Bitcoin mining and energy consumption

One of the big selling points of Bitcoin is that it&#x27;s meant to be decentralised but it doesn&#x27;t look like this plays out. Proof of work seems to inevitably lead to all the power going to parties that can afford specialised hardware who are in countries with low electricity costs.<p>Running a Bitcoin miner on commodity hardware now is pointless which seems to go against the spirit of Bitcoin when it started. Was this predicted at the inception of Bitcoin? It&#x27;s interesting how economics impacts the security of the protocol like this.<p>Proof of stake is meant to consume less resources but then the power is then handed to people with the most money? Coming up with a way to have a decentralised currency where everyone involved gets a fair say without consuming too many resources is a super interesting problem.

The electricity consumption is a red flag, but perhaps it could be cheaper than the cost to build and maintain Guarda&#x2F;Loomis trucks that carry physical currency, energy to melt metal to mint coins, and all the costs of building brick&amp;mortar banks (even then, bankers provide auxiliary services like loans and advisement).<p>We are all spending time talking about it as a collective effort to determine whether or not it should be adopted in order to optimize the transfer of value. Ultimately it could flush out the middlemen who just seek rent by being a financial gatekeeper. Bitcoin isn&#x27;t entirely different from that.<p>Many folks see it as a slot-machine. Buy, sit on it, cash out back to federal reserve notes. Profit. The question here is - what will those proceeds be spent on? If people are still conditioned from an early age to seek out excessive hedonistic experiences, what are we gaining by implementing bitcoin?<p>Part of me sees bitcoin explanations as a Rorschach test - you can observe some character traits of the person through their explanation or prediction of bitcoin.<p>I am wary of the entire thing because we are starting to spend more time talking about money. Or making money on money. It just has nothing to do with what we actually DO with our time&#x2F;resources. But that is content for a different thread.<p>I am not a financial expert. Just working-class trying to invest surplus cash. I want to use simple terms and concepts and condense the complex discussion.

Bitcoin&#x27;s electricity consumption is unfortunate, it&#x27;s difficult to assess whether it is a waste or not. The current position blockchain tech can be compared to the state of networked computers in the 70s and early 80s. Not a huge amount of value delivered at the time, yet very few could have foreseen the impact of the internet and personal computing on the world.<p>If blockchains and distributed computing does present a new leap forward in how we communicate, this electricity will not be wasted.

From a quick research online, it seems that most mining pools are located in China [1]<p>Roughly 2&#x2F;3rd of electricity in China is produced from burning coal or gas, which, upon combustion, emit their own weight in CO2, basically. [2]<p>From this two facts, one can conclude that Bitcoin has a pretty huge carbon footprint overall. This is not the impression that I got from reading that article.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit-media.org&#x2F;bitcoin&#x2F;where-in-the-world-are-bitcoin-mines-located&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bit-media.org&#x2F;bitcoin&#x2F;where-in-the-world-are-bitcoin...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Electricity_sector_in_China" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Electricity_sector_in_China</a>

&quot;Also, one can argue that Bitcoin actually saves energy. The world’s financial system requires many resources beyond the electricity to run servers.&quot;<p>What a bunch of crap. Bitcoin also needs servers (i.e exchanges, uses computers, routers, switches etc. )

Makes a reasonable effort to calculate bitcoin energy use (and it’s good to share reasoning, not just headline totals!), but it falls short with the whataboutism of, for instance, shipping gold by aircraft.<p>Assuming all flights are independently profitable, the cheapest ticket I&#x27;ve seen from London to San Francisco is £261 return, which sets an upper limit on fossil fuel emissions of about 6 barrels of oil equivalent. Me plus luggage is about 100kg, which at current prices is worth £3.292.122,21

Is this not the price paid for the trust, security, and utility that bitcoin brings? I don’t hear alternatives being suggested.

Can someone explain something to me:<p>So people mine bitcoin, which is really just validating the transactions on the network, and they get paid in bitcoin for doing so. However, they will receive fewer and fewer bitcoin over time because of the fixed supply. At some point doesn&#x27;t mining become unprofitable, causing the network to crash. And if the price drops doesn&#x27;t this exacerbate this problem? Would love some clarity here.

&gt; It is also easy to make this number look very small:<p>&gt;The energy that Bitcoin consumes in a year would only last the U.S. for 19 hours.<p>That doesn&#x27;t sounds small to me, given the relative utility of 320 million people against that of Bitcoin.

Why is energy consumption itself become a bad thing? I get greenhouse gas emissions being bad, but why make energy consumption itself a negative?<p>Not to mention that &quot;consuming&quot; energy is somewhat a fiction: it&#x27;s more so changing the entropy of a system. True consumption of energy, at the extreme, would imply sending energy into deep space (any direction other than the sun really) where it can never be recovered.<p>Is the problem that such entropy changes usually (always?) result in at least some heat loss? And the the planet is warming, so heat itself is seen as a negative?<p>To make my point a different way, if a mining rig were 100% solar and 100% efficient (both fantasy, of course), then it could consume unlimited solar energy with no ill effects. Thus basing our judgment on energy consumption instead of waste heat and energy source issues seems misguided.<p>Is it just too complicating to discuss this in terms of CO2 emissions and waste heat, instead of Watts alone?

Slightly off topic but would it be an advantage to use a low energy miner such as a Raspberry Pi as a bitcoin miner, or would that just be a waste of time and yield fractions of a cent &#x2F; a cent per day? Admittedly little knowledge on bitcoin mining

<i>Its base reward (currently at 12.5 Bitcoin per block) will half every four years, until it reaches zero.</i><p>That’s not how halving works.

When a handful of people control 40% of your market: it’s not decentralized.<p>When you consume more energy than your house does over 1 week to make a single transaction: it’s not efficient.<p>When it takes hours or days to settle: it’s not fast.<p>So what is bitcoin, anyway? From what I can tell a way for people to get rich.

&gt; It is also easy to make this number look very small:<p>Most of these comparisons sounded pretty identical to the ones from the &quot;If I had the intention to lobby for a ban of Bitcoin mining, I would use references like the one below&quot; list to me.

digiconomist has a more &quot;realistic&quot; estimate by including real world factors like cooling costs, the operation of older, but still profitable hardware etc. into their balance sheet. Their number is 32 TWh over the year (vs 9,6 TWh in the article above)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digiconomist.net&#x2F;bitcoin-energy-consumption#assumptions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digiconomist.net&#x2F;bitcoin-energy-consumption#assumpti...</a><p>Also, their yearly estimate was only 26 TWh a month ago. If we project this into the next year, then we&#x27;ll end with 130 TWh at the end of 2018 - or roughly 40% of what the UK consumes.

Take your best guess when Bitcoin will fall of the cliff: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BitcoinPlunge" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;BitcoinPlunge</a>

Can also utilize the waste heat...by selling a miner as a &quot;heater that makes money&quot;.

Looks like the HN domain name extraction rules need an update for .hk

&quot;Stellar maintenance entities, are those pesky Star-beavers ruining your convective zone? Do their hydrogen dams constantly clog up radiation from your photosphere? Never fear! With new extra-strength Dam-begone, your star will shine as brightly as 4 galactic years ago! Stay radiant! Stay prominent! Don&#x27;t wait. Get Dam-begone this rotation! Operators are standing by.&quot;. - (I think you might have meant &quot;hydroelectric generator dams&quot;)

Another aspect that is frequently overlooked is that keeping bitcoin requires no energy at all (literally you can write the key on a piece of paper), and a transfer (not considering the mining aspect) requires very little as well (it can be an SMS message).<p>Contrast that with the all the office buildings (e.g. Manhattan) and computer systems required by banks, ongoing. The banking industry has google-size datacenters as well, they just don&#x27;t like to talk about it. As well as the energy to print the paper&#x2F;plastic cash and all the statements, etc. It is very difficult to estimate the true energy consumed by fiat, while bitcoin energy is in the hashrate, and that&#x27;s pretty much it.

I don&#x27;t get why journalists are not writing about the criminal side of Bitcoins.<p>Lots of &quot;users&quot; ( not investors ) interested in Bitcoins are actually .onion sites or other shady &#x2F; crime organisations.<p>They actually don&#x27;t care for human life and I doubt they will care for electricity consumption.