So in an after class discussion today i brought up bitcoin mining and how it was revolutionizing "transfer of value" or commerce. My professor challenged us to calculate roughly how much energy is consumed per hour, day, month, and year to explain why this was not a sustainable venture. I dont care to speculate about its sustainability but at the end of a few short math problems i quickly realized how much of a problem the bitcoin mining network is and that is what i am here to share / talk about. Please keep on topic with that as the sustainability of the network is of no interest to me and i am really only here to see if there was an aspect or angle of looking at the power consumption that i had not realized.
Now onto the math
At my best calculation the most efficient miner on the market today is the bitmain S7, drawing roughly 1293W + 10% for 4.73 TH/s, for the sake of calculation we are going to assume the entire network is that efficient.
So to start we take 1293W / 4.73 TH/s to calculate that the draw is roughly 273.3W per TH/s
So the network would be running @ a rate of 273.3W per TH/s
According to blockchain.info at the time of writing this, the bitcoin network is running 943,007 TH/s
To calculate the energy draw on the world grid we would then take the network has rate, assume everything was as efficient as the S7 and do the math.
943,007 TH/s X 273.3 W per hour and come up with 257,723,813 Watts per hour, or translated into a more friendly number roughly 257.724 MegaWatts of power per hour.
So to put that in perspective assuming the entire network was as efficient as the S7 again our network consumes:Per hour: = 257.724 Mwh (That is over half the energy produced by the smallest nuclear power plant in the U.S.A)
Per day: = 6,185.376 Mwh or 6.186 GWh (to put this into perspective Gigawatts is the unit of measurement they use for nuclear power plants)
Per Month: = 185.58 GWh (yeah that's Gigawatts)Annually at its current rate as of now the bitcoin network consumes 2226.96 GWh annually. Edited to reflect a mistake in the original math.
THAT IS A SUPER SCARY AMOUNT OF ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION AND A METRIC-FUCK-TON OF A LOT OF FOSSIL FUEL CONSIDERING A MINUTE SEGMENT OF THE WORLDS ENERGY IS GREEN.
Now, with that being said, my math might be a little off, there might be a few factors I did not account for as i am not a big bitcoin fanatic like most of the members on this site, but none the less at surface value these numbers are a close guess i know. Knowing that the bulk of the network is not up to the S7's efficiency standard, i know that even if my math was a high calculation that the true numbers are in the ballpark i estimated or higher.
Let's have a civil discussion about this and as a group see how close to a true calculation we can come up with, and maybe speculate a little about what we could do to help combat this problem.
NOTE: THIS IS A SELF MODERATED TOPIC, THERE WILL BE NO ARGUING, RUDENESS, TROLLING OR OFF TOPIC GARBAGE HERE, LETS ALL BE GROWN UP'S AND HAVE A CIVIL, CONSTRUCTIVE DISCUSSION. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE SOMETHING USEFUL OR INSIGHTFUL TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE DISCUSSION THEN PLEASE MOVE ON AND SAVE ME FROM MODERATING