
Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it - subculture
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/17/bitcoin-electricity-usage-huge-climate-cryptocurrency
======
thisisit
This is another of the bitcoin related topic which has been discussed many
times already in last couple of months:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663053)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15873395](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15873395)

I have also written a blog on this:

[https://hackernoon.com/dummies-guide-to-bitcoin-energy-
use-5...](https://hackernoon.com/dummies-guide-to-bitcoin-energy-
use-5f38e91c3253)

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castratikron
Isn't the root of the problem that fossil fuels are too cheap? If you tax
carbon to include the costs of climate change then this problem will go away.

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mesozoic
The idea is the switch to proof of stake will likely fix this particular
problem if it works.

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wmf
A lot of people seem to be ideologically opposed to proof of stake; they
define "works" in a very narrow way that proof of stake can never satisfy.

~~~
andirk
Work as a concept is fine, but that massive amount of work having a direct
correlation to massive amounts of energy consumption isn't ideal.

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Lxr
Is there a reason the proof of work can’t do something more useful, like
protein folding?

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thisisit
Because of verification. It is easy to check whether the generated hash is
correct or not. How will the verification for protein folding work?

~~~
philipkglass
It's easy to evaluate if the energy of one structural conformation is lower
than another. (You don't need to determine at each step if the submitted
conformation approximates the real protein at equilibrium, only that it's a
lower-energy conformation than has been seen before.) But I'm not sure that is
the only problem.

You _want_ the proof of work to remain difficult for a PoW scheme. We have
pretty good assurances that mindless cryptographic hashing is difficult; ASICs
accelerate it considerably, but don't lower the Big O complexity of the
problem. On the other hand, people keep searching for _algorithmically_ faster
ways to simulate protein folding, not just ways to hardware-accelerate
existing algorithms. If one group of folders were to discover superior
algorithms for searching the potential energy surface, that would be
beneficial to science but potentially disastrous for a currency based on
protein folding problems. For that matter, the overall incentives might make
science worse off if ProteinCoin encouraged superior algorithms to be kept
secret, for PoW advantage, instead of publishing advances in the open
scientific literature.

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roadbeats
As I know, there is only 2 million Bitcoins unmined left. Once we mine all,
aren’t we done with mining and miners ?

~~~
dragonwriter
Miners are transaction processors, and instead of block rewards, they get paid
in transaction fees. So, no, you're never done with them until you're done
with Bitcoin.

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spraak
Sincere question: what's the energy usage for e.g. USD or EUR?

~~~
lubos
It's zero. Exchanging banknotes or coins for goods or services does not
consume electricity. Can't believe this was "sincere question".

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ufo
Many bitcoin proponents believe that bitcoin can fully replace the current
financial system so whenever the energy consumption problem comes up you
should expect to hear someone talking about how much banks spend on air
conditioning every year.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
Of course banks wouldn't go away with Bitcoin. There are still physical
branches despite the ubiquity of online banking and credit/debit cards. People
like having humans to interact with. And Bitcoin is trying to add in the
Lightning network, which requires large trusted entities where people can
store their coins for off-chain transactions, IE banks.

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1053r
This article is based on some incredibly bad estimates, and reaches an
outrageously large conclusion.

Let us assume that 100% of all mining rewards go to electricity (and none to
buying mining equipment, paying employees, servers, or networking), and let us
further assume the electricity costs $0.01 / KWhr, which is cheaper than one
can buy basically anywhere.

From flippening.watch, BTC paid miners $20,797,200 yesterday, for
2,079,720,000 KWHrs. This translates to approximately 87 GW of electricity,
24/7\. 87 GW is approximately the output of the 21 Palo Verde nuclear plants
in Arizona, which according to the US Energy Information Administration, can
output up to 3937 MW.
[https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=104&t=3)

In other words, Bitcoin is a drop in the bucket. Let's put this myth of
massive energy usage to rest, and at the cost of being too snarky, and let us
ask our journalists to learn basic math.

edit - I made a math mistake, which I have corrected. The overall point, while
I was off by several orders of magnitude, however, holds.

edit 2 - I retract the entire comment. It appears the article is true, and
that, ironically, I made the same mistake I accused the journalist of. I'm
going to leave the comment up for posterity, but I retract it.

~~~
wizeman
How did you go from 2,079,720,000 KWHrs to 24.07 MW of electricity, 24/7?

My calculator and Google (search for "2079720000 kWh per 24 hours to MW") says
it's more than 86,000 MW (so ~86 GW).

edit: corrected units from TW to GW, as pointed out by philipkglass

~~~
philipkglass
86 GW, not 86 TW. 86 TW would be several times world primary energy
consumption.

~~~
wizeman
You're right, thanks! It was an unfortunate typo.

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drukenemo
It's a problem because it's a digital currency? Because many other things that
could be considered "surpeflous" also consumer massive amount of electricity.
Or for example (not superfluous but potentially equivalent) how much
electricity all the global banking system uses? I bet that it's more than "a
nation".

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collinmanderson
fast forward to a Dyson sphere for crypto mining

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ohiovr
How does a nation expand credit with a cryptocurrency? Like as in the case
with fractional reserve banking?

~~~
habosa
Here are some thoughts on how it could work. Not completely thought out, but
something:

Before we had electronic bank records, banks could print "bank notes" which
were as good as money if you trusted the bank. Now that we have electronic
records they basically "create" USD by adding a deposit to your account while
only having ~10% of that actually stored away in dollars.

If your account was truly in BTC they obviously couldn't just increase your
balance, since it's a cryptocurrency and they can't just make something up.

One option would be for banks to have their own tokens, similar to bank notes
of old. All banks would accept the tokens of other banks 1:1 and convert them
to BTC on demand, but it would allow expansion of the "money supply" like we
have now with dollars.

~~~
AlexandrB
> One option would be for banks to have their own tokens, similar to bank
> notes of old. All banks would accept the tokens of other banks 1:1 and
> convert them to BTC on demand, but it would allow expansion of the "money
> supply" like we have now with dollars.

Why not create one big bank that can issue its own tokens that any bank will
accept? We can call it a "central bank" or something. And then maybe after
many years we can decouple the value of these central tokens from the value of
bitcoin, instead allowing the central bank to control the total supply of
tokens based on some kind of "monetary policy" to keep prices stable.

Sounds good. The future of crytocurrency is bright indeed!

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jamez1
High electricity consumption is the trade bitcoin made in its design for a
stable money supply, it's not an inherent problem with cryptocurrency.

~~~
lojack
It's the tradeoff made for a _distributed_ money supply. Satoshi just as
easily could have made a fixed supply of money which is also stable and
doesn't rely on proof of work.

That said, at the time, I don't think this was really the tradeoff being made.
When bitcoin originally came out, proof of work was the only decentralized
consensus mechanism available.

~~~
jamez1
Having a distributed money supply makes it unstable, since you've tied an
incentive to creating bitcoin.

Money supply would then be equal to how many miners there are without adding a
difficulty, and the amount of bitcoins would go through the roof. Difficulty
was clearly added as a solution after this to keep the money supply stable.

Note I didn't say it's necessary to waste electricity to have a stable money
supply, only that the reason Bitcoin does is because it keeps it's money
supply stable.

~~~
lojack
Difficulty adjustment is used to keep block times stable. Without this
adjustment block times would continue to go down until you would eventually
end up with a chain that has much more frequent forks of greater lengths. You
eventually end up with a state where the current head becomes indeterminate
and all sorts of security issues become possible, including double spends.

Bitcoin could have easily based block rewards on timestamps to keep the supply
of money consistent, similar to how the current difficulty is calculated.

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harlanji
I posted on FB while working on my degree and got a 5 year memory about it
recently. I visualized the miners turning the polar bears black, and I was a
good liberal who turned off my lights. Ethics would win. "It was a cool
prototype" that I forgot about. Every CS student can figure this out, so it's
surprising that we've let it go. Incentives, right.

~~~
vbuwivbiu
Polar bears have black skin with white fur

~~~
taneq
My car has steel panels with white paint. It's still a white car.

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pdemporg
What a ridiculous article. Household air-conditioning wastes energy. Running
your television wastes energy. Serving up webpages for The Guardian is
apparently a waste of energy. If the problem is that the price of energy does
not encompass the negative externalities it creates, then we need a Pigouvian
tax on it. The price rises, and miners reassess whether or not they are
profitable in a carbon-neutral world. The author seems to think that market
participants using energy in a profitable manner are at fault here, rather
than the policymakers who are not interested in tackling the Greatest Moral
Challenge of Our Time (TM). But sure, jump on the bandwagon and write op-eds
while Bitcoin is in the news.

~~~
AlexandrB
> What a ridiculous article. Household air-conditioning wastes energy. Running
> your television wastes energy. Serving up webpages for The Guardian is
> apparently a waste of energy.

All of these provide some form of value to the user. I have yet to see what
value bitcoin provides over USD. Okay, so we now have another medium of
exchange, so what? Why is that worth the 1000x energy consumption per
transaction over payment processors like Visa?

All your examples, by the way, have gotten more and more energy efficient over
the last 50 years. Bitcoin is going in the opposite direction for payment
processing.

~~~
pdemporg
Thank you for actually engaging! Let me preface this by saying I'm usually the
first to deride Bitcoin as a payments platform. However, using energy to mine
Bitcoin does provide value to the user - profits over and above what the power
bill and ASICs/GPUs cost. And you're right - for a payments platform, it is a
regression in terms of energy consumption.

That, however, does not change the fundamental issue - the severe underpricing
of emissions-heavy power generation. The externalities that the author is so
worried about (in the form of climate change) are not priced into the going
rate for electricity. Blaming bitcoin miners is silly - if I pay for my power,
I should be able to use it however I see fit. The alternative leads to
absurdity, such as a law that states your aircon may be set no lower than 22C
in summer, as anything more would be "a waste". I pay for it, I use it, bugger
off.

The external social cost of electricity generation needs to be internalised
into the private end-cost - a carbon tax or an ETS. Pick one, follow through,
and stop blaming rational agents for acting rationally.

EDIT: Spelling

