According to a press release carried by Eurekalert
In the first rigorously peer-reviewed article quantifying Bitcoin's energy requirements, a Commentary appearing May 16 in the journal Joule, financial economist and blockchain specialist Alex de Vries uses a new methodology to pinpoint where Bitcoin's electric energy consumption is headed and how soon it might get there.
The abstract of the article says
The Bitcoin network can be estimated to consume at least 2.55 gigawatts of electricity currently, and potentially 7.67 gigawatts in the future, making it comparable with countries such as Ireland (3.1 gigawatts) and Austria (8.2 gigawatts). [...]
The author offers a caveat:
[...] all of the methods discussed assume rational agents. There may be various reasons for an agent to mine even when this isn't profitable, and in some cases costs may not play a role at all when machines and/or electricity are stolen or abused.
[Other] reasons for an agent to mine Bitcoin at a loss might include [...] being able to obtain Bitcoin completely anonymously, libertarian ideology [...] or speculative reasons.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 21 2018, @02:37PM (3 children)
Two and small change.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by broggyr on Monday May 21 2018, @03:32PM
Not sure about this. The DeLorean time circuits use 1.21 jiggawatts, not gigawatts.
Taking things out of context since 1972.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @05:08PM (1 child)
Car analogies:
Current BTC usage estimate-
2.55 gigawatts = 3419606 hp
If an average car can produce 150 hp (peak power), this takes 22797 cars, all going full throttle.
Future estimate-
7.67 gigawatts = 10286000 (~ten million) hp
For the same average car, this takes 68573 cars, all going full throttle.
According to Wikipedia, there were 263.6 million registered vehicles in the United States in 2015. Of course most of them were not running at any given time (except perhaps during rush hours).
Looking wider, US publisher Ward's estimates that as of 2010 there were 1.015 billion motor vehicles in use in the world. This figure represents the number of cars; light, medium and heavy duty trucks; and buses, but does not include off-road vehicles or heavy construction equipment.
I'll leave it to someone else to produce estimates based on more realistic power levels, as used in normal driving (most of the time is not at full power.) Even with this adjustment, BTC is only a fraction of the power being used on ground vehicle transportation.
(Score: 2) by EETech1 on Monday May 21 2018, @10:31PM
Or about 50 large container ships!
At least they are not burning bunker fuel to mine BTC (yet)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @02:39PM (2 children)
Learn something new every day!
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday May 21 2018, @03:12PM (1 child)
Don't they just use two really large potatoes and a couple of nails? That is all the powers they are ever going to need plus it is 100% green spudpower!
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday May 21 2018, @11:03PM
I prefer 2 really large lemons thank you. They smell fresher too!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Monday May 21 2018, @02:40PM (18 children)
It is a great missed opportunity that bitcoin was not implemented in a way that those computations perform some beneficial service (eg. SETI@home, Folding@Home, LHC@home, etc. - things that would benefit from massive distributed computation power....)
Perhaps it is too difficult to secure, or technically impossible, or maybe it just wasn't worth it for a project that noone really though would catch hold like it has, but it has always seemed like a colossal waste to me.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @03:15PM (2 children)
Proof? The fact that Bitcoin is currently existing sustainably.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Monday May 21 2018, @06:39PM (1 child)
Is it really? What if there is no social benefit at all to blockchain currencies?
Does effort and electricity mindlessly invested into securing something of no actual value to society really yield anything?
Tiger repelling talismans could be said to provide as much social benefit (employment). They seem to be very effective.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @07:13PM
Social benefit is impossible to calculate. What was the net social impact of the Dutch Tulip market?
Anybody (living outside the actual Tiger stalking grounds) can see that Tigers aren't a serious threat; other more ephemeral threats like Cthulhu might actually need more talismans, if only you can get people to believe...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Monday May 21 2018, @05:20PM (6 children)
I'd guess the energy wasted due to DRM measures is much larger than the Bitcoin energy usage. Did anyone ever attempt to calculate how much energy is used up by that?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @07:16PM (5 children)
No, DRM wastes less actual energy - more legal discourse and advertising - the cost in peoples' time wasted for DRM is enormous, but the complete lack of actual security offered by DRM renders it quite energy efficient as compared to bitcoin. I think this was in the premise of the DMCA - they knew it would be broken, and so made the difficulty of breaking it a moot point.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:02AM
Are you calculating calorific energy into that?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 22 2018, @06:06AM (3 children)
DRM means that any time you play something protected with it, you have to do an otherwise unnecessary decryption step. You do so whenever you view a DVD or BluRay, whenever you watch a Netflix or Amazon Prime stream etc. That certainly consumes extra energy.
It doesn't matter for energy consumption whether it is secure or not; all that matters is that extra computations have to be done.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 22 2018, @11:56AM (2 children)
Compare the extra energy of a BluRay decryption to a BTC hashing node... the hashing node is 99.9+% burning energy for POW nonce computation - the BluRay might burn 0.1% of its total energy on decryption. Multiplied by a few hundred million BluRay players in operation it is significant, but it's not the core operation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday May 22 2018, @07:02PM (1 child)
It doesn't matter if it is the core operation. What matters is what difference it makes in absolute terms.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 22 2018, @07:10PM
In absolute terms, the production, promotion and distribution of the media that is DRM protected is much larger, in absolute terms, than the sham of a crypto algorithm that is used. What is the fuel cost of a single live U2 concert? Not just for the band and stage crew to arrive, but for the concertgoers, the fractional costs of construction and maintenance costs of the stadium and supporting infrastructure including airports, aircraft, roads, vehicles, hotels, restaurants, etc.?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday May 21 2018, @07:00PM (3 children)
Alternatively, there ought to be a way to get that same amount of electricity BACK by burning a Bitcoin.
The above statement suggests that bitcoins are simply and totally an utter waste of time, money, and electricity.
But if you could pump $150,000 worth of electricity back into the grid by burning $10,000 worth of bitcoins things would be radically improved. (And the value of bitcoins would rise even farther. Even assuming some friction loss in such system, it would be a vast improvement over generating NEW electricity.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @07:09PM (2 children)
Nope, there's some law of Thermodynamics about that one. Bitcoin: accelerating the heat-death of the Universe. If this is the future of money, it explains why we've never met an Alien race.
Not really, it's just pointing our how the Chinese, with cheap electricity and massive ASIC farms, can mine Bitcoin profitably in the current market, while Westerners misapplying their outdated technology cannot.
You're not talking about Bitcoins, you're talking about the Tesla Powerwall.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday May 21 2018, @09:39PM (1 child)
So award PowerCoins for the installation of power walls.
Or award KenetiCoins for hauling trainloads of heavy shit high up mountains, so that they can be rolled back down, generating electricity all they way.
Assure the continued value of these crytocurrencies by awarding some of the revenue generated by selling electricity.
Just Do SOMETHING that isn't a total waste of energy.
Wasting gas, hydro, or wind power generating a Bitcoin by doing useless work, yielding something that is not even worth the cost of the resources invested, is just pointless, wanton waste. Talk about Externalizing costs!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @10:09PM
I don't think it's exactly externalizing costs - it is shaping up to be the Great Soap Bubble Pyramid of our age, and while it is definitely wanton waste - it has a point: the point is to attract ever more investors to the base of the pyramid so those higher up can fly off in their Lambroghinis. (Yes, I know how to spell Lamborghini, but I think for the BTC glitterati, the embedded "bro" is much more appropriate.)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @07:05PM
There have been proposals for "proof of research" replacements for Bitcoin's "proof of work," but, somehow, they lack the market appeal of something that has an 8 year track record of 160% CAGR.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday May 21 2018, @07:35PM
Curecoin
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday May 21 2018, @11:07PM
Yes, as it was originally implement, but doesn't mean it can't be updated to do so. Other blockchain techs are looking at replacing the original proof of work validation with other implementations, i.e. proof of stake, etc.. Someone just have to be more creative that's all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @09:44AM
It looks like a scam with the flashy website, but the basic idea behind the network is pretty cool, and if it works out and isn't completely traceable, then it provides beneficial use of the hardware while also offering currency production.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @02:52PM (8 children)
Apparently a little less than 1700 TWh is wasted on IT per year:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320225452_Total_Consumer_Power_Consumption_Forecast [researchgate.net]
Now think about all the servers, phones, computers, etc using that energy. If I go to the cell.com page to read this article I downloaded 1.7 MB worth of stuff. However when copying the article text and saving it to disk it is only 22 KB. So that page is ~99% fluff, and its a pretty light page (eg cnn.com is ~ 5 mb). So just trying to use the internet to get basic info about something leads to wasting 99% of the energy.
Other stuff going on on the internet like playing stupid games, looking at pron, sending selfies to each other, serving ads, blocking ads, etc is completely unnecessary. So it seems to be the case that almost all that energy being used by IT devices is going to waste.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 21 2018, @03:06PM (5 children)
Looking at pr0n is not a waste.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday May 21 2018, @03:10PM (4 children)
Every sperm is sacred.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday May 21 2018, @03:15PM (2 children)
Perhaps he is watching for the awesome acting and the deep and meaningful stories?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 21 2018, @03:23PM (1 child)
Shit no. I'm watching for the naked chicks. Being able to see boobies on demand is something I value quite a bit though, thus not a waste.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @05:03PM
I think that gets to the real issue here. Some people just don't like bitcoin or have some kind of trading scheme so they came up with this energy-usage concern trolling.
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 21 2018, @03:25PM
I shudder to think how holy my bedroom trashcan was as a teenager.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 21 2018, @03:10PM
194 gigawatts across the year, less than 10% of global electricity use, comprising of multiple industries that underpin advanced economies. According to the Global Scope slide, it includes all client devices, including TVs and game consoles, as well as data centers and production facilities. Not merely inefficient and redundant networking.
At least the carbon footprint of blocking ads is less than displaying them. And browsers can cache bulky scripts after loading them.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @07:48PM
Not exactly, there's a high baseline of energy usage that's not correlated with bytes of data transfer, but... point well made nonetheless.
Bitcoin is pretty frugal with bytes stored in the blockchain, but Bitcoin Cash aims to change all that...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by FakeBeldin on Monday May 21 2018, @04:04PM
First? The very first?? Let me google that for you.
Oh lookey here: Sustainability of bitcoin and blockchains [sciencedirect.com], by Harald Vranken, October 2017 (and available online since May 2017). So it's scooped by about a year.
That's really not the first rigorously peer-reviewed article on this subject by a long shot.
Let's look at the journals:
- Alex de Vries: Joule, volume 2, issue 5.
- Harald Vranken: Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, volume 28.
So the later article appeared in a rather new journal (only 2 volumes). I don't see how being new makes your journal significantly better at peer review.
Frankly, I don't think there's necessarily a correlation - but I suspect that many bogus journals exist. And getting a reputation as a journal doesn't happen overnight. So for new journals, I would be highly skeptical about the quality of the journal.
So yeah, on any reasonable metric, this news fails.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @05:28PM (5 children)
One thing that studies of this type seem to miss is the totality of cryptocurrency energy consumption. Ethereum is running a close second to Bitcoin (I think I saw them listed as using the same amount of energy as Switzerland and Austria....) and this doesn't even start to scratch the wider realm of alt-coins.
If we proposed a global lottery that burned 10,000 tons of coal per day alongside a zero-net-sum parimutuel betting pool on some aspect of how that coal burned, what kind of reaction do you think we'd get?
http://extraconversion.com/energy/tonnes-of-coal-equivalent/tonnes-of-coal-equivalent-to-gigawatt-hours.html [extraconversion.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @05:46PM (2 children)
Who is proposing this? Eg, I imagine very different responses if Obama proposed it vs Trump proposing it.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @07:02PM (1 child)
While I agree that the response would be different, the result would be very similar: it's a non-starter of a proposal.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @11:00PM
Not necessarily, you can make an environmental argument that by burning the coal in this way it is cleaner than how it would have otherwise been burned (eg in china) thus reducing the total amount of pollution. On the other side you can argue it is just "trolling the libtards" on a worldwide scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal [wikipedia.org]
On both sides you can argue that this project will create new jobs. Combined with partisan politics and splitting up the project amongst many places, I'm sure 40-50% of people could be convinced to get behind this idea.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 21 2018, @07:05PM (1 child)
People shit on high frequency trading all the time, but the financial markets aren't going away any time soon.
10 kilotons of coal converted to methanol wouldn't even power one percent of the cars of the commuters in the financial biz.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @07:24PM
Assuming your average commuter burns 2 gallons of fuel per day, you're giving the financial biz credit for having over 100 million commuters.
One ton of coal = about 11,000 horsepower hours, or ~222 gallons of gasoline. 10Ktons -> 1,110,000 2 gallon commuters.
https://www.convertunits.com/from/gallons+of+gasoline/to/tonne+of+coal+equivalent [convertunits.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 21 2018, @07:21PM (5 children)
I was motivated enough to pull the US Mint 2017 annual report and glance at its 68 pages and amid much financial hand waving the overall annual budgeting authority is $2.3B depending on precise gesture of handwaving.
If the numbers in the unaudited yet peer reviewed paper are correct, then thats somewhat over a hundred billion bucks of electricity to run bitcoin.
Of course the whole point of bitcoin is its worldwide not US-wide. And the bitcoin price is "all inclusive" total systemic cost of a currency whereas the US Mint outsources practically all costs of using a currency. And bitcoin market is much smaller.
Given these wild ass engineering estimates, I'd say a world run on bitcoin would cost about the same as current regime currency costs. Its not gonna be a million times more expensive, or a million times cheaper.
Its very difficult to get a straight answer of how many bank retail legacy brick and mortar branches there are in the world. There are maybe 30K bank companies worldwide but some are paper or very small, yet some have at least 5K branches worldwide. The BLS claims there's a hair over half a million bank teller employees in the USA as of 2016, figure maybe ten tellers per average branch, thats 50K branches, the rest of the world economy might be 5 times the size of the USA, wild guess maybe 250K bank branches in the world. 2.55 gigawatts divided by 250K retail bank branches is about 8 kilowatts of electricity per branch, which is probably extremely low for a retail establishment. I suspect the lighting circuits alone exceed 8 KW plus HVAC adds quite a bit and banks have computerized somewhat compared to a century ago, plus telecom loads. Overall bitcoin uses much less electricity than legacy brick and mortar banking, yet is somewhat smaller. Brick and mortar banking is dying, of course, thru the magic of the internet and direct deposit I only go to the bank (well, CU) to deposit old fashioned paper checks. I donno there's always some people there in line when I visit, although not many. In that way, old fashioned in person human teller banking is perhaps not that much larger than bitcoin as a total marketplace, yet uses much less electricity.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @07:28PM (2 children)
You missed an order of magnitude, or four... a single transaction in bitcoin currently consumes the equivalent of $100 in electricity in my neighborhood. If my world ran on bitcoin, a $200 load of groceries would be taking $100 in transaction cost overhead (assuming that the magic security takes care of all the current processing fees, which it won't) as compared the the current $2 that my credit card processor skims out of the transaction.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 21 2018, @08:46PM (1 child)
I would suspect a booming business in the future for fractional reserve bitcoin transactions. And small local altcoins.
I would not be surprised if the future is a patchwork of altcoins and automated middlemen and the altcoins are some variation on fractional reserve or full reserve banking.
The entire world MIGHT need to sign that there's a major international trade agreement, but expecting the whole world to sign my bag of lettuce yesterday afternoon is unlikely in the future. On the other hand my local regional 16 store supermarket chain might have a coin signed at every store and the "real" bitcoin market is only contacted occasionally to keep in sync. That might be too small. My credit union belongs to a union of credit unions such that I get free ATM use at a ridiculous number of ATMs, and that union of credit unions could have an alt-coin of their own, to run maybe 25% of the economy of one major metropolitan area. Big (fee) banks like wells fargo have thousands of retail sites, I could see them having an alt-coin all their own.
If you want the entire world to sign your financial transaction, its gonna cost, but merely having 100s of metro area credit unions sign is actually quite cheap.
Something not often discussed is watt/MIP and $/MIP have been improving for a long time plus or minus Moore's Law ending soon, etc. So much as my first desktop computer in '81 had 16K of memory compared to my 32G desktop today, possibly the cost of bitcoin in energy terms will drop in 40 years to "nothing". Unlikely but possible.
Another interesting way to measure the power consumption is looking at solar power; if the planet were covered by a mesh of solar powered bitcoin nodes, its not really a problem as long as enough are in sunlight at any given time. Nobody really cares how much electricity it would take to generate light using LED lightbulbs to grow all the worlds corn, although I'm sure it would be a huge power draw if it were tried. Often when discussing solar powered computation you get complaints its impossible 24x7 blah blah blah, well clustering software simply transfers load where there's sunlight, and zero power bill means the software dev cost is irrelevantly low.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @09:34PM
Proof of work is some self fulfilling prophesy as far as cost vs value... Whatever mining "costs" is about what miners will be willing to mine (or transactors are willing to transact, if you will) for the built-in reward of doing the operation. I read somewhere (terribly reliable, I'm sure) that BTC miners "produced" $8B in BTC over some 12 month period, and spent ~$3.5B in electrical power costs to do so. This entirely neglects the cost of mining hardware, housing for said mining hardware, labor to install and maintain, internet connection costs, etc. So... the "free" market demonstrates its power of balance at scale yet again: as long as (speculative idiot) investors are paying $10K/BTC, mining will ramp up to grab that cash - nearly to the breakeven point. And, due to the scaling difficulty feature of the BTC algorithm, there's no end to how much power can be brought online, as long as "investors" are paying for it.
If we manage to scale back the cost per transaction down to the 1-2% of transaction value range, what have we won? The ability to tell Visa, MasterCard and Amex to F-off? Not really, not for a long time. Sure, you can create blockchain systems that peg the value of a "coin" to a dollar, or euro, or whatever - but that brings the big central figures back into the picture, not to mention regulation and overhead to ensure that the backing funds are appropriately administered, etc. Until that semblance of stability is present, no 16 store supermarket chain is going to accept a "currency" with wild hour-to-hour fluctuations in value vs the products they buy and sell.
I agree, there is a future where widely held cryptographic trust systems replace a lot of what "money" does today, but I do not agree that proof of work (mass hashing of nonces to regulate publication speed) is part of that future. Even if watt/MIP and $/MIP fall through the floor, that will just drive the POW complexity requirements upwards - it's peoples' behavior that's driving the cost of proof of work, not the cost-complexity of the work itself.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @07:30PM
Waste of time and gas, I've been mailing my paper checks to the CU since I started earning them in the 1980s. Miraculously, the post office hasn't lost a single one yet.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:53AM
I myself only go to the ATM when otherwise I would be totally screwed.
There's always two tellers at my credit union, sometimes three. They're all really happy to see me because quite likely I'm the only live human to set foot in their branch all day.
This despite their free coffee in plain view from outside their door.
While I use Amazon to read reviews, I buy local to the extent I possibly can. And if I really do have to order online, despite reading amazon's reviews I make my actual purchases at some other site.
"Live simply that others may simply live."
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @09:32PM (1 child)
http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-much-electricity-disappears-between-a-power-plant-and-your-plug/ [insideenergy.org]
That's about 20 and 6440 TWh per year (2.3 and 735 GW per year) that is lost in the US alone due to energy generation and transmission inefficiencies. The US uses about 1/6 the world's electricity ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption [wikipedia.org] ) so multiply those numbers by 6.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @09:37PM
Another way of looking at it is that if bitcoin leads to only a twentieth of a percent improvement in efficiency of the worlds electrical grids, it will be worth it.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 21 2018, @10:23PM (2 children)
Sorry, I'm being overly pedantic. But saying it's "Gigawatts" says nothing unless it is describing nothing. Perhaps I should assume that it is GWh being talked about, but to me the slip is more telling about the accuracy of the report than the numbers themselves. And even then I want to know over what timeframe the consumptions are.
Yes, I know cryptocurrency mining speculation gobbles up a disproportionate chunk of world energy. It's a story that should be told.
But this, "we'll guess from the approximate production of chipmaker's facilities for a particular brand of miner and then guess at world electricity average prices and guess at how profitable mining is and apply that percentage to the total cap of Bitcoin and call it good." Well, we can tell this is Economics at work and not a hard science, can't we? ;)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday May 21 2018, @10:25PM (1 child)
Sorry I meant it's saying nothing without a unit measurement applied since power usage is meaningless without describing it over a time period of production and consumption. Actually I just described the same error unintentionally that the author reached academically. (Says nothing unless it is nothing....) Time for bed! :)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday May 22 2018, @01:19AM
Believe me, I know more about Bitcoin than anybody. Bitcoin guys are mining ALL THE TIME. Basically all the time. Because there's new Bitcoins coming out every 10 minutes. Right? So if they stopped mining for even 10 minutes, they'd miss out.
And gigawatts, it's like watts. But bigger. Remember 100 watt light bulbs? Nice and bright. 25 watt, not so bright. Not so nice. 100 is more electricity, it's 4 times as much. Costs more to run. And 2.55 gigawatts is even more. But you don't see 100 watt bulbs anymore. Because Obama banned them. Going to repeal that one!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @12:23AM (1 child)
I am a proponent of free markets, and think generally speaking they are the least-inefficient way of allocating resources currently known to humanity. "Generally" being a key term in the previous sentence, as in specific situations there are better ways. That being said...
This is pretty clearly a good example of why everybody who says that the "invisible hand of the market will solve any problem" is not correct. Bitcoin mining is clearly broken. Case-in-point, if suddenly the number of bitcoin miners were to drop to 10%, the overall system would be identical to it is now (read: provide as much value) but only use 10% of the electricity. Moreover, by any real measure (food grown, beds warmed, clothes made, lives saved, cars manufactured, etc), the productivity of the country of Ireland is more valuable than the market for bitcoins.
No, I don't think this needs to be "fixed." It does demonstrate why "the free market" doesn't solve everything, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 22 2018, @01:26AM
It doesn't seem that you understand the most basic stuff about cryptos. Really, you just have to use them to understand what they are (I don't mean just have a coinbase account).
Lots strange about this. First, who said it wasn't? Are you equating electricity consumption with productivity of a country? Anyway, different people may value different things. Do you think the productivity of Ireland is more important than your access to porn?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:40AM
"The 51% percent hole" enables bad actors to tamper with the blockchain if they have the majority of the hash rate.
Presently 30% of the hash rate is under the control of just five people, all in China.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:45AM
Turned up all the way and running 24/7 even on hot days.
I bought Bitmain's Antminer L3+ because its AP3++ power supply can operate with Truly American 110 volts. The Anminer S9 and Bitmain's other miners all require 220v.
A common friend connected me with someone who's building a mining rig colocation facility in what used to be a weed gro-op. When Colorado legalized The Devil's Plant gro-ops sprouted like mushrooms but many of them closed down because of competition - but fortunately for me an the proprietor of that facility, the gro-ops installed lots of extra electricity before they went tits up.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 22 2018, @02:49AM
A well back The Godless Commies built coal-fired electric plants in many rural areas so as to promote their economies.
But that economic growth never occurred, leaving those power plants with no one to sell their juice to...
... until BitCoin was invented.
China has plenty of coal so these power plants produce really cheap electricity. But even the Communist Party is realizing that the People's Republic Of China has a finite quantity of human lungs.
This recently led the central government to - politely - encourage mining operations to gracefully cease productions.
I know where electricity and cold weather are abundant and cheap, but only the Inuits want to live there: there's a huge hydroelectric plant in Labrador, to the north-east of quebec in Canada.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]