Bitcoin is an ecological disaster

BananaRepublic

See here:

http://grist.org/article/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-clean-energy-future/

Each Bitcoin transaction uses the same energy as 9 US houses use in one day. Imagine everyone doing one transaction per day, and you can see that global warming will arrive ahead of schedule. Even worse, mining Bitcoins uses massive amounts of power. The more it is worth, the more people will throw away energy generating this nonsense currency. According to the article, by 2020 the Bitcoin network will use more energy than is generated in the world!

If this is true, then it should be banned. however, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the article. I'm sure I read something similar in New Scientist, but I cannot find the article.

veryintrigued

BananaRepublic wrote: »

According to the article, by 2020 the Bitcoin network will use more energy than is generated in the world!

If this is true, then it should be banned.

What a load of codswallop.

I haven't opened the article for fear of overloading a couple of power stations though.....

redux

Apparently some financial organisations are already pulling out of offering Bitcoin compatibility, on the grounds of very slow transaction speeds, and others are putting up pre-transaction apologies for about the same.

Whether these excuses are fully true, I don't know

BananaRepublic

veryintrigued wrote: »

What a load of codswallop.

I haven't opened the article for fear of overloading a couple of power stations though.....

The fact that Bitcoin burns huge amounts of energy in its creation is just that, a fact. There are Bitcoin farms burning cheap electricity in China. And that is ecologically unsound. The uncertainty is the energy required for a transaction, though the distributed nature may well lead to huge energy consumption. However, I bet you don't know anything at all about the issues.

redux

Just in case anyone thinks the link in the OP is an agency they hadn't heard of, similar reports are at Newsweek, City AM, the Guardian, and so on ...

adindas

BananaRepublic wrote: »

According to the article, by 2020 the Bitcoin network will use more energy than is generated in the world!

Mind you there are a lot of BS there, yet a handful of people still believe that.

veryintrigued

BananaRepublic wrote: »

"It will require more energy than is generated in the world"

Which is different to your OP - which is what I've posted above.

No-one in their right minds would believe what you originally quoted no matter how many publications it was printed in.

Over and out....

redux

According to The Week, referencing the Guardian

All of that complexity requires much, much more energy than established systems for payments and transactions. The Guardian reported that one of Visa's two American data centers uses about 2 percent of bitcoin's power consumption. Meanwhile, the two centers handle over 570 times as many transactions as the bitcoin network each day.

http://theweek.com/articles/742253/bitcoin-worth-energy

So apparently the much larger Visa is nearly 30,000 times more energy efficient per transaction than Bitcoin

It isn't only some fringe organisation trying to make a name for itself by picking topical headlines.

The largest professional group of engineers and technologists in the world agrees, 3 months ago

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin

BananaRepublic

veryintrigued wrote: »

Which is different to your OP - which is what I've posted above.

No-one in their right minds would believe what you originally quoted no matter how many publications it was printed in.

Over and out....

Did you really need to be so offensive and childish to make a pedantic point when the underlying meaning was obvious to anyone? Maybe you are one of those people who posts in order to have a fight rather than a discussion.

shover

BananaRepublic wrote: »

Each Bitcoin transaction uses the same energy as 9 US houses use in one day. Imagine everyone doing one transaction per day, and you can see that global warming will arrive ahead of schedule. Even worse, mining Bitcoins uses massive amounts of power. The more it is worth, the more people will throw away energy generating this nonsense currency. According to the article, by 2020 the Bitcoin network will use more energy than is generated in the world!

Well, first we have to clarify what is meant by "transaction". If you believe that every time someone pays for a coffee with bitcoin, they are going to use the energy of 9 US houses, then clearly that is not going to work. At all.

A transaction in this sense is a block transaction, which happens every ten minutes (on average) and contains thousands of client transactions. With the upcoming Lightning Network then most transactions will take place outside of block transactions, lessening the load.

Nowadays, the only miners that can afford to operate are placed in locations where they can get direct, cheap, power from solar or hydro. In a similar way that Google or Facebook put there centers near to hydro dams or solar farms. In 2012 Facebook used the power for 26,000 homes each day. It's been growing at about 30%/year. Google uses a similar magnitude of power for it's business. I can't find recent numbers for this, but I've a feeling it dwarfs the bitcoin mining network. Which, incidentally, use one sixth of the global aluminium industry.

I would estimate that the bitcoin mining network uses a small fraction of the electricity that the global financial network uses. If you factor in the number of enormous office building in all the major cities of the world, the millions of computers running in them. Bitcoin, if it does become a player in the finance world, and there are all the indications that it will do, will remove a lot of the need for this financial apparatus.

BananaRepublic

Various articles such as one in Wired dispute your statements. Estimates of energy used to mine Bitcoin vary but 1GW is roughly typical. It is a huge amount and might push up the price of electricity in poorer countries where it is mined.