So, to offset a Bitcoin, plant 1.6 trees and keep them alive for a century [1].<p>[1] "On average, one broad leaf tree will absorb in the region of 1 tonne of carbon dioxide during its full life-time (approximately 100 years)." <a href="http://www.carbonfootprint.com/plantingtrees.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.carbonfootprint.com/plantingtrees.html</a>
And so will AC systems in local banks.<p>The problem is not that something consumes energy if there are people willing to pay for that energy. The problem is how we generate electricity. It's getting better, but it has nothing to do with bitcoin.
This is one of the reasons that people are working on proof-of-stake, which secures a cryptocurrency without mining. There are some good technical articles on the ethereum blog, eg:<p><a href="https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/05/stake/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/05/stake/</a><p><a href="https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/01/10/light-clients-proof-stake/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/01/10/light-clients-proof-sta...</a>
The most important take away I think is that computing uses a helluva lot of more energy compared to what people think it does. Loading Facebook on your phone and seeing a newsfeed uses a fair bit more power than just the fraction of a percent of your battery's storage. Multiply that by 1.3 billion users and by a few thousand request per user per month - I suspect that's a lot of energy.<p>I think a lot of climate change action includes to a degree a reduction in energy usage - but I don't see that happening any time soon. Unless computers get dramatically more efficient in their energy usage, energy demand will continue to grow. Renewable energy source growth will have to beat it.
More interesting than the CO2 release per Bitcoin is the CO2 release per transaction.<p>I guess this is still substantially higher than for normal bank transactions -- but how much? Normal money and living also releases CO2. When you use your big car to drive to the bakery 0.2 miles away, you release a lot of CO2 and all to buy some rolls worth 0.0...? Bitcoin.<p>When I understand the system right, the number of transactions possible per generated Bitcoin should also rise in the same speed (or higher?) as the CO2 release does.
This kind of project speaks to a major strength of Bitcoin. The transparency that is built in to the Bitcoin protocol allows us to actually understand (albeit through rough estimation at this point) the complete resource cost of the network.<p>This transparency allows us (humanity) to actually have discussions on how we can go about managing our resources in the 21st century.<p>What is the total CO2 cost of <Large Payment Processor X>? No one knows - the network is opaque since that kind of information is a competitive advantage. Which is fine, the core competency of the payment processor isn't understanding their CO2 footprint.<p>However, from a policy maker point of view, a system where total resource cost is verifiable by a third party audit makes for a compelling argument in favour of the open network.
The waste is incredible. It seems like the nash-equilibria of a currency are far, far from a social optimum. In other words, the price of anarchy is very high. This has always been an off-putting aspect of bitcoin to me.
How much CO2 is released hauling bags of coins and notes around?<p>How much is released keeping the rest of the currency system running?<p>Bitcoin may or may not win on these questions, but if we're going to ask them about Bitcoin, we should also ask them about the way we're doing it now.
Creating Bitcoins is a side effect of processing transactions. I don't know how many transactions are currently processed when one Bitcoin is generated. But that would be the interesting figure.<p>What I would find interesting is to compare the power consumption per bitcoin transaction with other currencies.<p>Power consumption per transaction will probably always stay pretty low. Because one way or another the users of Bitcoin have to pay for them. And they won't use it, if it is expensive.<p>Energy efficiency is one of the few areas I think should be handled by the government rather then by the individual. If using up energy is cheap but bad for the environment: tax energy higher. Everything will fall into place then in just the right proportion.
For me this tells that we as a species are still horrible at producing electricity in an environmentally balanced way. Especially stuff that's on the grid (like stationary computers) should be easy to run on regenerative energy and as Bitcoin is a global currency, it should not be a problem to do so 24/7 (the sun always shines somewhere). On a related note: why is fusion still 50 years away? Nobody seems to put proportional effort in that sector.<p>ps: I think a satellite that is dedicated to compute Bitcoin with solar energy (no atmosphere/night to bother out there) would be awesome!
I would love to see bitcoin having zero waste and impact on our environment but even now in it's current state it is much cheaper and environmentally friendly [1] than other methods like Gold Mining, Gold Recycling, Banking System Electricity Use, Paper Currency & Minting.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.academia.edu/7666373/An_Order-of-Magnitude_Estimate_of_the_Relative_Sustainability_of_the_Bitcoin_Network_-_3rd_Edition" rel="nofollow">https://www.academia.edu/7666373/An_Order-of-Magnitude_Estim...</a>
This model is fundamentally flawed. It assumes (highly) exponential increases in hash rate with time but constant energy efficiency. However it is nearly entirely increases in efficiency that have driven the higher hash rates. If those efficiencies stop increasing (and we've probably picked the low hanging fruit already with ASICs), then hash rate growth rate will dramatically slow.
When first investigating Bitcoin in 2011 I was highly concerned with it's energy consumption for the sake of crunching arbitrary calculations. It's a huge waste of natural resources.<p>This is one of the main reasons I have been a big supporter of Peercoin. Peercoin eliminates the need for massive energy consumption and dedicated server farms. Both of these features will be very important in the future.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercoin" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercoin</a><p>Bitcoin is a huge innovation, but it can be considered the first major crypto-currency. In the long-run, alternate solutions like Peercoin will play a larger role in the market.<p>Full disclosure: I have investments in both Bitcoin and Peercoin.
It seems to me that this should be easily addressable with a proof-of-burn system (c.f. <a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn" rel="nofollow">https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_burn</a>). This simulates the property of burning energy to have a chance of generating coins by instead burning coins to have a chance of generating coins (I don't <i>think</i> it's a pyramid scheme: rather, it'd incentivise burners to contribute to the network, just as miners are incentivised).<p>Anyway, it's a very neat idea, and it'd make all this much more energy-efficient while still costing burners quite a lot (and hence making it expensive to try to attack the network).
Color me skeptical.<p>I believe the author merely looked at the mean of the CO2/KWh stats on Wikipedia for all generation. That leads to misleading numbers. For example, I recall hearing that a large number of miners have set up shop in Iceland, where the electricity is all low-impact geothermal (and cheap).<p>To get accurate numbers, one would need to figure out what types of electricity sources the miners are ACTUALLY using.
Thing is - as all that is being produced is information, you could generate all this power in the desert with solar power, run the machines out there, and just send the information along fibre-optic or microwave channels. There's absolutely no need for the operation to have a high carbon footprint, no matter how much power it needs. You can't say that about most things.
Note that the assumption of 500 gCO2/KWHe comes from an IPCC report which, according to another wikipedia article, has had its fair amount of criticism. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_IPCC_Fourth_As...</a>
There's the argument that fiat money enables wars because nobody pays for them directly. The rise in bitcoin could bring this to an end. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq supposedly matched as much oil as India uses each day to run. I think in order to examine Bitcoins Co2 impact you need to look at the alternatives in great detail.
As the price of mining goes up, the difficulty goes down. Was that taken into account?<p>I still think that using proof of work as a part of a consensus algorithm is terribly wasteful. The rich get richer by way of buying energy in an arms race and the externality is pollution.
Maybe some of the "waste" heat could be used to heat homes: <a href="https://medium.com/re-form/heat-your-home-with-data-ab27fe7d6f01" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/re-form/heat-your-home-with-data-ab27fe7d...</a>
There are alternatives, Proof of Stake for example, or gridcoin, where the computing power to "mine" gridcoin goes towards scientific projects via BOINC.
How much energy do ATMs, banking mainframes, security trucks, HFT, chip & pin machines, accounting PCs, minting etc. consume?<p>Let's compare like to like.