Topic: Is Bitcoin mining sustainable? - page 2. (Read 1234 times)

Or maybe I am right and we are already fucking up a huge amount of electricity.

What I am wondiring is: is it possible that nobody hasn't yet noticed it???

1 MILLION 700 THOUSANDS MILLIONS OF WATTS PER HOUR ?

Read it yourself, because if that's correct, I think I'm far off... and the network is sucking up much more than what I have written.

That's exactly the point: we are not seeing how much electricity the Bitcoin network is sucking up at the moment, and that's why I made my calcs.

Imagine tomorrow 1 BTC would suddenly rise in value to 10000$, would YOU buy an ASIC and start mining?
I think I would.
You would recover the cost in the next 2 weeks and make quite some bucks over it.
Then, the price of Bitcoin could fall and you could just turn off your hardware.
But you don't need such sudden increase in value: miners are constantly calculating if it's convenient to add hardware and mine more.
And when is it convenient? When Bitcoin's price is higher.
In other words, Bitcoin's value is directly proportional to the electricity spent to uphold its network, AND NOTHING ELSE (<- the bad part).

Is there anything wrong in this reasoning?

I haven't done the exact calculations, but i would be supprised if 36.000 households could be powered with the combined power used by asics in 24 hours...

This would mean you could power 3000 households for a year with the power used in one day, or 1 million households for a full year with the power used for a year... Seems a bit high for me...

EDIT:

I'll try to look at this the other way around:
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

The current hashrate is 1,840,166,130 GH/s.

Let's assume best case scenario first: everybody is mining with an antminer S9:
https://www.bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=0002016052907243375530DcJIoK0654

14.000 GH/s for 1471 Watt at the wall...

1,840,166,130 / 14,000 =~ you'd need 132.000 antminer S9's to deliver the current network's hashrate... Seems a lot doesn't it?
132.000 * 1471 Watt   =~ 194 Megawatt... This power draw would power the full bitcoin network
Megawatt-hour = Megawatt × hour
194 * (24 hours*365 days) =~ 1.700.000 Megawat-hour =~ 1.700.000.000 Kilowatt-hour

An average household seems to use around 10 KWu a year (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3), altough my household (me, my wife and my kid) use around 5 Kwu/year... Maybe our power usage is extremely low, maybe it's less for the EU as the US, maybe it has dropped significantly over the last 2 years???

So, by these calculations, 170.000.000 households could have been powered...

I must have missed something here... This can't be right   Probably a comma somewhere... 170 million households in the best case scenario probably means i did a convertion wrong somewhere...

First of all, if this topic has been touched already, please don't bash me, I tried a search for something similar but couldn't find anything. If so, anyway, just let it drown down or even lock it, I won't be offended.

Second, it may seem that this topic is about mining, but it's not. This thread is about a possible huge point of failure that has never been considered about Bitcoin.



Now, considerations: at the actual price (let’s round it to 600$), each block found gives the miner around 600*12.5=7500$.
If we assume that miners are taking just a small share of overhead on that number, we can assume they pay something like 6000$ to mine those Bitcoins.
Some of those 6000$ are for hardware, a lot is for electricity.
Now, to make it easy, I’ll just assume that 5000 of those dollars are for electricity. This is, approximately, the cost in electricity to uphold the Bitcoin network for 10 minutes.

Assuming an average electricity bill for a house of 20$ per month, this means that 250 houses could be powered for one month with the power used to uphold the Bitcoin network for 10 minutes.
This means that 36000 houses could be powered for one month with the electricity used to uphold the Bitcoin network for one day.

Now, we are all here waiting that Bitcoin's value will rise where it deserves to, replacing or pairing up with fiat currency, and this means we are waiting for it to take off for good reaching 10000$ of value, or even 100000$ or even 1 million $, who knows.
Now you easily see where this is going.
If one Bitcoin is going to be as valuable as 100000$, upholding the network for one day will require the same electricity to feed 5976000 houses for one month.
Are we going to build nuke plants to uphold the Bitcoin network?

The problem is that, with the actual protocol and software, the energy necessary to uphold the Bitcoin network is directly proportional to its value, and nothing else.
In fact, the chain of events to consider is this:

1. Bitcoin price increases because there's more demand
2. People/companies add computational power to the network because there's more money to take from the market
3. The Bitcoin protocol adjusts the difficulty to suck even more electricity to uphold the network.
4. Goto 1.

This, if we look at raw data like I have done.
But there may be variables that I didn't consider, and I don't want to seem that one who knows everything.
I'll be glad to be proven wrong, because I see this as a hurdle coming fast onto the face of Bitcoin, and we may find that countries will ban Bitcoin mining because of this.
So if anyone can bring me additional variables to throw into the equation that could considerably lower the Bitcoin's network uphold cost, I'm all ears!
If there's some different Proof-of-XXX (Proof of Porn?) incoming on the software, that I'm not aware of, I'd be glad to read about it, as much as if there's any other software solution or protocol change that could clear the problem, and the same with anything else that can prove my reasoning wrong.

Again, if this matter has been treated already, just let the thread drown, but please give me the link to that thread!
Thank you!