Topic: Development for Bitcoin to reduce CO2 footprint - page 4. (Read 1479 times)

Green energy and renewable energy is a process that we must achieve. However, development is still underway in this area. Useful results may emerge in the near future, but we are not ready yet.

a legendary user that doesnt even know that hashing is unrelated to transactions .. dang



energy is already 'taxed' at different rates/additional CO₂.. its why coal energy production is more expensive per kw than hydro.(research carbon credits)
power companies already do deals for farms to buy up power in contracted allotments of power long term. this isnt the standard domestic/residential 'consumption' but the excess that would go to waste. thus its literally 'free money' for the power plants. which they love and can use to expand operations

I'm not sure if there are exact figures how much energy is spent on Bitcoin. Probably with bigger adoption energy consumption will grow further but maybe some alternative energy sources could be the answer to that.
The biggest problem for CO2 are huge mining farms but for them there could be defined some additional taxes or something, like is already done in some other industries, and funds from that should be invested further in environment protection. I think that no one wants that Bitcoin becomes another problem for our planet.

That doesn't really address energy consumption. The advent of LN isn't taking miners off the network. On the contrary, hash rate keeps increasing and is near the all-time high.

There are two big issues I see. One is whether mining operations are drawing on excess capacity or not -- how much net increase in electricity generation are they causing vs. load balancing? The other is the trajectory of green energy usage in the coming decades and what percentage of Bitcoin mining will shift away from things like coal-fired energy.

I think the introduction of the Lightning Network and the removal of millions of micro transactions to a off-chain solution has already contributed to a massive reduction in the amount of transactions that had to be done on-chain, so that is a solution on it's own. 

Governments could even tax large mining farms with additional CO2 taxes to create special income for them to help fight the CO2 pollution, like they did with the CO2 taxes on new cars.  

People dont understand. BItcoin is until now not little part of banks. I dont like them but Bitcoin until now dont give credit, dont sell company shares, even not work as payment system. Its only a investment

Pollution of those things is easy: Come to germany and see that windmills are even build in forest, where 100.000 square meters each windmill trees are taken down.
And that damns change the whole landscape is also known

It's all relative. Do you know how much energy we use for everyday living. In relation to the big picture mining uses hardly any electricity. I wonder how much a bank uses?
You say dams and windmills also pollute the environment? How?

Things that damage CO2 is stuff like coal mining and mass pollution and dumping deforestation. Mining doesn't do this. Worrying about mining leaving a large CO2 footprint like worrying that the cherry on your cupcake meanwhile the whole cupcake looks and taste horrible.

Yes, it should be clear for all to understand that all industries are consuming electricity even the religious organizations do. And of course, there are wastes in every industry and the big incentive why we have to continually look for more efficient technology (or mining equipment on this regard) is all about money or economy.

Not really.

Mining uses the same amount of energy regardless of there being 10 transactions or 10 million transactions per block. Miners spend as much on electricity as they can while still turning a profit. Accordingly the amount of money miners can spend on electricity mostly depends on the block reward, transaction fees and crypto-to-fiat exchange rate (other factors being infrastructure and hardware acquisition costs).

So one way to lessen the CO2 footprint of a PoW-based cryptocurrency is to shorten its currency emission timeframe, similar to Monero's. Making larger blocks unfortunately is not.

I agree that CO2 print is very important, and if it were a way to reduce electricity consumption, it would be great. However, I don't think you are right that it's not possible to keep mining and yet become eco-friendly. Surely, there's some pollution from the alternatives we have today, but significantly reducing it is still a good idea. Moreover, it does not seem like our world is on the path of using less energy. In fact, I am pretty sure that the consumption will grow along with civilization. So searching for better sources of energy and learning to compensate the footprint by actions that can reduce it seems to be a more realistic way. Moreover, I don't think Bitcoin users are generally concerned enough about ecology to support the fork.

VISA payments are not settled when you swipe your card. all that occurs is a balance checker (validate UTXO) and relay tx to a bank(network relay of unconfirmed to mempool).
the banks then SEPARETLY batch up the payments and handle the settlement later.(block hashing)
comparing visa to a bitcoin confirmed tx is wrong on so many levels

a visa payment/speed is comparable to just putting tx's into mempool, which costs are much lower than you insinuate it costs for bitcoin, but speeds are the same

also bitcoins confirmed tx cost are not high due to technology. but artificially manipulated to appear high by those trying to stifle bitcoin utility to advertise alternative networks as 'the solution'

also. whether a block is empty or contains 100,000 tx. the asic mining part is the exact same. asics do not handle transactions. they just hash a small piece of data. this small piece of data is the same length no matter how many transactions there are. so trying to insinuate asics costs relate directly to transaction cost, is you mis understanding the whole bitcoin process

As payment system, as shown with my first link, BTC uses about 3x more energy then 100 thousend Visa TX:

For me personal I often said, DASH is the more useable payment system because it can send TX within secounds. But DASH still also POW

We are still early in crypto's development and I am most interested in POS coins that won't require massive amounts of energy and hardware to stay secure.  Just because something hasn't gained traction yet doesn't mean we should stop trying.

I'm not saying that Bitcoin is not a working payment system at the moment, because it is, despite it's scaling probles. I'm saying Bitcoin is not yet able to fully replace existing payment systems -- assuming you want to reduce Bitcoin to a mere payment system (ie. there's also the matter of store of value, financial sovereignty and maybe at one point a useful token / smart contract economy).

In the end it breaks to whether we deem 1) cryptocurrencies a worthy endeavour and 2) PoS and other PoW-free consensus algorithms viable security models.

Regarding the first point, reclaiming individual financial sovereignity and possibly replacing existing, more energy and especially labour intensive financial infrastructure seem worth it. Just imagine the amount of human resources one could free up by automating a large part of the financial industry. At least financial service workers will have a better chance at finding new jobs than most of the manual workers one can expect to be automated away in the coming decades.

Regarding the second point I have simply yet to see a consensus algorithm other than PoW work in practice. Crypto's history is full of failed PoS attempts and most other consensus algorithms are either permissioned or require trust.

That's just my 2 sats though.



Thanks for doing the math

I think people tend to underestimate the amount of energy required for water to reach boiling point.

average kettle is 1200watt/h = 20watt a minute
average gaming computer 600watt/h = 10watt a minute

if a kettle takes 1 minute to boil (depending on how much water your boiling) you would have to google for 6 minutes to match

those are actually pretty interesting facts. thanks for sharing!

I've heard that googling something requires the same ammount of heating water for tee 3 times.

power plants produce more than they consume ON PRPOSE to prevent brown outs/black outs during sudden surges of power utility.

EG they know at superbowl halftime, alot of people microwave some popcorn or make coffee or turn on a houselight to go to the bathroom.. this means there are known times of power utility growth. but not enough time to just flick on an extra generator at a seconds notice. and so power plants process excess power to cop with known and also some unknown scenarios

imagine power plants produce an excess of 15-20% above consumption. because its impossible to give power after its needed. but also its impossible to take the power back if its unused. and so this 15-20% excess is essentially 'waste' electric.

mining farms dont buy the domestic allowance power (normal consumption) instead they make year long deals/contracts that they will buy 1-10% of the excess. which power stations love. after all it would have gone to waste anyway

also although "china" as a country does have coal power plants. asic farms decided to set up in regions not near to coal power plants and in regions of hydro/solar/geothermal. so the CO₂ numbers are way lower than what you may think.

Interesting point to say maybe the electrical power would be wasted when not used by bitcoin.
And as I said before you also point out its not a working payment system at the moment.

So for place with much coal energy power its wrong because you could simply reduce input and output regarding to demand.
For green power can be some right because e.g. windmill produce power even when not needed. Thats big problem normally because you have to backup it when there is no wind 

So lets make an agreement that 30% would be wasted. Its still 20000 kt of CO2 extra. And for the people say the conclusion of Hash Rate and power consumtion is wrong i give another 30%. Still there are more then 12000 kt = 12000000 tons of CO2 extra for bitcoin.

Guys you really can affort this with your conscience.

By the way I wait 3 hours meanwhile for a TX I gave 12000 sat/kb. Cheap TX in Bitcoin mainnet is past again.....

Disclaimer: I'm a PoW hardliner who's not convinced of PoS and its derivatives (at least those that I'm aware of)

I'm under the impression that whenever the power consumption of PoW gets brought up that one factor is largely ignored: Grid energy storage.

Maybe the hard facts will betray me once a comprehensive studies comes out (so far most studies I found regarding the power usage of PoW were on shaky grounds at best, link me up if you have something interesting), however so far I'm under the impression that economic forces lead to PoW mining using energy that mostly goes beyond what can be stored in the power grid and would therefore get wasted for the most part.

That is, based on the assumptions that
1) miners are driven towards places with the lowest energy cost,
2) energy is the cheapest where there's a surplus of electricity and
3) current energy storage capabilities are very much lacking
we can come to the conclusion that the additional power consumed by miners is energy that is otherwise wasted. Unlike consumers and most industries that have other economic factors at play (eg. you can only drill for oil where there is oil, you can only produce commodities where resources are either nearby or cheaply delivered) electricity is almost the sole concern for mining operations.

But like I said, the hard facts may betray me, so hopefully at one point a proper study will take place proving the above either false or correct. Also I'm neither an economist nor a grid engineer, so for all I know my assumptions could be utterly void.

That being said, I would very much love to see an increase of Bitcoin's transaction throughput as to make it actually feasible to phase out some of the legacy banking system in favor of cryptocurrencies (ie. IMHO Bitcoin's PoW wouldn't feel like that much of a waste if it were to successfully supersede parts of the existing system rather than running redundantly alongside it).

And this may result in a big problem for BTC later. For technical reasons (payment ?!) and also my main topic:
Think of new "green" european parlament says: POW Crypto use are forbidden in europe.
They stop normal lamps for energy saving, even vacuum cleaner are not allowed to sell with more then 1000 W because of energy consumption.
They stop much plastic one use material starting 2020
And that was made under mainly conservative leading parlament ....