Topic: Energy consumption will become an issue if bitcoin really breaks through - page 6. (Read 23459 times)

You didn't get the point. Your billion or whatever increase in computing efficiency will just increase mining difficulty. It will not reduce energy consumption of the bitcoin network. Variable costs of mining are dominated by electricity price. Mining gear will be run as long as those costs are not higher than the expected mining reward plus transaction fees. (Amortisation has no influence on this - it's the miner's risk)
So what follows from the above is that more efficient mining gear will of course produce more GH/s per Watt. So it will be more GH/s per $ on your electricity bill. This means that it is profitable for more people to run even more mining gear. And what's profitable will be done on a free market. If such a thing as free market really exists, Bitcoin is it.

Efficiency goes up
Difficulty goes up
Energy consumption stays exactly the same.

The Energy consumption of the Bitcoin network can be approximated by the following formula:

GlobalEnergyConsumptionForMining = (MiningReward + TransactionFees) * bitcoinValueInUSD / EnergyCostInUSDperkWh

The efficiency falls out of the equation because of how a free market works

..as the GPUs do now, meaning no net change? That's how I understood it anyway.

It's TOTALLY relevant. If you consider what a "computer" cost 40 years ago, how HUGE and power hungry it was, and how pathetically not "powerful" it was, you could have predicted some insane power consumption trends, based on current technology.

Now consider that your cell phone is 100,000 times smaller, 1,000,000 times cheaper, and 1000 times more powerful than a university-grade computer from 1965.

That's a BILLION (with a B) fold increase processing power, cost efficiency, and reduction in size in the past 47 years... Think about it.

What would have taken 1000 university-grade computers, the size of a house to process, 47 years ago--which would have consumed MEGAWATTS of electricity and put off MASSIVE amounts of heat--can now be processed, with ease, on a mere cell phone, that consumes a few milliwatts...

My Samsung Galaxy S3 can put down about 3khash of CPU processing power on litecoin. Which is roughly half of the hashing power of a 4-year-old laptop roughly 20-times its size, with a Centrino Mobile processor in it... This was a $1000 computer 4 years ago, and it consumes 90 watts when running full-out. My phone consumes about 2-4 watts... MAAAAYBE 5 if the screen is on full brightness...

More efficient miners will drive less efficient miners out of the profitability realm. If you want to compete, you'll have to use more power efficient equipment, or find a way to get free electricity. This will drive the entire 'mining industry' toward power efficiency, constantly. The cheaper people CAN process, the cheaper they will. And the cheaper those people process, the more necessary it becomes for others to move to power efficiency in order to compete. Sure, there will always be a few people operating on the bleeding edge of profitability, but once that line is pushed behind them by the increase in difficulty by the more efficient people, they will be forced to either move to more efficient equipment, or abandon mining.

Nobody's going to mine at a significant financial loss. Not even speculators.

1) You DO want more of them
Just not located in France...
Check new Thorium safe NP in India.

2) "next major nuclear accident"
 likely be the "well-contained" missile "friendly exchange" between
India & Pakistan.
After the Taliban will overtake Pakistan.
Or maybe this is an optional condition...
------------
All that GreenTech-Talk is a scam.
It's very unfair , when "good" and
 "environ-friendly" stuff are being produced
 with the help of very dirty technologies
 in poor countries and consumed in rich ones, which trying to be "tidy" and "green".

BTW, we have ONLY one planet,
it's our COMMON home...
Be a good human, don't by "Green" tech.

This is an excellent point  Renewable energy is fairly cheap.  What is expensive is moving that renewable energy from where it is produced to where the money is printed.  Centralized, fiat currencies don't create homogenous prices.  They create price disparity that makes resources (nominally) cheap at the periphery and expensive at the center, yet (due to money printing) relatively abundant at the center and scarce at the periphery, when, without this centralization, the opposite would be true.

3 words for OP: Application-specific integrated circuit.

Back in the 1970s, they would have said the same thing about computers in general, and now you hold a phone in your hand that can process more data then a server the size of a room at that time. Something tells me that energy will keep being inefficient for as long as its cheaper to follow the crowd, and technology will continue to compensate through innovative developments in and of themselves.

It will be pretty cool if they make a completely unrelated-to-bitcoin-mining breakthrough in bio-solar technology. I'd love to wear shoes that generate enough electricity when I walk to power all my devices.

A 19th-century Member of Parliament predicted that, given the rate of growth of traffic, London would be six feet deep in horse manure by 1910.

It's hard to predict the future by extrapolation, one aspect missing in the discussion is that if bitcoin becomes more widespread and accepted and devalues the USD than maybe the calculation shouldn't be based on current electricity costs in USD.

I do expect Bitcoin to be treated as terrorism or whatnot.  Similar projects (Liberty Dollars) already are.  And I am making plans for this eventuality.

As for the influence of the US government over its citizens, in the current economic environment, after over a decade of failed wars and false flag terrorism, meh, we'll see.  It certainly isn't going up.

Who said that it didn't?

Moore's Law does apply to solar energy.

http://www.digitopoly.org/2011/11/07/moores-law-in-solar-energy/

Also, your wiki article only refers to cost of generation. Not cost to consumer. If the person doing the generating is also the consumer, he's getting his energy essentially at "wholesale".

If he could buy "wholesale" coal energy, you'd be right. But he can't. So we have to compair "wholesale" Solar to retail coal. 

With net-metering, you pay wholesale solar price, even when you're pulling back out, what you previously put into the grid.

A combination of wind and sun works out pretty well too. But you're right, it's not a good idea to just jump completely "off-grid" (and nobody's suggesting that, at least I'm certainly not) since the majority of energy is consumed during the DAY for air conditioning, etc, solar can offset coal by generating surplus energy during the day, and then pulling from the grid at night (this is called net metering).

Very little energy is used by the grid at night, and gets grounded out and wasted, since they can't actually shut the plant down at night, even though demand is lower (this is why off-peak electricity costs less).

A solar system that creates a surplus during the day (when demand is high) and pulls from the grid at night (when demand is low) serves to not only supplement coal (or whatever) during the day, and ease demand (which can cause brown-outs and worse), but also serves to make coal generation more efficient, since the power isn't wasted at night.

Renewable energy IS CHEAP, it just takes a long time to recover the costs, unless you're a high volume consumer. I personally don't have a problem with clean energy like Nuclear either, but I seriously doubt that bitcoin mining is going to drive the creation of even a single new nuclear power plant. Certainly not here in the U.S., where it's practically illegal (and effectively impossible) to build a new nuclear power plant, and has been for as long as many of us have been alive. Not a single nuclear power plant has been built in the U.S. since 1974...

So for your part of the world, it might be a different story. From where I am, if 7% of our energy consumption were cryptocoin mining, it would absolutely drive a move to renewable energy more than any socialist government programs ever could.

Ok, inform us please if you'll come
to something practically useful.

  I gotta say, I think that this would do nothing but increase the efficiency of electricity generation. If it becomes more profitable to generate electricity for your mining purposes by installing your own solar array, or your own hydroelectric, wind, or tidal generating system, then that's what people will do, and in the Bitcoin 'arms race', that would almost guarantee that in order to remain profitable, EVERYBODY mining bitcoin would be required to convert to renewable energy, in order to remain competitive. And it's really not hard to scale up an installation economically. So if you have to put in a (arbitrarily picking a number here) $50,000 installation to run your farm, and it takes another $$3000-$5000 to go ahead and scale up enough to run the rest of your home, then it's safe to assume that most folks running a home-based operation large enough to justify continuing to mine (meaning they economically have no choice but to switch to renewable energy) would go ahead and do it up for their homes as well. Less residential consumption (although probably an insignificant impact, some is better than none, right? It's a start).

7% of the world's energy generation being shifted to renewable energy, essentially 'overnight' would have significant impact in areas that would 'trickle down'. Economies of scale in alternative energy production equipment would make it affordable for the average joe to now also invest in cheaper renewable energy (like solar or wind), for his home/business which would have a domino effect on the current constraints limiting people from switching (cost). People aren't burning oil and coal because they hate the environment, they're doing it because it's too expensive to shift. Implementation is currently so low that there's no economy of scale that allows producers to make energy production equipment cheap enough for the average consumer. Most people can't justify the upfront costs of spending $10,000-$20,000 for a solar system that is going to take 20 years to pay for itself (assuming no maintenance costs), and last for 30, just to save $75-$100/month on their electricity bill.

The bitcoin mining 'climate control' systems are also interesting to me.

As to the question regarding how heat from a mining farm could be converted to COOL a building, you might want to read up on "Absorbtion cooling" It's one of the most efficient methods for cooling, and the original way that refrigerators worked (propane or natural gas). Not a new concept, zero moving parts, so maintenance costs would be essentially ZERO. Not to mention, you could ALSO use the heat to heat water. Be that residential water, a pool, hot tub, what have you...

Sounds to me like if your theory is correct, we could potentially move a very large portion of our current energy consumption to renewable energy, move heating and cooling to a nearly 100% efficiency scale (turning "waste" heat into building heating/cooling), all while kicking the banksters and oligarchs to the curb.

Empty the banking buildings, move in huge mining farms, harvest the heat waste for climate control, and move in legitimate jobs in their place. Win/Win/Win. 

Good point. We might have to change the thread for this discussion. Still:

Why do you think bitcoin can change this? The US still dictates in what currency US citizens have to pay their taxes.
And even more: The USA are very good at evilizing what "they" don't like. Expect Bitcoiners to be treated like enemies of the state once Bitcoin really starts to weaken the States

I don't know.
I'm still updating on alternate concepts, haven't crossed and understood a better solution yet

…a very good reason to use sustainable forms of energy, not just for Bitcoins…

That sure is a whole lot of words you put in my mouth.

>>>energy-efficient successor.
2brenzi
And what do you propose ?
PoW - is evil ?! Fine...
What will be your proof-type of choice ?