Bitcoin's Growing Energy Problems

Well what do you except when there are only a few companies that make miners in the first place. Now if intel or amd would get off there asses and work on making some miners that use low power, things would be awesome. The problem is intel and amd think there is no money in that market. I'm not talking about GPU's I'm talking about asic's. Apparrently 3 to 4 Billion in profit is not enough. Thats how much bitmain has made.
 
Do research on the entire process of printing money, and the network infrastructure of the financial system that runs world currencies today. You're not going to find a single article. Things like this take study, not being handed out a single article.
t sounds good it makes you feel content with yourself, right? Only it's not true when you do an actual comparison not based on thin air. Just look at how many money transactions are made in the financial system. Then look at how much energy is required to process one bitcoin transaction. Then do a simple multiplication. As it turns out with a conservative estimate it would take about 150.000 gigawatts of energy / day if all those transactions were in bitcion. Yes that's one hundred and fifty thousand gigawatts of energy daily.
 
I do a bit of coin mining. In the winter it helps heat my home and make money. In the spring through fall, I mine in the same room as my hybrid water heater. The heat pump pulls the heat out of the air to heat up water for my home. Not the most efficient but definitely good. It think if this market really matures, people need to get smart and take advantage of the heat produced. Small scale is easier to take advantage of than large scale.
 
I once read that a single Google search requires enough electricity to run a light bulb for a few hours. It seems like all tech uses too much electricity if you account for the entire infrastructure required.
 
I once read that a single Google search requires enough electricity to run a light bulb for a few hours. It seems like all tech uses too much electricity if you account for the entire infrastructure required.
I once read the Loch Ness monster is real and alive!

Its best to research a dubious point to be sure of it before posting.
The internet is in front of you.
 
what about all the servers that have to stay online to keep the financial system and banks online to make standard money valid and all the plants that die and fuel for farm equipment to process them and chemicals used to make paper money and fuel to transport the raw materials and what about the mining of metals to make coins then the fuel used to move all that money around. that's alot of not only electricity but oil burned to keep standard money system going.

just sayin

....

After clearly disproving the argument you come back with the same argument? Clearly you good sir are an imbecile.
 
Great we banished old style blubs for LEDS and then BOOM Cryto mining from left field :/

LEDs actually didn't help much, if at all. There is some good research from NASA on this, who has looked at power consumption as well as light pollution (from visible light sensors on sats.) over time with the shift to LEDs. They found that rather a reduction in power and light, we saw a massive gain in their use and light pollution, as rather than saving the energy and money LEDs can give, people started using LEDs more and for longer. A interesting case study really that shows how humans are, and that people desire more light for longer than money or energy savings. The main downside NASA covered was the disappearing night sky that has only gotten worse with LEDs.

Anyway, back on topic.
 
Power co's just need to introduce a high usage fee so normal consumers aren't affected but high usage bitminers pay twice the rates or something.
This is the practical solution.

Energy provider sets the price, and offers tiers.

It would be funny to watch the net neutrality people not complain about tiers with energy providers. I'm guessing it would be a road to Damascus moment for them.
 
This is the practical solution.

Energy provider sets the price, and offers tiers.

It would be funny to watch the net neutrality people not complain about tiers with energy providers. I'm guessing it would be a road to Damascus moment for them.
I don't think net neutrality means what you think it means. Net neutrality is about equal access, not quantity. I'm all for making high bandwith users pay more, that has nothing to do with net neutrality.

And we already have tiers for energy usage for industrial endpoints. They pay a different fee based on energy requirement.
 
keys to crypto success long term:
a. safe/secure
b. energy efficient
c. ease of access
d. actual usage / adoption
e. have live applications (wallet, debit card (ADA), use in banking (XrP) or some other real world purpose like BAT for ad rewards etc)
f. long long term ... safe against quantum computing
g. not scam prone, not ico scam prone
h. less shilling BS and day trading. the "value" needs to increase from "adoption" not just shilling/day trading
i. functional, is better than the service it is replacing (example BTC for fiat)
j. reward those that help the network (staking or fee kickbacks) that isn't directly mining. One noval use I forget if nano or navcoin or something else they use raspberry pi 3 to help with transactions at fractions of the energy.
k. diverse holders (not 1-5 big investors) for decentralized coins
l. product works (golemn or REQ or other cloud like mass computing apps)


BTC is hurting crypto long term as the "benchmark for all crypto successes"...
a. high fees
b. low transaction rates
c. energy hog, bad for environment


Unless BTC requires solar/wind energy or modernizes their methods to POS or another low-energy methodology it will continue to be bad for the environment and a bad benchmark for the industry. Some investors equivalent to "Gold" and LTC or other coins to "silver". However BTC/ETH/LTC are the three popular "barriers to entry" to market for people to get started before trying alt coins on binance. BTC is rewarded for its branding/name recognition, early adoption (First), low supply (higher prices) and high price (and people hope to see similar gains others did that invested early on). However long term if it does not evolve more efficient, faster, better, multi-use coins will replace it (ADA, XRP, IOTA, AELF, Enigma, digibyte, stellar, zilliqa, vechain, REQ, icon etc). Other 2nd and 3rd gen coins have more than one purpose and newer methods for proofing that do not require stealing Kyle's gpus.

To dismiss all crypto is misleading and a misunderstanding. Humans are prone to support wasteful products and things bad for the environment for convenience, normalcy and $... hopefully btc evolves or is replaced long term along with pesticides, flint water for our politicians lol.
 
LEDs actually didn't help much, if at all. There is some good research from NASA on this, who has looked at power consumption as well as light pollution (from visible light sensors on sats.) over time with the shift to LEDs. They found that rather a reduction in power and light, we saw a massive gain in their use and light pollution, as rather than saving the energy and money LEDs can give, people started using LEDs more and for longer. A interesting case study really that shows how humans are, and that people desire more light for longer than money or energy savings. The main downside NASA covered was the disappearing night sky that has only gotten worse with LEDs.

Anyway, back on topic.

That study was by Rutgers, and it only concluded that in the longer term (2050 onward) would increased usage outstrip the gain in efficiency. By that time, most of our energy should be from better sources than fossil fuels.
 
There is no reasoning with the cryptocrazed.

If you cryptocrazies think power is not an issue, then you will not mind paying for electricity based on the percentage you use, compared to everyone else in your grid.

Example: Say 10 homes are in your grid. You use 55% of all the electricity in your grid. The 9 other homes use 5% each of the total power consumed in your grid. The power company determines your grid needs to pay $0.20/kWh. So your rate per kWh is 55% of that $0.20, while your 9 neighbors pay 5% each, of that $0.20kWh.

This would be in a residential environment. It gets a bit more complicated in a commercial environment.

Just a thought.

Uhm you literally just described the metering that exists and did the math slightly different by adding an extra step of coming up for a value for the local grid.

If my electricity is $0.15 per kwh, and I use 1000 in a month, but my neighbor only uses 500, and we are the only people on the grid, I am paying 2/3 of the grid cost and he is paying 1/3.

All you have described is paying for the portion you use, which is more or less how it works now unless you pre-buy your electricity in big chunks. If so, you permit the energy supplier to bid on future production more accurately and they share some of the savings of buying in bulk ahead of time with you.
 
The other thing is the hate for ASIC(S) ... that are more power efficient and directly programmed to the specific crypto than a "Catch all gpu". This gets alot of hate on reddit "you dont understand the point of gpu mining". I still dont. If we can do something faster/cheaper then why not adopt it and move away from gpus?

why doesnt btc and other major cryptos develop specific chips that are reprogrammable for adoption? I imagine this is what XRP will do when they develop "machines" for banks or ADA for debit transactions. BTC needs to evolve.
 
Uhm you literally just described the metering that exists and did the math slightly different by adding an extra step of coming up for a value for the local grid.

If my electricity is $0.15 per kwh, and I use 1000 in a month, but my neighbor only uses 500, and we are the only people on the grid, I am paying 2/3 of the grid cost and he is paying 1/3.

All you have described is paying for the portion you use, which is more or less how it works now unless you pre-buy your electricity in big chunks. If so, you permit the energy supplier to bid on future production more accurately and they share some of the savings of buying in bulk ahead of time with you.

No, right now, many of us (I say that for caveat purposes) pay a fixed rate per kWh, regardless of how much we use. I described (at least I thought I did) how the rate per kWh will vary based on the usage within the grid. The "grid" is arbitrary and can be anything the power company decides it to be.

I did leave out a step though and thank you for bringing it to my attention. After the penalty is calculated, the lowest rate would be subtracted from the base rate and then the remainder would be added to all rates. Doing this normalizes the rates so no one is paying under the rate the eletric company has calculated it needs per kWh.

Using your example; you would pay (@ $0.20/kWh) $200.00, while your neighbor would pay (@ $0.15/kWh) $75.00. Is that clearer?
 
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I don't think net neutrality means what you think it means. Net neutrality is about equal access, not quantity. I'm all for making high bandwith users pay more, that has nothing to do with net neutrality.

And we already have tiers for energy usage for industrial endpoints. They pay a different fee based on energy requirement.

I meant tiers as in content type as well as speed.
 
Is this a discussion on the moral use of energy? BTC is a waste because people don't understand the scaling or capacity of the technology. While dismissing that it provides something not currently offered by present financial structures.

I'm sure we could find plenty of big wastes of energy tied into other systems that could prove a larger impact if addressed. And theyre not being addressed. Sugar, animal livestock, poor implementation of mass transit, poor investment into improving energy production. There's plenty of industry out there that uses energy, produces garbage, and pollutes to the detriment of future generations.

BTC and other crypto are constantly improving week by week as well. The competition between them will weed out the best of them. The scrutiny is really misplaced and ignorant to larger fish to fry.
 
If it was that big of a deal, they would do something, until then, they are just whining.
 
That study was by Rutgers, and it only concluded that in the longer term (2050 onward) would increased usage outstrip the gain in efficiency. By that time, most of our energy should be from better sources than fossil fuels.

No, it wasn't.

Affiliations of those who wrote the paper:

GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam 14473, Germany.
Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Berlin 12587, Germany.
Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Glorieta de la Astronomía s/n, Granada C.P. 18008, Spain.
Dept. Astrofísica y CC. de la Atmósfera, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid 28040, Spain.
Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309, USA.
Centre for Geography, Environment and Society, University of Exeter, Penryn TR10, UK.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boulder, CO 80305, USA.
Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, Penryn, Cornwall TR10 9FE, UK.
 
Comparing Bitcoin to the stock market.
Yep, this thread is headed nowhere fast.
Well the poster was talking about the problem being nothing of inherent value being done. I can't say I see the value to society of day trading.

LEDs actually didn't help much, if at all. There is some good research from NASA on this, who has looked at power consumption as well as light pollution (from visible light sensors on sats.) over time with the shift to LEDs. They found that rather a reduction in power and light, we saw a massive gain in their use and light pollution, as rather than saving the energy and money LEDs can give, people started using LEDs more and for longer. A interesting case study really that shows how humans are, and that people desire more light for longer than money or energy savings. The main downside NASA covered was the disappearing night sky that has only gotten worse with LEDs.

Anyway, back on topic.
That's a classic fallacy of people who think increased efficiency of technology will solve a problem. What happens instead is as technology becomes cheaper and more efficient, even more people use it, making the consumption problem worse.
 
Well the poster was talking about the problem being nothing of inherent value being done. I can't say I see the value to society of day trading.

That's a classic fallacy of people who think increased efficiency of technology will solve a problem. What happens instead is as technology becomes cheaper and more efficient, even more people use it, making the consumption problem worse.

Indeed, but quality of life improvements have a close tie with that, which is great for everyone. We have things today that we don't even think about, which used to be reserved for only the very, very rich.

Not saying that consumption might not be it's own problem, only that there are definitely positives and negatives to each side.
 
Considering my country(Canada) is banning pipelines and demanding that oil be shipped via railway and hauled by trucks...bigger concerns than electricity usage, more like worried about another railway boom taking out a small town :|

Well since the all might solar and wind power is considered %100 environmental(none of the parts are from fossil fuels right) and doesn't cause any damage, why not just start throwing up more of them.....Then maybe the god damn hippies will realize how destructive they are and to stop hating on MODERN nuclear plants.
 
As others have said, there is a solution to bitcoin, eth, etc using so much power. that's proof of stake. It's a big change, but it is the environmentally friendly choice. Mining equipment becomes useless though so you screw your early adopters. Which I believe is why nobody has switched yet.

I think you could start a coin with something similar to POS from the getgo though. The whole point to proof of work is to make a 51% attack unlikely/unachievable by requiring an immense amount of computing resources. Proof of Stake requires more than 50% of the staked funds. So come up with a way to make it unlikely a single party can have more than 50% of the votes in the system that doesn't require lots of power and you can make an eco coin. Or don't bother with a decentralized coin and run it the same as VISA and friends where you control the network and this type of attack doesn't exist.
 
I once read that a single Google search requires enough electricity to run a light bulb for a few hours. It seems like all tech uses too much electricity if you account for the entire infrastructure required.

That is complete and utter bunk. I can't comment about how much energy their white space uses but it's actually hella efficient. If I told you how many average transactions per second those servers handle and the amount of power they consume on customized silicon you would be shocked how low it is for a single search.
 
That is complete and utter bunk. I can't comment about how much energy their white space uses but it's actually hella efficient. If I told you how many average transactions per second those servers handle and the amount of power they consume on customized silicon you would be shocked how low it is for a single search.

I apologize. Here is the study I (mis)remembered:
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392654,00.asp
"Google said that 100 searches are equal to a 60-watt light bulb burning for 28 minutes. "Specifically, we currently use about 0.0003 kWh of energy to answer the average search query," Google said. "This translates into roughly 0.2g of carbon dioxide."

This is from a 2010 analysis that didn't account for anything beyond Google servers and infrastructure. Once further internet and home user infrastructure and energy use is taken into account I think it is fair to at least double that energy use calculation. Of course, a lot has changed in eight years, but so has the amount of information and number of searches on the internet.
 
Well the poster was talking about the problem being nothing of inherent value being done. I can't say I see the value to society of day trading.

Day trading is just trading at some range of frequencies. I can certainly see the value of being able to trade property.

I don't see the value to society of backyard pools, but I definitely see the value of the water infrastructure.
 
Cash and credit use power yes, but it does not become an experiential slope like BTC. Longer process times = more power used. Higher difficulty? More power.
Printing more cash uses as much power as last week.
 
Well the poster was talking about the problem being nothing of inherent value being done. I can't say I see the value to society of day trading.

There arguably is some value. So the idea is that if there is are people who are always making trades and doing so frequently, trying to make a bit of money on a small spread, then there is always a demand for your stock, and a supply of it. What this means is if you decide you want to cash out, you can do so basically immediately. You place a sell order and it can be executed right away and you gets your monies. If everyone is only playing the long game that may not be the case. You go to sell and it can take time before someone is willing to buy, or perhaps you have to push your price down quite a bit to entice someone to buy quickly. People who do rapid trades like day trades eliminate that because so long as you are offering at least a small amount of a discount, that's enough for them to snap it up and try to flip it.

Now as I said, you can argue that, and even if you agree you can certainly say that the convenience it introduces isn't worth the instability (I fall in with that viewpoint for HFT for sure, and lean that way for day trading). Just presenting you with an argument as to how it could indeed have some value.
 
I apologize. Here is the study I (mis)remembered:
https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392654,00.asp
"Google said that 100 searches are equal to a 60-watt light bulb burning for 28 minutes. "Specifically, we currently use about 0.0003 kWh of energy to answer the average search query," Google said. "This translates into roughly 0.2g of carbon dioxide."

This is from a 2010 analysis that didn't account for anything beyond Google servers and infrastructure. Once further internet and home user infrastructure and energy use is taken into account I think it is fair to at least double that energy use calculation. Of course, a lot has changed in eight years, but so has the amount of information and number of searches on the internet.

These figures are off by quite a bit. 2010 is Sandybridge days. Unfortunately I can't say more.
 
This is a self correcting problem. Eventually the value will come back down to earth.
 
Day trading is just trading at some range of frequencies. I can certainly see the value of being able to trade property.
I think it's a bit of a stretch calling stocks "property" as it all exists only as a concept. If a merchant sells you food, or hardware, or any real items, those have value to people and are a cornerstone to society functioning. Everyone needs supplies. A merchant has to make sure he has suppliers, judge what his customers need, establish a store or means to sell them, etc. He profits, and his customers get things they need. That's not what day trading is. Pressing a button to buy some stocks in the morning at a lower price, then pressing another button selling them in the evening at a higher price helps society how?

nomu said:
I don't see the value to society of backyard pools, but I definitely see the value of the water infrastructure.
Backyard pools isn't a job. Construction, architectural design, cleaning, engineering, etc. that goes into creating and maintaining said pools are all valued skills with many useful applications in society whether they're currently being applied to something valued or not.

There arguably is some value. So the idea is that if there is are people who are always making trades and doing so frequently, trying to make a bit of money on a small spread, then there is always a demand for your stock, and a supply of it. What this means is if you decide you want to cash out, you can do so basically immediately. You place a sell order and it can be executed right away and you gets your monies. If everyone is only playing the long game that may not be the case. You go to sell and it can take time before someone is willing to buy, or perhaps you have to push your price down quite a bit to entice someone to buy quickly. People who do rapid trades like day trades eliminate that because so long as you are offering at least a small amount of a discount, that's enough for them to snap it up and try to flip it.

Now as I said, you can argue that, and even if you agree you can certainly say that the convenience it introduces isn't worth the instability (I fall in with that viewpoint for HFT for sure, and lean that way for day trading). Just presenting you with an argument as to how it could indeed have some value.
Well, I think I might disagree that's of inherent value to society compared to being a nurse, or even a janitor, but by that logic if you want to argue that IS of inherent value to society, I think you have to argue Bitcoin is well. You're saying the value comes from being able to cash out rapidly because you havelots of people involved buying and selling an intangible asset. Isn't that something Bitcoin is also doing?
 
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