness.

Yes it is that way right now, but it won't continue for long. It would be too stupid to continue losing the heat produced by miners. That heat will be reused in boillers, and the mining will become practically free to those who'll implement that. Hence - no waste anymore and no problem, mining cryptocurrency will be just a side-job of heaters and boilers!
Cities will host heating/mining farms, persons will use mining heaters... Why not?

I know I am dropping a million dollar idea here , but I am also sure I am definitely not the first one who thought of actually implementing this. With mining popularity rising in such tempo recently, I wouldn't be surprised to see such offers soon, on a regular consumer-level first.
Think of consequences of such a "merger" - they are going to be huge, for both Bitcoin and energy market.

What about that scenario? Wouldn't you buy an electric heater with Ethernet connection which also mines..?

It's quite scary, the maximum installed capacity of all the nuclear plants (capable of producing energy, not online) is around 400GW and 750 GW when it comes to hydro (again maximum installed)

Fortunately there two things that will limit this:

a) before we reach the 1.8 million mark we are going to have at least a halving for sure, that is going to drop the energy consumption by half based on the model.

b) and one that is not that good overall
Once there is need for electric power prices go up, at some point it won't be that profitable to mine and the consumption will go down.But in this case, there is one little catch, if energy prices go up, then everybody is affected.

Probably BTC has grown a little to fast.
Or the distribution model should have been a bit shorter.
If we would have dropped already to 3 coins per block we probably wound't have had this discussion.

Exactly. BTC can, since segwit, do a maximum of 14 transactions per sec, nowhere near 25.000.


Ok but off-chain is a whole different beast. You're interpolating on-chain but who knows how much electricity LN transactions will costs. As a device NEEDS to be online in order to be part of a LN payment route and tons of info need to continually pass through the network (for routing purposes), this is really a whole different calculation. Where people now mostly power down their pc's at night, with LN they'll probably keep them running 24 hours/day. IF LN would ever to become a success (which I highly doubt for reasons I've laid out already: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/reasons-why-lightning-network-will-fail-2792933)

Besides, BTC is currently doing 51 Tw/year already: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Yes, but the 3,5 tx/s (depending on the day, between 3 and 4 tx/s, actually) was the real transaction rate at the time of Marc Bevand's study in March 2017 (see Blockchain.info stats). That is the relevant number for this kind of calculation, not the maximum transaction rate in tx/s.

We can discuss if the transactions rate is the correct measure, maybe it's also the "number of new UTXOs" (because one Bitcoin TX can in theory generate hundreds of UTXOs), but I don't know stats about that.

PS: Maybe you meant "Bitcoin could never reach 25K  tx/s" but read the phrase before this assumption - these 25 tx/s can be carried out on-chain, off-chain, on sidechains and even on pegged coins that are not sidechains (like the BitBTC on the Bitshares platform).

You do realize bitcoin has a maximum of 7 tx/sec ? Well ok in all fairness, 14 tx/sec after segwit.

I was curious about what could be the final consumption of Bitcoin mining** if it was a major world currency. It is a rough calculation, we would need much more details, but I think the approximate order of magnitude could be correct.

For this calculation, I took two sources:
1) Electricity consumption of Bitcoin: a market-based and technical analysis (March 2017; his estimation is between 300-800 MW)
2) What is the fair value of a cryptocurrency? - pablomp's theory about a dependency of a "fair" price of a cryptocurrency on the transaction volume, based on the Quantity Theory of Money.

Let's base the calculation on the following assumptions:

1) What transaction rate would a "World Currency Bitcoin" have?
- World population: 8 billion (8000000000)
- Family/household size: 4 persons
- Every household should be able to do one Bitcoin transaction per day (It is NOT important if it's on-chain or off-chain, it can be using LN, sidechains, pegged smartcoins etc. - but the value must be denominated in Bitcoin).
- Necessary transaction rate: ~25000 tx/sec (2,16 billion/day)

2) What "steady" price would such a "world currency" have?
- pablomp's theory roughly assumes that with the 3,5 tx/s the Bitcoin network reached in mid-2017, we had approximately a "fair price" of $250 (based on QTM). At the moment of his study the price was about 10 times higher, but that is not important as most of today's price is based on speculation on future usage.
- That means that 1 tx/sec would mean a price of $71,4.
- With 25000 tx/s the price of 1 BTC becomes 1785000 USD (Moon! ).

3) How much would electricity would a 1.8 million BTC consume?
This is the hardest part, because we could say that "it depends" on various factors, like the mining reward, transaction fees, efficiency of mining hardware, and so on. Let's do it the simple & lazy way and say that miners' income in BTC and miner hardware efficiency would be similar to 2017 (this is a forum post, not an academic study ).*

OK, let's go:
- In March 2017, according to Marc Bevand, the electricity consumption was between 325 and 774 MW. The price of 1 BTC, in this period, was about $1000 (it was the era of the "ETF rally and crash").
- So we can calculate the approximate consumption of a 25K tx/s and 1.785 million BTC and get the following results:

Lower bound: 325 * 1785 =580125 MW (~580 GW) - about 500 nuclear plants of 1 GW
Upper bound:  774 * 1785 = 1381590 MW (~1,38 TW) - about 1300 nuclear plants of 1 GW


*There is actually a better approach: calculate the consumption based on the past electricity cost instead of the past electricity consumption because miner hardware efficiency then would not be relevant anymore. But this would be much more complicated.
** Clarified that it's only taking into account mining, not other power consumptions (like users' devices).

To me bitcoin is an economic structure where value is created. And nearly every economic structure that creats value needs energy. I do not see any difference to the automobile industry. They create cars, we create bitcoins. And I see even the tendency that we handle energy responsible. Miners use the newest energy saving hardwar to create bitcoins.

yes you are right miners bitcoin now is too over they use energy that is very much and they should make environmentally friendly energy such as solar panel energy for mining it is very good or water power and wind power is pretty good because not too dredge oil that exist on this earth for the energy they use.

So they say - "Bitcoin wastes more energy than a whole country..." ??  

Well, yes. So what? I would say - what Bitcoin brings to the world is more important than most countries will ever bring. As to me, Bitcoin is more important to humanity than most of the countries are. So its ok for it to spend (waste is a wrong term here) so much electricity.

Except that, mining-produced heat won't be wasted left unused for long. I am pretty sure in the very near future it will be used to heat up houses or whole buildings/suburbs, as well as for other, not so obvious needs.

Even now, with proper watercooling, you can use the mining heat to keep your house warm at winter. Just needs a bit of engineering effort. As soon as someone produces a standard commercial solution for that (an actual product kit with optional installation service), it will be adopted by many.

Imagine the world where big buildings/cities are using mining farms at boiling houses instead of regular "dumb" boilers

There was also an older thread, back in 2014 ringing a few alarms.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7841368

We're 10 times above that (price is almost x20) but also the rewards halved.

The question is, what if BTC goes to 100 000$?
The entire untapped energy in Iceland won't be enough.
With that much money , I hate to say it but "printed" each day, we will have millions of miners added to the network.

Should we do the numbers for 1 million /BTC?
At 1 million, and even at a 10c/kwh price we are going to see 300 GW , as it's still profitable to mine and you will still get a ROI.
And even Itapu is a joke  to that number.

I really think that people dismiss to easy the impact mining has, and it's not just bitcoin.
Tried to buy a GPU lately ?

1. Yes. But that doesn't mean it's not a waste. You could change the foundation to something non-wasteful. PoW is quite literally a waste of energy by design. This energy is not going towards producing anything. You waste more energy - you earn more rewards.

2. Is it? Have you considered centralisation as a safety factor (be it mining pool or geographical centralisation)? Are you not aware that there was a time when ghash.io pool briefly exceeded 50% of total hashrate, making mining centralised for a moment. In free market conditions PoW is inherently trending towards centralisation of mining and/or manufacturing mining hardware. No electricity cost will be the same in every country, one hardware will be more efficient than others (see bitmain), one mining farm will be more efficient than competition etc.

3-5. Not an arguments. What you're saying is "X is not a waste of energy because Y is using a lot of energy". I'm not fat because some other guy is also fat/fatter. You get the gist.

You mentioned Iceland's renewable energy. Any thoughts on Iceland's proposal to tax bitcoin mining, because they're concern it can drain too much electricity? https://www.coindesk.com/icelandic-lawmaker-floats-bitcoin-mining-tax/

This thread is also worth reading, it explains how rising Bitcoin price could fuck up energy supply on a global level: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-paperclip-maximizer-2847680

You see, you're again missing the point, and you treat bitcoin related activities in a special way.

Miners can move from China to Iceland to mine with green energy but other industries are not allowed!!!!
There are 4 aluminium smelters in Iceland (big ones), and 20x more in China burning coal.
Why not move those there?

You just need an internet connection?
Oh, let's have datacenters there.

And you gave one example, probably the only in a world where we have an island that is too far away to connect via a cable..........for now
https://www.landsvirkjun.com/researchdevelopment/research/submarinecabletoeurope

Bitcoin is not perfect, nor is the PoW.

Yeah, really great and valid ones. Isn’t the media's main target the public viewers and readers who really do not have any knowledge and are as ignorant as them? It is just deliberate and even if it is not, it is just a way of showing how dumb they are and will always be (referring to the media).

Gone are those days when you can ever trust anything that comes out of the media as these days, even the media is corrupt. At the end though, those who are smart will always not be deceived.

I´ve admitted that my comparison of Bitcoin mining to the US Military was somewhat flawed.
But I could easily argue that your comparison is flawed as well!

After all you are comparing a company with centralized solutions like a search engine
or a video sharing service to the best invention of the 21st century. If all Google services were
gone by tomorrow no one would really notice, because there are plenty of other search engines and
plenty of other video sharing services.

On the other hand if Bitcoin was gone by tomorrow this would be the death of the idea of a decentralized,
global world currency (or more accurate: an immutable settlement layer, because it will likely never be
used the same way that fiat is used now). If anyone of you thinks that a random altcoin would simply
take Bitcoin´s spot you are completely delusional.

Bitcoin could consume 100x the energy of Google and that still wouldn´t change the fact that one
is easily replaceable and the other is unique.

Google used 5.1 TWh in 2015. Bitcoin is at 51 Twh.
Google offsets all of it's carbon footprint.
Google has over 90,000 employees.

I think that even the vast majority of people here use Google more often than they use Bitcoin!

Chill out people.

I remember the stories around the time Google was doing it's Initial Public Offering (IPO). They decided to by-pass Wall Street and set up an auction for the public where people bid what they wanted to pay.

In response there was a sudden flurry of articles in the press complaining about the energy Googles data centres were using. "As much as 5 million houses" read one title, if I recall correctly. The way people were going on at the time, you would have thought Google caused climate change all by themselves.

Then when people who bought the shares started making profits, the stories suddenly went away!

I concede that my comparison of the energy consumption of the US military to the
energy consumption of Bitcoin mining is somewhat flawed, because they are not directly comparable. However,
I simply wanted to show that there are still many things that are destructive instead of constructive that consume
more energy than Bitcoin mining.

I strongly disagree with the statement in the quote. E.g. if a BTC mining company uses renewable energy
from hydro power in Iceland there is no way that the energy would be redirected to a country that is burning
coal energy if the mining company would stop mining. This is simply completely uneconomical due to the location of Iceland.
On the other hand Bitcoin mining is possible from any place on Earth with an internet connection and therefore it
is a great use of renewable energy that is abundant in countries like Iceland or Canada (countries like Norway would
be great, too, but energy prices are too high there).

It had been established in several thread here and even a sample of calculation were produced.  Banks waste more energy than the whole Bitcoin miners.  Anyways, there is no argument that bitcoin mining contributes to global warming and that should be the one we should pay more attention.

I agree that the issue of Bitcoin's energy use is overblown hugely out of proportion - first of all because it isn't a waste if it serves a useful purpose. And securing the Bitcoin network has become a very useful purpose in itself. Never mind its implications for modern finance.

I also agree that Bitcoin's energy consumption is unfairly measured, unfairly compared, and unfairly valued. There are just so many factors to take into account other than simple "txs per unit of energy". At least with Bitcoin, you can actually more accurately quantify how much it costs to conduct commerce in the Bitcoin ecosystem. But look at alternatives like Visa (the favourite comparison)... you can't easily put a figure to how much it costs to conduct their commerce. You can estimate salaries of Visa employees, overheads for brick and mortar establishments, even budgets lines for marketing, for security, for brand, R&D, maintenance. None of the comparisons take these other cost-bearing aspects into consideration.

But I also agree that energy consumption should be considered - and it is actually an issue that's been debated even from four, five years ago. Rightfully so.


This. Can't blame politicians for picking a populist stand on Bitcoin, though. That's sort of their job

I agree. Cryptocurrency mining is really not a big deal about power consumption. What I mean about that is cryptocurrencies can be earned from a different way. And aren't we using more energy now compared to before? We are now on a digital age where all of us have gadgets that require energy and blaming it on a few mining rigs is not the way to go. What our government need is to catch up in our power consumption demands or if not the companies making the mining equipment must design better and energy efficient equipments.

I don't think that much was debunked by your post.  

1) the energy consumed is a side-effect, you could actually better name it a waste product, of mining.
2) this may be the case, but how safe does the network have to be? PoW may be currently the most secure, that can change.
3) this is a Krazy (note the capital K) comparison. The US military employs millions of costs trillions to run. It too is a huge waste, but it couldn't be done with 1 guy, unlike the Bitcoin network which could be run on one PC.
4) Fiat money is far from perfect, that is why Satoshi made Bitcoin. If the world went cashless - something most don't want - the costs of fiat money would be very low.
5) Other commodities? you mean Bitcoin is a commodity? In which case it isn't a currency? Ignoring that, much like answer 3 - if 1 guy with 1 spade could mine all the required gold/silver/iron/lead etc that the world needs by himself, I would be strongly for him doing that.

I don't see being a supporter of Bitcoin as being a fan of massive energy wastage. Satoshi himself didn't want an arms race into GPUs, I doubt he envisioned huge ASICS farms using a significant percentage of the worlds supply of electricity!
I don't see an end in sight, but it is certainly a way that Bitcoin will be attacked in the future. When cars have emission limits, do you really think that governments will allow Bitcoin miners to use as much electricity as they want?

Lol. They will always have something to say, won't they? Mainstream media has always been showing how ignorant they have been over the years, and how bad it keeps getting, knowing that they are never ready to do any research or come out to say the real thing. Well, most of them are bought, so being surprised is not something one should be. If they cannot accept the fact that there is really nothing they can do, then they will never stop acting like ignoramuses.

Two problems here....

First, the bitcoin network currently has 180k transactions a day.The US army has currently 1 300 000 personnel.
Most of you say banks consume a lot of energy....but how many transactions are banks doing?
Of course this problem will be solved with the LN but till then, it's hilarious to have 800 000 (or something like that) S9 mining non-stop each burning 32 kwh while the network is servicing less people than a bank in Lithuania.

If bitcoin price goes up and there is no rapid improvement and deployment of LN the things will only get worse.
More mining, more energy consumed but still the same capacity.

Second.
As long as somebody in this world consumes coal, you burning free green energy doesn't make things right.
Because if you would stop, then the energy consumed by you would be redirected to the one burning coal energy, and the coal power plant will be shut down.
When you build a green energy source (solar/wind/hydro) you make things better only if you replace the nuclear/coal/gas sources. If the energy you produce is consumed on top of that, there is nothing greener in it.

ps.
There is always this argument, that banks also use energy for ATMs for offices, for POS.
But nobody is speaking about the 8000 nodes that are also on right now. Not the hundreds of servers running exchanges, online wallets etc...

It is basically just a way for them to generate unnecessary and unintelligent FUDs without knowing how stupid they always sound when dishing out shits like that. I often do not even always bother myself participating in such arguments, because at the end of the day, you will realize you are busy arguing with big fools who have no single knowledge of whatever they are saying. In fact, let's even imagine bitcoin consumes more power, who really cares?

This is really such a nonsense. Once traditional paper fiat is printed, which costs does it have ? None! BTC keeps costing energy every single day, it's already costing more energy than a small country uses and who is using BTC anyway to really pay for things? 0.000000000000001% of the people ? And it's at at frikking 51 Twh/year already !!! Let me spell that out for you, that's 51.000.000.000 kilowatt hour/year !! And let me ask you this, do you know of a single person who actually pays stuff with bitcoin? I for sure dont. I know people who trade it, but actually pay with it? I honestly don't know anybody who does that. In fact, I don't even know of a single physical shop that accepts bitcoin in my country anyway.

If you calculate that energy cost per payment then you'd end up with an extremely bizarre number. So this whole thread is just ridiculous.

Exactly, that's what's worrying me a bit. Everything will depend on what will be the proportion of mining in relation to the the total "electricity producing hardware" market - if it's large at a given time, then the impact on prices will be big.

More precisely one can say:

- The faster the world changes to renewable energies, the less the impact of Bitcoin mining will be.
- The steadier and slower the mining electricity consumption grows, the better (less price impact). At the contrary, if there is a short boom there could be shortages (like GPUs in the altcoin market today)
- The bigger the impact of mining in solar/wind energy hardware prices, the higher the probability of regulation or even prohibtions - the most likely scenario for me, however, would be a special tax on miners that could be used to pay subsidies to other users of "electricity generating hardware".

As miners' electricity consumption depends largely on the Bitcoin price, the best scenario for us would be a steady price/adoption growth without insane bubbles like in 2011, 2013 and 2017. I hope one day that becomes possible.

But as I can't rule out problems in the future, I still support technologies like PoS, proof-of-space/capacity and proof-of-burn that have potentially better energy efficiency, although they may be less secure.

That's pretty much a logical event. If it doesn't happen naturally, large players in the market will increase the price artificially because those who are in need will buy it anyway. It's basically you being able to ask any price (obviously in relative terms) if the demand for energy and other products keeps increasing like we (at least I) expect it to do. As long as the price keeps going up, which will definitely happen long term speaking, it will likely even out the potentially higher cost price of hardware and electricity that miners depend on. For that reason I don't see it be much of a problem for miners itself. It however will impact those (non crypto entities) who need the same resources as miners. It's going to be interesting to see how this will play out in the future....

Exactly, totally agree.

Producing their fiat money costs more energy than BTC, so what are they are talking about??

Also, they are hindering^[1] the invention of more efficient ways of generating energy.
So if the world is wasting energy is their fault, not Bitcoin's.

---
[1] For example there is a law that says if you dare inventing a system with more than 20% efficiency, you cannot release it.
You must give them the specifics of your invention "for review" ( then they just shutdown your project instead of letting you make the world better)
---

I would agree with this statement if the following two statements were also true:
1) Bitcoin achieved a comparable transaction throughput than at least one major fiat currency
2) Bitcoin's mining costs would be, at maximum, one order of magnitude higher than today, even if we have mass adoption (meaning: if BTC today is using the same electricity amount than Denmark, then in it's final state it should not use more than "ten Denmarks" or one country like Germany).

Basically, my point is: if Bitcoin achieves a sufficient scalability to be usable by a majority of the world's population - very probably with techniques like LN or sidechains - then your assumption is true. But for a maximum of ~7 tx/second, the Bitcoin ecosystem is using a very high amount of energy.

So for a final conclusion we have to wait if LN works as expected and if not, if there are other techniques to boost transaction throughput.


This could also have side-effects in the future: if the mining industry continues to grow, its demand could have impact in the price of renewable energy. Now the effect is negligible, but I predict if it continues to grow, we would have a similar effect on solar panels and wind turbines that now occurs with graphic cards.

Well nothing's a waste as long as you do believe in what you're getting yourself into. For me, if people would want to believe then good. If not, then it's their choice and it's they're loss. Most of the time when people ask me about btc but they have all these negative rebuttals that just seems to try to test me, i just leave them be. It's not my loss anyways

Honestly, if we want to start counting the extreme waste of energy, we would even count more than what the OP has listed. In fact, bitcoin consumes far less, and even its adoption saves even lesser energy that all their useless bullshits that help no one but themselves. They really know the truth, but we already know that, bitcoin has come to disrupt a lot of things, and we would not expect those who it is affecting to keep quiet as they keep getting even more embittered. And you know what? That makes me happy knowing we are really getting at them.

4th one is absolutely correct, no one talks that printing money costs a lot and there are a lot of trees cutted for that.
If you look, both side has arguments to say that energy for bitcoin mining is wasted or not.
You use electricity for miner which does virtual job - mining bitcoins, in reality there is nothing created and even fiatmoney is behind bitcoin because it's value is determined in usd. So can't we say that it's just a pure waste of energy which can be used for more better things?
But now look it on different way, we get decentralized currency which is more independent, anonymous, easy to use and able to save money/bitcoin offline in some small drive.

What does 1 corrupt country have to do with the rest of the world? Nigeria is scammer's heaven. I'm sure their government isn't any different.

People complaining about Bitcoin's enegry consumption isn't really what I am bothered by. It's high level politicians talking about Bitcoin's energy consumption being an environmental disaster cracking me up. If they even bothered to care about the environment, they would do something about the larger oil corporations literally poisoning and killing everything that is alive, and that on a daily basis. Just look at what Shell is doing in Nigeria. It's going on for years, but no one even cares to sanction Shell. That basically also goes up for Exxon, Shevron, BP, Total, etc. As long as they are willing to pay their 'contributions', no one will even dare to sanction them, that's how things go - corruption is the desicive factor as always.

That guy is such a an idiot. "Market arbitrage", REALLY? LOL. And he obviously doesn't understand that energy in some countries is cheap because of politics/taxes instead of lack of demand.

would add a couple of other points:

a) you can re-use a miner to heat a room or even a building for larger setup
b) in fact you are helping the power net using electricity when it is not saturated

and consider that these two are the first that came mind ...

Those are all excellent points including a couple I had not thought of before. One additional point is that as new and better cryptocurrencies come out, there will be many that are faster and use less energy. My point is that Bitcoin is just the first step in the cryptocurrency economy and even though it is currently the biggest one, it is only a small part of this new technology.

/t

+1 WOsMerit

Bitcoin is highly energy less intensive and compare to what come out of the mining and transactions confirmation activities I don't think Bitcoin waste a lot of energy. I will advise our government to do more research on the opposite side of crypto currencies instead of looking for the limitations side of the crypto currencies.

I'll just leave this here - no further discussion required...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T0OUIW89II

There are entire countries that are basically dedicated to the mining industry, to get gold and silver or other commodities.

Fiat currency printing presses are running 24/7 as well.

People act like that energy is the primary argument for not investing or adopting bitcoin. But then they proceed to waste energy in their own homes. For sure, this energy use can be optimized, but people have been exaggerating it and also been using it as an argument against bitcoin. Which I personally think doesn't affect the world as much as they think it does.

I liked some of the views shared here . First and foremost everyone knows that bitcoin mining is an expensive procedure and it consumes a lot of energy, not like printing fiat currency  , this one point is more than enough to shut down people who complaint about the high price valuation of bitcoin and predicts it will go down to zero.

every argument that I have heard so far regarding this supposed "waste of energy" has been with the assumption that bitcoin is useless and was trying to make the conclusion that bitcoin should not continue to exist in long term.
practically there is no difference between this argument and simply calling bitcoin "fraud" like what JP Morgan did recently. and their motives and fear about bitcoin are perfectly clear...

but the fact is, as bitcoin provides a useful currency, or a payment system in a decentralized way that people want and are using, that warrants any kind of power consumption that it may have.

Yeah - I am waiting for the USA to replace their army by a bitcoin mining rig.

1. It is an inefficient system for security. PoS and newer solutions solve the same problem with a lot less energy.
2. You are claiming that PoW is more superior without offering an explanation.
3. You are using whataboutism, that is one of the low forms of demagogy. You are trying to compare the incomparable to put something into a better light. Please read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
4. Again you are comparing the incomparable.
5. Again you are comparing the incomparable.

If you want to compare bitcoin to something, then use other cryptoassets. And yes ASSETS not CURRENCIES. There isn't a single proper cryptoCURRENCY out there. The main thing that makes a quality currency is value stabilization. That the flow of currency is regulated in a way that it's value is predictable for the future years to come. This enables the economy to actually use finance as a practical tool. Without a stable value currency, it's impossible to calculate any projects that are larger then opening a lemonade stand. Bitcoin and any other crypto for that mater, still lack any mechanism for price stability. I hope that we will see some development with this in the future, but currently it is as it is. Because of this, cryptos are currently useless as currencies. Every business that "accepts bitcoin", actually still accepts FIAT through bitpay or similar service. Bitcoin is just a temporal payment solution started with marketing, not financial goals.
If you want cryptos to actually become currencies, and actually offer competition to central banking, create a system that actually does the same thing as central banks do - regulate the flow of money so that it's value will be predictable. Then you can actually calculate a business plan that's numbers wont change their value 50% in a week.

I wholeheartedly agree with your post even though it is kind of sad how clueless
most people are with regard to their precious fiat currency of choice.

However, I wonder if this will always be the case. How long can the average person
ignore the fact that Bitcoin is superior to their fiat currency in terms of security and
especially in terms of securing purchasing power for the long-term?

Purchasing power of the $ over the last century (provided by the St. Louis FED):


https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=iuIe

We all know how the Bitcoin chart of the last 9-10 years looks in comparison.

If we assume that we are still in the early days of Bitcoin it is to be expected that
more and more people have to see the value in it when the purchasing power of
1 Bitcoin always rises in the long-term while the purchasing power of 1 $ always decreases
in the long-term.

Most of it has to due with lack of education about what it takes to secure a PoW blockchain and why you would want to. I think basic laws of conservation and thermodynamics will point the way forward. Miner swarms will be placed in LEO's and will be powered via solar energy. Ground based farms will also be powered via microwave transmissions sent from the orbital solar arrays. It will take awhile..but we will get there.


*edit*

https://youtu.be/lp5Yx34SO58?t=19m28s

The thing is these people still deem fiat as gods of modern banking and finance without knowing that their valued USD isn't backed by gold since the 70's. That is why these people think that any energy spent on something unusual or bizarre is worthless, unless it can directlt be exchanged into their dollars. Average people won't care much about bitcoin jargons, PoW algorithm or security tied within bitcoin through the process of mining; they only care about the value of the coin and any other information aside from that is worthless and can just go. Stupid thing is, they don't realize that USD don't have any intrinsic value anymore since the 70s, and any efforts made by the government to produce it is just a waste of energy as well.

I always wonder if those poeple would say the same thing to guy paid to drive a armored car to move funds from A to B, and risk his life every day.

"Hey honey, you are doing a pretty useless job. Also, it is an extreme waste of energy"

You make great points, and I completely agree, but the true problem lies within the general public who will consume the news piece -- they're not going to care.

This is yet another issue that could be sensationalized, and those aren't good for Bitcoin as a whole. Green groups are going to fixate on the cons, and with enough traction, could cause government regulators to step in. It's not a problem now, but it could be in the future.

Such arguments of mainstreem medias and freens always were pretty funny. They usually start from the energy consumprion of Bitcoin and end somewhere at conclusions that BTC is killing pandas, causes a global warming and takes electricity from the poor african kids. I think that those people should ask themselves a question who da hell is lacking of electricity in the 21st century? For those people who realy don't have access to electricity it is not the problem of cryptocurrencies. The electricity consumption of the whole planet is growing each year but it is not a problem people should care about (especially right now).

These stories that BTC causes enormous electricity consumption come from those who oppose the whole idea of decentralized currency.By some data bitcoin mining is using only 0.22% of total electricity consumption and that's comparable with Singapore EC in one year.But some say that it is big number and that we should be concerned due to a bigger increase in the future.

It would be interesting to see how much electricity is consumed by all world banks,other financial institutions,money printing and so on.I bet it is much more then what bitcoin mining is using today.I think that energy needs are becoming greater every day,but renewable energy sources are still very poorly utilized in the present time.

It would be really good to connect bitcoin and renewable energy sources-decentralized currency on green energy

I´m tired of hearing the argument "but Bitcoin wastes more energy than
a whole country..." all over the mainstream media.

Here are a few reasons why the energy that is consumed by Bitcoin mining is not wasted:
1. The energy that is consumed by Bitcoin mining is the foundation of the security of the network
2. Proof-of-work is superior to other consensus algorithms like Proof-of-Stake and offers less attack vectors
3. Fiat currencies are supposedly backed by the power of the state... meanwhile the US military consumes more energy than Bitcoin mining per year
(this is a comparison of the military of a single country compared to a truly global currency)
4. No one is talking about the enormous costs of transporting fiat money, securing it and printing it in the first place
5. The mining of other commodities is extremely energy-intensive as well

If you take all these factors into account, Bitcoin may actually be less energy-intensive than traditional
fiat currencies. Besides, many mining companies have set up their operations in countries with an abundance
of renewable energies like Canada or Iceland. The days where Bitcoin was solely mined in rural Mongolia and China
may finally be behind us.