Topic: THIS IS AN ISSUE: Bitcoin mining network uses a min. of 257 Megawatts per hour. (Read 2410 times)

No country can truly "ban" bitcoin for any reason really. They can impose fines and criminal penalties if you get caught using, mining, or supporting bitcoin, but the great thing about bitcoin is that it really cannot be stopped. I dont think anyone here is talking about anyone banning anything based on its air pollution. This is more a discussion of we should care that our beloved bitcoin needs a more Eco-friendly mining community.

  I have no idea if Chinese use 10% or 90% hydro for bitcoin. Or anything inbetween.  I do know China has really bad air quality issues. I do know politicians all over the world like to find scapegoats.

So what better then to tell your people that bitcoin is making the air bad. Follow my logic most people don't use BTC so if China bans btc claiming it is bad for the air, most Chinese people would say okay since most Chinese people don't use or own   BTC.

This is why being on the leading edge of Green is important for BTC.    BTW any country could make the claim that BTC is causing bad air and use it to ban BTC.

I've seen mines in China which are 100% hydro (they are attached to hydropower plants, if there is too little water they shut down). Instead of World vs. China it makes sense looking at individual facilities in my opinion.

By no means a complete picture and mostly based on my own observations (I have seen quite a few mines in China):

Some of the largest mines in China now run on hydro. The rate of hydro-powered mines is steadily increasing too, because ease of access to them and because lower electricity rates can be negotiated with owners or operators. I have seen an increasing number of "micro mines" during the past 6-12 months (1 megawatt range, some even smaller) at very remote locations - the power plants there aren't that big, but on the other hand very little electricity is used locally since there is almost no industry. The power used for mining is basically the "left-over" from these turbines, would otherwise not be used as they are too remote. In general I noticed a larger fragmentation of hash-power in China. There are physically big facilities (big halls), but I have yet to see a 100MW or even 40MW facility. 20MW and smaller on the other hand I have seen.

Of course many miners run their gear in industrial places within city boundaries (also first tier cities) and pay published electricity rates - they don't actually have control where the electricity comes from. But I believe these will be more exceptional in the future, as naturally miners in China also need to compete with the cost of Bitcoin mining on a global scale (US, Canada, Georgia, Iceland, Sweden etc...). I believe many of these city miners may be driven out of business sooner or later, the block reward halving may play some role too but who knows.

Well, if we extrapolate a few years when the reward is lower and the diff much higher, this will become a real economic question.

1.  marginal improvements in btc mining will be smaller and smaller at a larger and larger cost per improvement.  So at some point the cost of electricity will become a very important factor.  By that time, we can hope solar/alternatives will be cheaper than polluting ones.

     I could have posted 413 photos from the google image search but my imgur account is too crowded.

 I have had asthma issues on and off in my life.  So this subject is sensitive for me. It isn't that btc is a huge polluter it pollutes some what.

I am working with another member to setup a 60k solar array for a joint mining adventure.  I would prefer to be as green as possible.

That is horrifying to say the least. Thanks for sharing those pictures, it really puts things in perspective.

If China's government decides that killing off people with coal plant pollution is not a good idea they could shut down 200 to 300 ph in gear.  When I look at these photo's below I ask myself how long will they continue this pollution?

http://imgur.com/a/9rWrq   this has 40 shots in it.

here are a few shots

The big problem with all of that is that people actually believe that hydro electric dams are "green"

Small run-of-the-river plants emit between 0.01 and 0.03 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour. Life-cycle emissions from large-scale hydroelectric plants built in semi-arid regions are also modest: approximately 0.06 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour. However, estimates for life-cycle global warming emissions from hydroelectric plants built in tropical areas or temperate peatlands are much higher. Source cited via hyperlink.

While i agree that Hydro is a good alternative to coal and gas as it produces less co2 emissions, it is not the end all answer for bitcoin.

I will say again, bitcoin is a commodity, as a commodity I would be more likely as someone who cares about what we are doing to our planet to buy bitcoin I could verify was generated via hydro electric power, the real solution has to lay somewhere else. Solar, wind, tidal, something else is the answer, and its adoption by bitcoin miners and users could easily make bitcoin the greenest currency technology in the world. That would take BTC mainstream 1000x faster than any amount of hype/fud/adoption could do. If you could verify-ably say that "this form of currency is supported by a network of green generation and reduces emissions by using it", Bitcoin would become the currency of choice by most of the world almost over night. Maybe not from a federal level, but we all know the power of a decentralized community supersedes any politics or government regulation. Look at the bit license for NY. Early estimates show less than 12% of users, buyers, sellers have complied with the new regulations. 

0 Carbon bitcoins may not be the future now, BUT IT NEEDS TO BE.

According to a Bitmain employee, China's bitcoin mining is about 70% hydro, 30% coal during the summer, and about 50% hydro, 50% coal during the winter. Most of the dams in China have seasonal flows and power generation capacity. This is dirtier than the average for bitcoin mining worldwide, which is probably above 80% renewable, with almost all of that hydro. My facility is about 95% hydro, for example.

Why? Exactly for the reasons you said, the current banking systems and financial structure consume massive amounts of energy and put massive amounts of greenhouse gases into our air every day. Just like RichBC said, Bitcoin is the "new boy" in town. Sure bitcoins blockchain technology is probably the greatest innovation of this century but that does not make bitcoin itself great, Making bitcoins blockchain technology synonymous with a green alternative to the current currency structures available would make bitcoin itself the greatest technological achievement  of this century not just the technology that bitcoin is based off from.

Bitcoin is the "New Boy" and still forming it's position in the marketplace and as such it would be no bad thing for it to be linked with Green Electricity. Because of it's particular needs for low price electricity Hydo is used by some, but I suspect the overall percentage is low.

Rich

why bitcoin should go green when bank system and other industry are consuming even more, much more than bitcoin which is self sustaining netowrk without any waste actually, because the consumption reflect the value of the coin in soem way, and encourage a faster need of efficiency

while in others sectors there is a much big net waste of electricity?

Thanks talks_cheep, That's exactly what i was referring to. A system which is able to verifiably produce 0 carbon coins. "Green Bitcoins" if you will. That is something i could get behind, feel good about, and would pay a little more for. I'm sure the technical aspect of it is unfathomable but its a neat concept to think about. I keep hearing people say "excess hydro energy" like that is a thing. Hydro is renewable, sustainable to a point and true its 10,000% better than coal or natural gas, but it is not a green technology, sure its a greener option than almost every other power plant sized operation but it still has a lot of environmental impact, if it didn't you would not have to spend millions on environmental impact reports prior to getting approval to build one. Even the smallest run-of-the-mill hydro plants still emit between 0.01 and 0.03 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour. Again its better than almost every other option we have besides solar or wind which are not grid ready technologies until we have created grid level storage solutions, but excess hydro electricity is not ever excess and does not really exist, and it does not come without a cost. Just because they can produce more power than they need at a given time does not mean that that extra power is excess or without environmental costs in the form of carbon emissions.  Still i would be more prone to buy bitcoin i knew was generated off hydro than out of some kids closet in the middle of So-Cal powered by the Mojave fossil power plants.

You're misunderstanding. He's referring not only to green servers running a mining pool software, but also green miners' green mining gear.

Seriously, what? The things burning the electricity are the miners. A pool is simply some server running somewhere that probably uses some ridiculous fraction of the energy of the miners that submit work to the pool. All in all the server probably pulls less than 500 watts. A single new S7 is 1293 watts. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you are saying....

For perspective - a SINGLE dam on the Columbia River (of the appx. 10 owned between Chelan, Douglass, and Grant counties) generates well over 2000 Megawatts of electricity.

257 Megawatts compared to human power consumption as a whole is trivially small - and SOME of that usage replaces "space heating" power/fuel usage for at least part of the year for most of us home miners and to some small degree for commmercial miners.


 I suspect most major farms are running "green" through power from various hydroelectric projects around the world - specifically including at least some and possibly ALL of the major Chinese farms.


 MOST major industrial powers burn a fair bit of coal for power generation, as hydro and wind are NOT PRACTICAL for many areas.



 It's been moving that way for a long time now. Every new ASIC generation has been quite a bit more efficient than the generation before it.
 The down side is more folks have gotten involved, moving the target higher every time they add hashrate to the network....

Glad to hear your mined coins are green. I would be interested to see if there is a way to annotate in the block chain coins that are generated on green power.

Agreed about China, If I had not unplugged my little 10 TH/s farm a few months back i would for sure after thinking of it in that light point my miners to somewhere more green.

Would be great to see a "Green-Pool" open up somewhere for green miners mining on a green hosted pool, generating 0 carbon coins. That's something I could get behind, if I still mined I might even pay a % premium to the pool to further invest in ways to track true green coins through the block chain.

Yeah bitcoin mining is destroying the planet.  no doubt about it.  its what most bitcoin users want, no? not me, though, I hedge that by heating my garage with my miner, and all my electricity is produced with hydro-electric. 

Seems China is burning coal, which is bad for the planet as a whole...so just another good reason to point your miners elsewhere than f2pool or antpool

I appreciate your contribution to the discussion, unfortunately i cannot reply to your bullet points without either A: sounding like i am calling you an idiot and a troll. or B: getting into a multi-page battle of semantics.

To be clear i am neither calling you an idiot or a troll in any fashion as i am sure you are neither, or maybe you are and that was your point. Either way I just cannot reply to what you wrote without it seeming like that is what i am doing. So respectfully i must myself opt not to reply directly to your issues or comments for want of being a civil grown ass man that does not need to behave in such fashion, and to settle the later, 90% of conversations involving bitcoin turn in to a battle of semantics and result in nothing more productive than littering the world wide web with more bytes of useless garbage that has to be stored on a disc drive somewhere. Needless to say, i will not contribute to semantically driven conversations or arguments.

My apologies for not directly addressing your issues. It is a no win situation for me if i would have even attempted.

I have a number of issues/comments with the above discussion.  

1) A GWh (Gigawatt hour) is a unit of Energy.  A watt is a unit of power.  As has already been mentioned it is totally incorrect to say things like "Per Month: = 185.58 GWh (yeah that's Gigawatts)".  

It is like saying my 500 watt electric heater used 100 kilowatt hours of electricity last month (yeah that's thousands of watts).

2) There seems to be an assumption that Bitcoin mining should be more electrically efficient.  But the very process of Bitcoin mining is fundamentally about turning electricity into Bitcoins.   That is what Bitcoin mining is about.  Some Alt coins work differently but Bitcoin mining is about electrical consumption.

Electricity cost is likely to settle at about 40% of the cost of mining.  Currently about a 1.5 million dollars of Bitcoins are mined a day. So it would be logical that stability is reached when 500,000 dollars worth of electricity is used per day for Bitcoin mining.  At say 0.05 cents per KWh this means current mining would stabilize at about 400 Megawatts or 10 MWh per day.  So the estimate of 6 MWh above seems reasonable and is not unexpected.

Of course total mining electrical consumption will change next year after the bitcoins per mined block halves. Electrical consumption  will also rise and fall in proportion to the value of a Bitcoin. If transaction fees ever become significant they will also increase electrical consumption.

It is of interest that the amount of electrical power used does not depend on the actual miner hashing efficiency as any improvement is cancelled by a resulting difficulty change.  

3) The environment impact is not clearcut as much (most?) of the Bitcoin mining is done in areas with surplus hydro power, for example Western China or Washington state or Sweden.  Geothermal power is used in Iceland.  Hydro plants are often a long way from the users and have considerable surplus capacity when first built.  They like customers with a constant power draw who can located next to the generators.  Bitcoin farms just want large amounts of cheap reliable power and can easily relocate almost anywhere.

Just for comparison the 3 Gorges Dam in China has a power output of 22,600 Megawatts.  So the total world Bitcoin mining represents about 2% of the 3 Gorges Dam electrical capacity.   Or to use a US comparison, total world Bitcoin mining is equivalent to about 8% of the Washington state Grand Coulee dam capacity.