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Bitcoin Earth Power The Almighty Buck

Vast Energy Use of Bitcoin Criticized (bbc.com) 312

The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has calculated that Bitcoin's total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours, reports the BBC: The UK's electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the CCAF's best guess for Bitcoin. And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources. The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels....

We can track how much effort miners are making to create the currency. They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second — that's 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering. And this vast computational effort is the cryptocurrency's Achilles heel, says Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomist website and an expert on Bitcoin. All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren't really doing any useful work. "They're computations that serve no other purpose," says de Vries, "they're just immediately discarded again. Right now we're using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy."

The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues. "If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [U.S.] Federal budget to spend on electricity."

"We'd have to double our global energy production," he says with a laugh. "For Bitcoin."

Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chief economist at the IMF, tells the BBC that Bitcoin exists almost solely as a vehicle for speculation, rather than as a stable store of value that can be easily exchanged.

When asked if the Bitcoin bubble is about to burst, he answers, "That's my guess." Then pauses and adds, "But I really couldn't tell you when."
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Vast Energy Use of Bitcoin Criticized

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  • by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @12:39PM (#61108610)

    That environmental organizations like greenpeace would be all over this

    • Apparently, at the very least Greenpeace Russia has criticized Bitcoin's energy use. [equaltimes.org]
    • All over where? How do you hang a banner off a bitcoin? What publicity do you get scaling the side of an unassuming building with a few computers inside? There's no corporate logo infront of which you can dump a welded shut container with your staff inside. There's rocks you drop into bitcoins ocean, no cables you can dangle in front of its fleet. No selfies you can take with large cooling towers (which ironically are usually the greenest components of all the things they demonstrate against).

      Greenpeace has

  • Indeed. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @12:47PM (#61108644)

    Here's a couple of good Twitter threads [twitter.com] by Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) about what Bitcoin's energy use (with an earlier one further down below).

    *** TRIGGER WARNING The Bitcoin boosters might want to avert their eyes! *** (but really, why are you even reading this story then?)

    Let's discuss the environmental cost of bitcoin. Because despite all the push for sustainable and green investment in the tech sector, there's a giant smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Silicon Valley which a lot of investors would prefer you remain quiet about. Thread (1/)

    TLDR on bitcoin economics: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do. [references earlier thread, also down below] (2/)

    That alone is sufficiently awful on its own merits, but on top of this the environmental damages of bitcoin are enough to make even Greta Thunberg weep at the pointless waste of it all. (3/)

    The underlying technology of bitcoin is based on the notion of "mining", a technical term for a process that keeps the network running and processing transactions. (4/)

    I won't cover the details of the algorithm, suffice it to say the premise of bitcoin mining is to prove how much power you can waste, and the more power you can waste, the more tokens you can probabilistically secure in exchange for your energy waste. (5/)

    And so people have set up entire warehouses of computer hardware dedicated to run 24/7 consuming power and performing the trial computations required by the protocol. Globally this consumes *nation state* levels of energy to keep it all running. (6/)

    Bitcoin mining is essentially a fucked up version of Candy Crush where you solve puzzles for coins, except the coins go to buy darknet fentanyl, launder money for warlords and provide gambling for hedge fund managers. (7/)

    And the scale of this waste has some scary numbers attached to it. A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment. (8/)

    The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several *million* US households. WolframAlpha gives some scary comparisons to help you relate to how much energy this is (think nuclear weapons). (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=77.78+terrawatt+hours [wolframalpha.com])(9/)

    Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste. It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost. (10/)

    In addition to the energy waste and CO2 emitted, the mining process itself requires constant replacement of hardware and produces a steady stream of waste from broken and exhausted computer parts. All of which are full of toxins and rare earth metals. (11/)

    The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482,456 people living at the German standard. (12/)

    Try to imagine a future where paying for your morning coffee involved smashing an iPhone and burning enough fossil fuels to run your entire household for 60 days. That's the environmental cost of the "revolutionary" technology behind #Bitcoin in a nutshell. (13/)

    Climate scientists have estimated that #Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2C. And this is just one of *hundreds* of other cryptocurrency networks that run on this apocalyptically wasteful set of ideas. (14/) (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 [nature.com])

    Cli

    • Before ArchieBunker asks [slashdot.org] again [slashdot.org] for more info:

      The Crypto-Chernobyl [stephendiehl.com]

      In recent history the mining, petroleum, and nuclear industries have all had their share of environmental disasters. These are household names that every school child learns: Chernobyl. Fukushima. Deepwater. Kingston. Valdez. However you may not know that as you read this, the tech industry is having its own environmental disaster moment and you may have heard its name: Bitcoin.

      For those of you living in a monastery for the last decade,

  • Bitcoin mining --> coal power plants --> radioactive cesium in its smoke --> cancer for everyone in its vicinity

  • And yes Bitcoin is so distributed over the world and yet so insignificant that you need to compare it to Argentine.

    And this is why Fridays For Future ignores BTC .. they are smart and focus on the big targets minor improvements on big targets are easier and have a much greater impact than big improvements on little targets.

    And anybody who wants to successfully tackle climate change - focus and not let your focus be distracted:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Btw. The Bitcoin bubble is bursting right now

  • Units (Score:2, Interesting)

    by swillden ( 191260 )

    Does anyone else find it odd to use TWh/year as a unit? Since we're talking about (on average) continuous consumption, why wouldn't you just use watts (with an appropriate prefix).

    The UK uses 35 GW and Bitcoin consumes between 4.5 GW and 51 GW, with a central estimate of 15 GW, for those who prefer less-silly units.

    • It's a little strange, but the times hour/year actually serves a purpose. We commonly measure residential electrical consumption in kWh, so keeping it in those units per year makes it easier to compare. Even the government does this with energystar ratings (they base their standards on: "On average, consumer refrigerators, refrigerator-freezers, and freezers consume 384 kWh, 588 kWh, and 555 kWh per year, respectively.") See also, we could use horsepower, but that's not intuitive.

      • See also, we could use horsepower, but that's not intuitive.

        Even horses switched to the metric system years ago ...

        • Really? Clocks and calendars too?
        • And the metric unit system measurement for residential energy consumption is kWh/year. You didn't like that.

          • And why should anyone like that?

            Energy consumption should be measured in Joules. Which, oddly enough, TWh/year reduces to nicely. Just slap a prefix (Tera/Giga/Mega/Kilo etc) on the joules number, and you're golden.

            I've always wondered why SI users can't use the SI units as designed....

    • It is a pretty common metric, just like [k|M|T]Wh/[day|month]; it is energy per reference period of time and not power. Specific to Bitcoin, I doubt the power over the course of a year is consistent— it should vary significantly with the price of Bitcoin.

      The one that gets me for some reason is when they do similar things with BTu.

  • Why oh why hasn't anyone pointed this out before?!

    • It has been, frequently, but as we reach the final few million BTC being generated the amount of computational power has increased considerably. When BTC first came into being you could mine it with a basic entry level laptop at a rate of coin generation that today requires a rack of dedicated miners sucking up several KWh to achieve.
  • SETI@home (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @01:07PM (#61108704)

    Imagine if SETI@home got the same amount of computing power. Or the protein folding project.

    • Re:SETI@home (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @01:53PM (#61108866)

      SETI@Home with this amount of computer power behind it would have achieved about as much as bitcoin has in making the world a better place. In all the years they have nothing to show for it, much in the same way that bitcoin is not a currency and doesn't generate any value.

      Folding@home on the other hand is using the computing power for something that actually benefits society. Their results are large enough that they categorise them by year: https://foldingathome.org/pape... [foldingathome.org]

      • SETI@Home with this amount of computer power behind it would have achieved about as much as bitcoin has in making the world a better place. In all the years they have nothing to show for it, much in the same way that bitcoin is not a currency and doesn't generate any value.

        Ya, but having something to show for it or not was part of SETI's mission, so *not* detecting anything provides some useful data. Granted, not nearly as exciting as detecting something, but still useful from a scientific standpoint.

      • True. Sad but true, regarding s@h. But, to add to fafhrd's comment, "absence of evidence is not..." etc. It added an incredible amount of data points, one could say, to one or more variables of the Drake equation.

        As for worth to humanity, debatable of course: but what if there had been a hit?

        PS: thanks for the reminder on f@h. I gave it up a while back, but now I have a better performing comp and I'm not as concerned about the electric bill atm.

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      There are some cryptocurrencies that use useful computations as their proof of work.

    • Imagine if SETI@home got the same amount of computing power. Or the protein folding project.

      Protein folding has actually been "solved" and it wasn't solved due to excessive amounts of computing power. As a result, we will soon be able to compute protein folding rapidly.

      Sadly, the SETI project still wouldn't have discovered anything due to the scope of the search.

    • by Rinikusu ( 28164 )

      I can't speak for anyone else, but when bitcoin first came out it was being discussed on the folding and seti teams I contributed to. I know I was kinda disgusted that people would throw CPU cycles away for something as "crude" as a digital currency, but we did lose quite a few folks over to it. Anyway, eventually I shut my small farm down and these days wished I had thrown some weight into BTC for awhile. It certainly would've paid off, but I'm not sure I'd have been happy these days with the consequences.

  • I have no idea why the governments of the world (for the most part) have not not realized or acted on the fact that the vast majority of the actual use of cryptocurrency as a currency is for illegal purposes.

    For example, cocaine cartels used to move large quantities of money around with pallets of Benjamins, obviously with very high transportation costs and risk of interception. Now? They send an encrypted e-mail, and most likely while connected to a no-log VPN. The narcotics trade was an early adopter. Oth

  • if we'd say "almost half the UK" instead of "all of Argentina's" usage. At least in American. You'd be shocked how many Americans don't think anyone in South America has electricity...
  • by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @01:15PM (#61108746)
    1) The hash rate for bitcoin is easy to look up. The computational power of the latest mining rigs is easy to look up. You then do a simple division to get the power consumption.
    2)Miners will only mine if it is profitable. So the amount of money spent on mining is always going to be less than the block reward.
    3) Bitcoin can never be used as a global currency. It is limited to just under 7 transactions a second (4000 per block, on block every 600 seconds). VISA can do 15000/second last time I checked.
    • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @02:17PM (#61108934) Homepage Journal

      The issue with item 2 is that profitable can be relative if the miner can figure out how to externalize part of the cost.

      Selling $1000 worth of stuff to a fence for $100 is profitable mainly because it's not your stuff. If you include the externalized costs, it's a net destruction of value.

  • Merge the project with Boinc, seti@home or Folding@home or something. Doing useless computations is just so damn stupid.
  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @01:47PM (#61108836) Journal
    ..of cancerous shit that needs to be destroyed, like 'social media', so-called shitty half-assed 'AI' crap, 'IoT' nonsense, and so-called 'self-driving cars'. All cancerous, all need to be utterly destroyed.
  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @02:13PM (#61108924)

    All you need to do is place a "carbon" tax on energy produced using fossil fuels that will grow annually until it's too costly to produce pollution for energy. Will this decrease computations for Bitcoin? Yes but only temporarily until the price of electricity subsides again as everything will become renewable fuels.

    Politicians are fully aware they have the power to do this but are willing the sacrifice the future to save their own hides.

  • As much as I hate taxes, this is one place that they need to be applied to. Auto companies pay insane amount of money for Carbon Tax but we as a society let this activity produce way more carbon than cars do. It is ridiculous.
  • by remoteshell ( 1299843 ) on Sunday February 28, 2021 @03:44PM (#61109168)
    Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin
  • The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues. "If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [U.S.] Federal budget to spend on electricity."

    Err, Bitcoins transaction rate and the energy it uses aren't connected in any way. The fact Bitcoin hit it's max transaction rate a long time ago, but the energy use keeps going up should of

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