The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge – an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.
[…]
In just a few months from now, at bitcoin’s current growth rate, the electricity demanded by the cryptocurrency network will start to outstrip what’s available, requiring new energy-generating plants. And with the climate conscious racing to replace fossil fuel-base plants with renewable energy sources, new stress on the grid means more facilities using dirty technologies. By July 2019, the bitcoin network will require more electricity than the entire United States currently uses. By February 2020, it will use as much electricity as the entire world does today.
This is an unsustainable trajectory. It simply can’t continue.
Not only is bitcoin tulips, but it’s also incredibly bad for our planet. These energy numbers are insanity.
Bitcoin technically is not moving forward. It’s stagnant and hasn’t improved much. There is no way they can make proper decisions. People just seem to not be able to work together. No governance (and I’m not talking about government here. Just finding ways to agree on what should be done and how).
Other than the brand name and being first and the biggest ‘marketcap’ I’m not sure why Bitcoin is still in the race.
Edited 2017-12-06 20:52 UTC
This is a pretty universal problem though, isn’t it? How many open source projects have been forked over the years, because developers couldn’t agree on something or other? Hundreds? Thousands?
A DAO model with voting like for example Dash introduced seems to at least have a way to solve disputes. ‘Voting rights’ in Bitcoin are very limited.
>Bitcoin technically is not moving forward. It’s stagnant and hasn’t improved much.
Another ANAL-yst.
There is too many people, organizations, too much money and power involved that upgrading [the] bitcoin [protocol] becomes quite difficult.
Edited 2017-12-07 07:06 UTC
Did the authour account for the money needed for the power to do this mining?
If it takes as much power as they project the cost of doing the mining will become greater than the money made from the mining.
After-all, the power has to come from somewhere but even wind and solar is not free!
I wonder how the energy numbers compare to something like YouTube usage, or NSA data storage or World of Warcraft. People only seem to be interested in these numbers and their environmental impact because “Bitcoin” is in the title.
I’d like to draw attention to one telling blub in one of the linked articles where they talk about trying to estimate energy consumption: “Even though the total network hashrate can easily be calculated, it is impossible to tell what this means in terms of energy consumption as there is no central register with all active machines (and their exact power consumption).” So take the figures presented in the Grist article with a big grain of salt.
Edited 2017-12-06 21:37 UTC
jessesmith,
Sure you can fudge some numbers hear and there, but objectively, I think it’ll be hard to argue bitcoin doesn’t have a problem.
The problem is the exponential part of the growth in Bitcoin if some of the articles are correct.
Lennie,
A greater short term problem as I see it are the arbitrary blocksize limits that bitcoin’s developers hard coded into the protocol.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy
Without a fix, users will find that as bitcoin grows in popularity more and more transactions will fail to execute in a timely manor because there isn’t enough space to record those transactions in the block chain.
The problem with hard coded protocol limits is that if the user base keeps growing exponentially, then eventually transactions will be forced to queue. At first for hours, then days, and even indefinitely. The fixed transaction capacity will make fees increasingly important in order to execute transactions. Some may not have a problem with this, but if we accept that only transactions with the highest fees will be processed, then that implies the gentrification of bitcoin where those at the bottom are forced to compete on fees with those at the top simply to complete a transaction. It is kind of sad that a virtual currency should have this property.
Edited 2017-12-07 08:51 UTC
“Without a fix, users will find that as bitcoin grows in popularity more and more transactions will fail to execute in a timely manor because there isn’t enough space to record those transactions in the block chain”
Of course.
I wonder how many years Bitcoin still has left before it ‘explodes’.
No, it’s not. Exponential growth can’t continue past a certain point (usually something like the user base), so while a short-term section of the chart may look exponential, it will flatten out long before it reaches a level that’s really bad.
I dug into it a little and found one comparison that put it into the proper perspective. All the bitcoin mining in the world per year uses ALMOST as much energy as we burn on Christmas lights here in the US. So is it actually an issue that we need to address right now? If it is, then doesn’t that mean there are other issues just as pressing that must be addressed right now?
Hi,
I agree – sooner or later, the Christmas lights issue should also be addressed (and not just the power consumption, but the cost of manufacturing the lights, etc too). I’m mean honestly, are some stupid flashing lights really “necessary” (Jesus didn’t have any!), or is it just gullible consumers being sucked in by companies telling them to buy more useless crap?
Fortunately Christmas lights aren’t 365 days per year though, so I guess that issue can wait while we fix bitcoin mining.
– Brendan
Edited 2017-12-07 02:38 UTC
Jesus didn’t have a fir tree in his manger either. Or tree decorations. Or cards. Or snow.
I think of Christmas lights as one of the key features of Christmas actually – it’s a lovely idea, and perhaps not as wasteful as it may initially appear. The excess energy that isn’t used for light is turned into heat, so any lights that are indoors at least are having some of their energy recovered. I don’t go for the fashion of buying new lights every year just to colour coordinate with the rest of the street of course (my sets are all at least 10 years old), or for having ridiculous outdoor displays, but newer LED-based lights are far more efficient too.
Mind you, energy efficiency for bitcoin mining could also be said to have the same side effect (contributing to the heating) in colder climates at least.
daedalus,
If your talking about bitcoin mining mostly at home, and then mostly in the winter, then maybe that’s a valid point. But the majority of it is taking place in huge datacenters that produce so much excess heat that they have to spend even more energy to actively cool the servers. We’re talking about 100+ megawatts of electricity. This heat energy just gets released into the atmosphere.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/worlds-third-most-powerful-data-cente…
If you wanted to reclaim that somehow, the data center would have to be near a huge apartment complex or similar. But even then, this wouldn’t do as much good in the summer when everyone wants AC rather than heat.
The most energy efficient places to do bitcoin mining would be at the north and south poles where we can do away with cooling, but we’d just be contributing to melting the poles.
Edited 2017-12-07 14:57 UTC
JLF65,
The main problem is that it gets worse as bitcoins become more popular and valuable. On the one hand, we could cap the rewards & fees to miners to lessen the incentives to build more and more data centers for mining bitcoins. But on the other, having many competing data centers is absolute crucial to bitcoin’s security. So for security reasons you’d want those data centers being built, but from an environmental perspective, it’s quite wasteful.
Edited 2017-12-07 02:41 UTC
The Christmas light energy will decrease over time as old bulbs burn out and are replaced with LED.
Just did that last weekend, couldn’t find any non LED bulbs. Was concerned as I tried them maybe 5 years ago and found that they flickered at a unsettling pace. But the ones i just bought were better.
Actually, a recent study found:
Yes, LED is more efficient at making light, but often times for many applications we don’t actually use less energy, just produce more light. This might be one of those applications, I don’t know/haven’t checked.
That’s an effect known and named (though I forgot it
) since the time of steam engines: more efficient use of a resource (like coal in the case of better steam engines) leads to more, not less, use of that resource …since we are more likely to find new ways to utilise it which are no longer prohibitively expensive/inneficient.
LEDs sure seem to lead to more lighting on the streets etc. of my city…
In 2010, Google used 2.26 TWh, or about 1/16th of Bitcoin (Transactions + mining) currently does.
This has been a known problem with bitcoin’s “proof of work” model for years. It’s only just now that people are beginning to get the impact of it though.
There are other crypto coins models that don’t require wasting energy, “proof of stake” for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake
Alas there’s no silver bullet as these require varying tradeoffs and even privileged nodes.
We had a fairly long discussion about this stuff not long ago:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?651220
In my last post I actually suggested that crypto currencies might be eliminated all together in favor of multiparty peer to peer bartering. I’m curious what people have to say about that?
http://www.osnews.com/thread?651328
I like your thoughts on peer to peer bartering. It hadn’t occurred to me before that secure digital transactions don’t just make cryptocurrencies possible (pseudo-gold), but maybe goes further by making fiat currencies themselves redundant, including the cryptocurrencies.
Alfman and M.Onty, I agree thoroughly. The only reason mining exists is to track the existence and movement of fiat tokens through the network in a trustless way. If we start questioning the assumptions that we need fiat tokens and we need a trustless consensus system, very interesting possibilities start to naturally emerge.
As I was reading this article, I kept thinking about this project that recently came across my reading list called Holochain. I’m super excited about it. It takes the best part of Bitcoin, that is, the hash chain, and asks the questions, “can we ensure trust in other ways?” and “do we need tokens at all?”
Holochain is actually just an app platform that mashes P2P networking, a distributed hashtable, hash chains, and a small API together. Think of it like AWS Lambda meets Git meets BitTorrent meets PKI. But its first application, Holo, comes with a ‘mutual credit’ cryptocurrency. No tokens to mine, just double-entry accounting among peers and ‘intrinsic’ data integrity (that is, peers validate each other’s data as a prerequisite to doing a transaction with each other).
Because it’s an app ecosystem rather than a cryptocurrency, there are other interesting apps in the works, like microcurrency exchanges, co-op sharing economy platforms (think AirBnB and Uber but collectively owned), distributed Git, and voting/governance platforms.
It might sound like I’m a paid evangelist, but I’m just a really interested observer who got involved with the community a week or so ago. Some of these people have been working on the system for a decade though.
The Indiegogo campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/take-back-the-internet-with-share…
Some Medium links:
https://medium.com/holochain
https://medium.com/metacurrency-project
The chatroom, for people who want to get involved:
https://chat.holochain.net/
skeezix,
This is very interesting. I’ve always felt something like that would be a good idea, running nodes at the edges of the network instead of having centralized services where everything’s out of our control. I’m saddened that federated protocols have become sidelined in favor of proprietary services and that things like NAT and ISP port blocking are breaking the endpoint connectivity principal (ie I cannot host HTTP endpoints at home). I had been tinkering with idea for running a virtual P2P network on top of the internet that is free from these problems. But alas I’m not sure anyone would use it and I never came up with a business model that would let me work on it.
I will read about this some more. I don’t know if Thom would post it, but it could make for a good article submission.
Edited 2017-12-08 02:38 UTC
Thanks for the encouragement; I think I’ll do that!
“Well sure, but it doesn’t help that you/your exchange may be using one fork and the people you need to exchange funds with may be using another. Consumers expect a principal of universality. A couple currencies may be able to co-exist, but the financial incentives for investors and developers to keep creating new currencies doesn’t help.”
We have that now with national currencies.
___
If the general public adopts closed source wallets that will be a big problem. Because I assume a lot of people will loose their money.
___
On your topic of p2p barter, adoption of openbazaar (or it’s current half commercial fork of it) hasn’t really happened I think.
Does that show there is no demand for this ? Isn’t that strange ?
Lennie,
I think it’s one of those things where it could be popular but there isn’t enough critical mass to get the ball rolling first.
Edited 2017-12-09 17:04 UTC
“Apple could require users to use their obligatory version with apple pay.”
It has been suspected that Apple is actually blocking cryptocurrencies from their platform because they have Apple Pay.
“Remember that prior to the government stepping in, there were some companies that actually paid salaries in company currency. It makes me wonder if this could happen again in an extremely pro-corporate government culture.”
Some of the companies in the cryptocurrency-space do this.
It’s kind of like getting paid in stares.
Edited 2017-12-09 19:08 UTC
Lennie,
I guess as long as it was a widely accepted currency that you could cash out then it’s not so bad. But if the company created it’s own fork and you couldn’t exchange it for normal currency then that would definitely cross the line IMHO.
I commented below already, but I want to address the peer-to-peer bartering thing specifically. That sounds like a great application! Like you say in that other comment, that sort of thing only becomes possible at Internet scale, because otherwise how would you gather enough data to make reasonable estimations of the worth of this or that.
Mutual credit is perhaps simpler for people to grasp, because it deals in actual numbers (you could peg the unit value to your own federal currency if you wanted)
skeezix,
That’s a good point, but I would argue that with the bartering system in place there’s no need to “peg” to any currency because currency itself would naturally be just another “commodity” in the system. There’s no special logic needed to handle “what’s the value of this in dollars” versus “what’s the value of this in bananas”. People are so accustomed to dollars that I’m not sure they’ll be comfortable seeing units of anything else.
Typically a bartering service is legally required to comply with the IRS, but it’s unclear to me if a P2P would be exempt? The IRS makes life harder quite a bit harder for (legal) bartering. Everything traded is required to have a dollar value and both parties are required to report it on form 1099B. Then the taxes for 1099 income has to be paid every quarter. This poses some serious obstacles for normal consumers/employees who are not accustomed to reporting 1099 income to the IRS or paying taxes several times per year.
I think instead of delegalising bitcoin, it should be completely legal to “steal” – it’s not physical so you can create a copy without destroying original and it’s not controlled/protected by any government so why they should care if someone copies your digits ? After all it is merely a number. If you dig for diamonds, gold, copper, etc. you still need lots of energy, but you get very useful physical resources to create millions of things. What is bitcoin useful for ? Not a god damn thing. At most it has value of toilet paper you can print that number on. When you can get salary in bitcoin and pay for you bills or at a grocery store then it might have some use. Why idiots who “lose” the bitcoin cry so much that they lost x amount of USD ? If one looses gold, cash or work of art they will think about these items not their value, so it shows even in one’s mind bitcoin ain’t worth shit.
I must note that most of widespread uses of diamonds or gold are also useless…
> Not only is bitcoin tulips
Yeah, it will soon hit 10 years of age, its trading volume is close to 10 billion dollars a day, it’s recognized by a lot of financial analysts, it poses a real threat to the old banking system but it’s tulips, right.
Either you hate it, Thom, or you feel left out, or you don’t understand it. In either case your statement is devoid of anything other than pure rejection for the sake of rejection.
Edited 2017-12-07 07:02 UTC
Tulips is what was part of what made the current financial system. So tulips can still be a big deal.
Tulips are still a major industry. Bitcoin will probably be almost worthless in a matter of months.[In fact once bitcoin futures start trading next week it will be highly vulnerable to attack from institutional short sellers.]
Bitcoin is the sort of idiotic utopion idea that appeals to geeks. It is nothing more than a totally fucked up analogy for physical gold. It is deflationary which encourages hoarding. The cost of production is staggering and increases exponentially and the blockchain is about the clumsiest and most impractical anti-counterfeiting method ever devised.
It’s been here for 9 years already and according to you it will die in a few months.
Have people collectively stopped using their rational mind?
Do you understand why people use the analogy of a bubble?
Bitcoin has gone from being “worth” 6 cents in 2010 to $17,000 (today) based on nothing but hype. That is as irrational as you can get.
Economic history tells us that every “investment” that has a parabolic price rise collapses very shortly afterwards.
Edited 2017-12-08 02:21 UTC
It’s trading well below 1 billion a day with occasional peaks of 2/3 billions. But if you have two/three millions dollars (that’s not much in our current global economy) you can manipulate the price as far as 10%, as it happened in the last days. A perfect manipulated short opportunity for someone with some money to risk.
It’s not really “recognized” by the financial community, they talk about it a lot but most of them say there are a lot of issues with it, first of all the volumes… you can’t really play big volumes due to the limit in transactions’ number.
And second the fact that you can’t really but something in bitcoin, I mean no prices are set in bitcoin, price is normally set in fiat money and you need to change BTC on the on its very volatile rate before buying something, so it’s not really working as a currency but much more like a tulip.
Edited 2017-12-08 07:00 UTC
You can also cobsider this problem from the positive side. Much energy is now invested in the development of powerful and power efficient hardware. This hardware is also becoming available for the rest of the economy, and if the bubble bursts this hardware will become cheaper because demand collapses.
a lot of aforementioned hardware is circuitry designed to crach bitcoin mining problem. it’s paperweight otherwise.
Most Bitcoins are mined on custom hardware (ASICs) that can’t be reconfigured.
Here is a better article than the crap linked above: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-c…
Also, I come here to read decent OS news, not this “BSD is dying!”, sorry “Bitcoin is dying!” bullshit.
Bitcoin is sucking the living and their energy. Who believes this BS. People buy solar panels to make Bitcoins, they also Buy Tesla with only purpose to drain car battery and recharge for free to make Bitcoins. What a screwed up world …yeah.
?
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?651878
goo.gl/BgjtCB
It was a rant…regarding topic and how bad is bitcoin to environment.
Speaking of which bitcoin just pooped we shall see after new years if continues ascending trend.
Edited 2017-12-09 19:37 UTC
Nobody said Bitcoin is dying – least of all me. That’s something you made up all by yourself.
…interesting why you would do so. Perhaps because deep down you’re insecure about your convictions?
You might not be saying it, but your intention or the feeling you’re trying to convey is clear: “tulips”, “incredibly bad for our planet”, “insanity”. Additionally, from the article: “This is an unsustainable trajectory. It simply can’t continue.”. Even if you’re not saying that Bitcoin is dying, it’s obvious you want it to die.
Also, I couldn’t care less about Bitcoin itself, but that’s a completely different discussion
There’s way more interesting cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency developments out there, why don’t you report on those?
Do not worry about oil supplies running out, they predicted it would ‘run out soon’ since 2 centuries ago and it still does not show any sign of running out any time soon.
But the unthinking public has been treating oil as if it’s a rare commodity thanks to all the fear mongering so I guess the lies were a success.
TBH any lie will be a great success if you own the media and education systems. They could make people believe they landed on the moon if they wanted to.
Edited 2017-12-07 16:45 UTC
There are two things when talking about oil. The oil supplies do not run out, but the investment needed to bring that to the market was not made just so you know price is now going up. You cannot have oil without investing in capacity to extract. Two sides of the coin. Same with Bitcoin…demand and supply. Whatever..meanwhile Bitcoin going to 50k, watch and learn
Two centuries ago the extraction of fossil oil didn’t even really start; we were still hunting whales for oil, nearly wiping them out in the process.
And with how we’re currently using in one year 2-3 million years worth of oil production…
I think Bitcoin was planned by those that rule us. Some say banks are going to hate Bitcoin but if that is the case then why do the banks not use the media to spread fear about Bitcoin? The banks can easily buy all the propaganda they need and since the unthinking public has complete faith in the news it’s easy for them to make the public afraid of buying Bitcoin. Anything that gets this big is backed by those that rule us.
But I cannot stop it. If the big banks want something to happen then it will happen. Instead I bought Bitcoin back when it was around $3000 and got rich. I think it is this kind of greed which allowed scams like the dollar to get big. But unless one is self-sustained so that he needs no money it is really hard to not buy into the scam. And unfortunately instead of learning useful skills like children used to in the past, I spent my youth wasting my time in an education that was meant to make me dumb and dependent.
Yes, yes, the past is always better …you mean useful child skills like coal mining? (and if you think education made you dumb, perhaps it’s succeeded; “dependent” is the whole idea behind functional society)
Depends on how you define functional. Dependent unthinking people are necessary in order to make society a well-oiled machine which has high production for those that control the society. (Like bankers, they produce the least but own the most.)
But it is impossible to be free and dependent. Dependence results in a lack of freedom because the ones that you depend on can use your dependence to control you. So a society of dependent people is never a society of free people.
The society we have now cannot be sustained by free people.
You live in your own little bubble, disregarding real world. Best education systems are in the Nordic countries, and it’s what is largely responsible for them ~leading in all sorts of civilisational factors (like ~leading in social mobility, or inventivness …precisely the opposite of “lose individuality” or “prevent critical thinking”). Most of the world strives for Nordic model because most of the people on this planet still have largely ~private, largely dysfunctional education systems…
And if you really want to, go back for that “free” lifestyle of hunter-gatherer in some woods… we’ll see how long you last without your dependence on modern, comfortable and cozy society…
The hunter-gatherer argument is a strawman. I never said I wanted to be a hunter-gatherer and in fact I do not want to be a hunter-gatherer. The fact that you think that the only alternative is hunter-gatherer shows that you live in a bubble.
Being self-sufficient does not imply being a hunter-gatherer.
Then you simply don’t realise what your dependance on modern, comfy society means.
BTW, why are you even on the internet? “They” created it, “they” use it to control you …unplug now!
Bitcoin’s energy footprint is definitely an issue. Fortunately, IOTA and Holochain supply counter-examples of how it can all work.
Thing is, compare this all to the dollar. It’s not exactly propped up by intrinsic value; there’s even something to the idea that the wars in Iraq and Libya were fought over keep the dollar as the de-facto currency of the oil trade. Now *that* is a footprint.
That’s why I’m willing to give the cryptocurrencies a chance.
Edited 2017-12-09 08:23 UTC
Hooray! Good to see someone else mentioning Holochain and IOTA.
The meteoric rise of BTC has gone on long enough. I now know what I must do to stop it. I must buy some BTC After which time the price of BTC will inevitably collapse causing me to lose said investment but it will end this rally.