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posted by mrpg on Tuesday November 20 2018, @01:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the too-much dept.

Researchers have calculated, or approximated, the cost of creating bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. Then compared said cryptocurrency costs vs the cost of real actual mining for minerals. Mining bitcoins etc requires more power then most actual mining such as actual gold. An average bitcoin-dollar, or if you will a dollar worth of a bitcoin, is calculated to require about 17 megajoule of energy, while digging up a dollar worth gold requires 5 megajoule. Aluminum is still a lot more expensive then most of the cryptocoins to produce as it requires a massive 122 megajoule to create a dollar worth of.

The Carbon dioxide creation due to cryptocurrencies mining is also estimated to be between 3 and 15 million tonnes, between January 2016 and June 2018. But a Chinese bitcoin emits four times as much CO2 as a Canadian one, so it is highly dependent on the form of energy used. I didn't find any comparable numbers to how much CO2 is created from the production of Aluminum, Gold or other metals.

Quantification of energy and carbon costs for mining cryptocurrencies
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0152-7

Bitcoin Will Burn the Planet Down. The Question: How Fast?
https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-will-burn-planet-down-how-fast/


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 20 2018, @01:08PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday November 20 2018, @01:08PM (#764220)

    There's a market balance at work here: bitcoins are worth about as much as people put into them, from the other side of the bit: people put nearly as much money into bitcoins as they can get out of them.

    Since some people get their energy for cheap, or free (stolen), that drags down on the market value - those people are then willing to sell for less, because it cost them less. Of course, there's an abundant supply of people willing to ignore the future costs of their CO2 emissions, so that doesn't even enter into the crypto-currency valuation equation.

    BTC is only down to $5K, where it was about 13 months ago, and 9x where it was 24 months ago, down from a peak around $20K, still somewhat in the speculative froth. It will be interesting to watch what happens as the market value starts to fall below most miners' costs of production. On the other end of the speculative equation, NVDA is having a very hard time going anywhere but down lately.

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