Topic: Is bitcoin mining environmentally responsible? - page 3. (Read 3208 times)

Of course. In what scenario would it be environmentally responsible? It is a waste of real-world resources.

I think the question in here is how much energy is spent in producing, distributing and regulating fiat currency. All those articles do not talk about that subject and I'm sure it is spent much more energy in fiat currency.

It would be interesting to see the other side of the coin.

Best regards,

Compared to the energy usage of all HFT-trading worldwide its nothing.

What does it cost? We all should ask us what does it cost, if we do not etablish an independend money system.....

My electricity is produced by the voice of Bill Withers, and the tears of Orphans.....Its sufficient for now.


BTCHarlemite

Indeed it is: How Fossil Fuels Have Greened the Planet (weird, I must click the google link to get through the paywall, the direct link doesn't work)

Food for thought. We're not all using asicminer just yet though. And do you think the global hash rate might increase once everyone owns an one ?

im newbie XD

I was wondering what the context of this kind of number is vs. say industrial usage. I found this analysis of European Energy Efficiency, including stats for overall european industry: http://www.lbst.de/ressources/docs2010/EP-05_Energy-Efficiency-Industry_DEC2010_PE-451-483.pdf

One key quote was:
.
So in 1990 to 2005 (I don't know about the last 8 years) European industrial sector has used 320 MTOE per year.

TOE is a tonne of oil, with an equivalent energy expenditure of 41.868 GJ or 11.63 MWh.

320MTOE is equal to 3.2*10E8*11.63 = 3.722PWh (peta-Watt-hours)! However, that's per year, so per day that works out as "only" 10.2 TWh (tera-Watt-hours) per day. So, well done BitCoin you're currently running at 0.01% of the energy usage of the European industrial sector!

Well its just a guestimate and there are factors pushing towards it being over estimate (FPGA, ASIC, and people having second uses as space heaters, people using mining on systems that were on anyway and not using much extra power or no extra because of it) or an underestimate more people than you'd think still playing with CPU miners, or CPU mining + GPU simultaneously etc.  Who knows!

But another thing is the stat of 982/24 = 40 MWatts sounds less alarming than ~ 1 GWh per day.  You notice how they did that.  However thats still quite a few households eh has to be into the thousands of households range.  According to this stat http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3 that would be like 30,000 households ongoing energy budget. 

And escalating probably as the difficulty ramps up if the price supports the demand.

Adam

To comment on the OP clearly not very environmentally responsible in a direct sense.

According to this article http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-12/virtual-bitcoin-mining-is-a-real-world-environmental-disaster.html the bitcoin hashcash mining function is taking a gigawatt hours per day.

As the inventor of hashcash thats a lot of power I indirectly caused to be burnt.  Personally I am reasonably green minded so I can see  the negative aspects of that.

However an alternative view is that bitcoin is lower financial transaction costs.  And credit card companies, clearing banks, banks have been getting away with charging some rather high fees.  The cost of that electricity is a lot lower than those fees.  Maybe the money freed up by saving those transaction fees.  Global fund flow is measured in the trillions per day.  Depending on the details banks charge 20 - 50 USD or more and a percent of the amount.  Surely would dwarf current mining costs.  Human resources have value too - if banking become more efficient and if people can save money, human resources are freed to invest in and work on more human progress.  Maybe we get fusion power a year sooner, or people can buy more solar with the money saved etc. in the big picture.  Also about half the bitcoins have already been mined.  Though I dont think the mining arms race is barely started.  I think its probable we will see rows of datacenter racks full of 22nm custom chips ultra dense blades in datacenters chasing down the last of it.  ie right at the technology limit tracking moore's law.

Adam

Interesting, so depending on the power source, a 12/24 rig could be much more than twice as environmentally friendly (and cost effective) than a 24/24.

I'm not sure it's a fair comparison. The amount of bitcoin in circulation isn't all that much.

Yes, the number of bitcoins is the same, but the cost (in terms of both dollars and energy) certainly isn't. Which bring us to the next point:

It's not enough for the technology to merely be new. The new technology must also be more energy efficient than the old technology in order to make a profit. Bitcoin gives miners a direct monetary incentive to adopt energy efficient technologies. Sure, everybody can pay less for electricity by being more energy efficient, but bitcoin miners don't just pay less, they actually make money by being energy efficient. That's a much stronger incentive.

If you trace back all wealth to its origin you will find some sort of exploitation of the environment/natural resources.
Its the foundation of all economies since the dawn of humanity, its what we do, and a large part of how we determine that something has value, bitcoin is just carrying on in this long tradition.

I don't think it's very environmentally great, but then nothing much we do is as humans. Probably the newer tech like ASIC will be more energy efficient which will be good. Factoring the environmental cost properly into the cost of generating power (taking into account the type of power generation i.e. coal, nuclear, solar etc) and passing that cost on to the power consumer is probably the best way for the market to correctly rate their particular scale of mining operations impact on the environment because it will be reflected in the bottom line.

Where I live solar is common and grid power is not especially cheap, so it become more sensible to mine during the daylight hours only and use just the solar power. Though it slows things down considerably, if your power costs are substantial it can make sense.

haha... perhaps too much CO2 on earth.

i reduced my current central heating bill, my room is always warm now... 

I think the impact is only determined by exchange rates.

Increasing effiency will result in higher network speed and thus higher difficulty. And with higher difficulty, you will get less BTC over time.

First CPU then GPU then FPGA them ASIC, but BTC mined remained the same. You only made profit if you were early adopter of new technology or with increasing exchange rates.

So only higher exchange rates make wider adoption possible and thus the environmental impact is higher.

"Waste heat" could be used for heating, too.

Maybe in future most miners are located in the polar regions...


ya.ya.yo!