Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
arstechnica.com
Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
59 comments
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What an absolutely absurd waste of resources. There should be some sort of enforcement/restrictions of energy usage from these clowns.
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Up next: AI
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Whatever the motives of those that wrote it, the fact that cryptocurrency uses power wastefully to ensure validity is absurd when we want to reduce climate change.
The concept is great. The execution needs altering.
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The concept is great.
Is it? I really don't see how cryptocurrency is a good thing for humanity. The name is a problem in and on itself, since it's not currency and can not scale up to be used as one.
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The need for power is to make it extremely difficult to take over the network. If the power needed was minimal, 1 person or group could easily take over. Power is what keeps it secure and as we enter the AI and quantum computing age, blockchain tech and how they are secured is one way to protect ourselves. Centralized databases are sitting ducks as we have seen with the amount of hacks going on at an increasing pace.
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Ummm if you follow the links to the EIA’s report, it does not show their method of calculating
The report discusses a few methodologies for estimating the electricity consumption, and if you follow the trail of references, there's a table of sales and use of electricity by sector. And the data in that table comes from "Form EIA-861, "Annual Electric Power Industry Report.", Form EIA-861S, "Annual Electric Power Industry Report (Short Form)" and Form EIA-923, "Power Plant Operations Report".
So the report discusses a few possible ways to estimate the crypto consumption by using overall sales and usage data. And they give references on finding that data.
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What a total fucking waste.
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Oh I don’t know. We are providing the NSA with a mapping to the low values of SHA256 hash algorithm. That could be useful.
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And less than 0.00000001% goes to Ethereum
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2% still seems really high.
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It's absurdly high.
Context: The US consumed ~4 Trillion kWh for 2022. If you take 2% of that, you get 80 Billion kWh.
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oh so more then 160,000,000,000 lightbulbs.
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ThIs Is GoOd FoR bItCoIn
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How much electricity goes to normal financial institutions though?
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A tiny fraction by comparison, given the amount of transactions they handle per second (Visa alone handles thousands per second whereas bitcoin only does 3-7 transactions a second). Either way, I wouldn't mind seeing the stock market and the vast amounts of effort wasted on that bullshit getting shut down.
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Dunno but probably worth it for the amount of transactions they process.
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Pay your taxes in buttcoin and I'll tell you the answer.
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Eth has moved to staking, which is good for the environment because it doesn’t have a bunch of computers competing for transactions, unlike bitcoin - instead the network picks a computer for the transaction and takes staked coin if the computer does something nefarious to the transaction. The problem though is that staking requires coins / money. Mining requires electricity and can make money (albeit pennies depending on your setup and electricty costs). For this reason, it’s not just bitcoin that’s a problem, but a whole bevy of other mining-based coins like bitcoin cash, cudos, etc. That problem (the desire for folks to spin up new farms to mine crypto coins which they can mine using the spare CPU/GPU cycles) is likely not going to go away soon.
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Does someone feel like giving me an ELI5 why Bitcoin mining eats up so much electricity these days? Is it just because the problems the machines need to solve have gotten more complex? Do other cryptos tax the resources as bad? Is there a viable crypto that would be considered “green” at this point?
Sorry for overboarding my questions if anyone even attempts to answer this lol
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All crypto is essentially designed around competition for who gets to be the one mining it. Things escalate, and that's how you end up with these ridiculous crypto farms that use as much power as entire cities. No crypto currency is "green". And UNLIKE cars, lights or banking, crypto serves no purpose, it's currency that doesn't get spent, it's basically just there to fuel speculation for tech bros.
Crypto is a complete waste of energy, it's not 'big money spinning Bitcoin as negative', it's just objectively idiotic, don't listen to that comment.
If you haven't, I recommend watching Dan Olson's documentary "Line Goes Up" on Youtube.
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It is the cost of securing the network. It is intentional as if it was low power and easy to mine, 1 person or organization could take over the network and thus it would loose its decentralization. Nothing wrong with using power as long as it is green. No one is complaining about how much energy social media uses, or electric cars, or the fiat banking systems or all the lights left on etc etc. Power usage is not the issue here, it is power generation. You best believe that big money is spinning Bitcoin as negative as possible as it is a threat to their establishment. Don’t be a sucker for the BS.
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It still a problem if it’s using green power as it’s preventing that green power from replacing fossil fuels in more useful and essential parts of the economy. Therefore essentially increasing demand for fossil fuels. Additionally by increasing the nations total energy use it’s making the task of decarbonising energy just that little bit harder.
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Price goes up, chances go down, more people/machines trying to mine, more electricity usage.
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If you want to have rather green cryptos, you need to exclude those who rely on proof-of-work to secure the network.
Btw. Ethereum showed that a transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake is possible.
If you're not interested in the complexities that a lot of cryptos have, because you just want to transfer value efficiently, have a look at Nano (https://nano.org) -
the power is needed because trustless distribsuted ledger is mathematically impossible.
So there has to be some mechanism that actually prevents someone being able to just change anything at will. This is the mathematical impossibility part. What bitcoin does to get around it is to (artificially) make it cost resources to write into the ledger by making everyone solve a random useless puzzle. And with each block depending on the one preceding it, changing implies also changing all the subsequent ones.
This of course assumes that the chain is ever growing, otherwise the attacker just needs time to catch up. Bitcoin's security guarantees come from ensuring the network keeps growing faster than any one single entity could write to it. The only thing that keeps anyone from writing whatever is that they just can't do it fast enough.
This implies that the network is only (probabilistically) secure as long as there are people mining it. If people stop mining, bitcoin instantly loses all of its security.
It then follows that the security of the chain depends on its ability to keep its users wanting to mine it. This is handled by it being a currency. something that humans would have a psychological need to hoard.
This is also why any non-cryptocurrency application of blockchain simply cannot possibly work.
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the power is needed because trustless distribsuted ledger is mathematically impossible.
So there has to be some mechanism that actually prevents someone being able to just change anything at will. This is the mathematical impossibility part. What bitcoin does to get around it is to (artificially) make it cost resources to write into the ledger by making everyone solve a random useless puzzle. And with each block depending on the one preceding it, changing implies also changing all the subsequent ones.
This of course assumes that the chain is ever growing, otherwise the attacker just needs time to catch up. Bitcoin's security guarantees come from ensuring the network keeps growing faster than any one single entity could write to it. The only thing that keeps anyone from writing whatever is that they just can't do it fast enough.
This implies that the network is only (probabilistically) secure as long as there are people mining it. If people stop mining, bitcoin instantly loses all of its security.
It then follows that the security of the chain depends on its ability to keep its users wanting to mine it. This is handled by it being a currency. something that humans would have a psychological need to hoard.
This is also why any non-cryptocurrency application of blockchain simply cannot possibly work.
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To those that say this is a waste and has no good purpose, you should know that most energy used by miners is renewables because renewables (especially during off-peak hours) are the cheapest source of energy.
Bitcoin’s value to society is the ability to easily transfer money from point A to B and having a clear fiscal policy it has kept to for 15 years, 365 days a year, 24/7 without a single hour of downtime, a bank holiday, or getting hacked. There’s a reason big money like hedge funds and private banking are investing in it: it’s actually useful and has massive potential. The market cap of Bitcoin is 850 BILLION USD, that’s bigger than the GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam. People use it to move over a trillion dollars of value a year. You can debate how much of that movement is trading & speculation vs use as a currency, but it’s a trillion nonetheless. I personally pay for things regularly with Bitcoin, you’d be surprised how many places you can spend it when you start looking. And it’s available to anybody with a cellphone and halfway reliable internet access, including the billions of people who are “unbanked” and lack access to stable banking infrastructure.
Transactions on Bitcoin lightning occur in under a second and cost pennies in fees. That’s to send it across the room or across the globe. Remittance services and bank wires use just as much energy and cost 10x-1000x as much. And they waste not just energy but human capital as well, we no longer need humans manually sending bank wires like it’s 1910. You just don’t see headlines about the energy impact of bank wires or western union because it’s not novel, we just accept it as a cost of our financial system.
The energy used by miners is needed to secure the Bitcoin network. Historically, we have built currencies of incredibly inequitably distributed resources: precious metals, stable governments, etc. Bitcoin was the first one to build an economy based on pure energy. This stuff literally falls from the sky. While it is not perfectly equitably distributed, it is the most equitably distributed resource on earth that can be used for this purpose.
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and if bitcoin wasn't wasting all that energy, we could be powering actually useful stuff with that renewable energy. It's not ok that energy is being wasted. It coming from renewable sources does not make wasting it on useless hash calculations is good. That energy could be used elsewhere, for useful work.
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How much energy do banks use? Or remittance services like Western Union? Notice how you never see those numbers alongside these headlines. These articles are for clicks and outrage, not for serious discussion and weighing pros vs cons.
Sending transactions from A to B is "useful stuff".
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Read the article - some of the mines are deliberately near fossil fuel plants that had been tapering off production.
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Those fossil fuel plants are the problem, the problem is not that somebody is willing to buy that electricity. Those fossil fuel plants probably only even still exist because of subsidies of fossil fuels. Renewables are cheaper, have been for quite some time, it's just a matter of getting enough capital to build out their deployment in the first place and fight existing subsidies for fossil fuels.
That is a governance and policy problem, not a Bitcoin problem. Bitcoin finds the cheapest energy it can, which tends to come from renewables. So does every other energy-intensive industry on earth. Bitcoin is not unique in this aspect, but what does make it unique is the ability to rapidly turn on/off use of electricity according to current electric rates, unlike say a cement plant or factory.
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59 comments