Equivalent to 215kWh used per bitcoin transaction

[sykosis]

“An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins.

This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction”

 

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change

 

Was curious to get in on this but didn’t take the plunge. I use plenty of power for my homelab to put more into mining at this point.

[Crunchy Dragon]

That's a lot of electricity

[ChickenCake248]

I mean bitcoins are worth several thousand dollars now

[dizmo]

Is this meant to be another fear tactic type article? Oh no! People are using power!

If you're that worried about it, why don't you use less? On average the typical US household uses two to three times the power a typical European one does.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, sykosis said:

This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction”

Ask the same question for how much energy it takes per transaction for EFTPOS or Credit Cards, if you take everything in to account that is required to make those possible it's going to be a heck of a lot of power.

[vanished]

8 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Ask the same question for how much energy it takes per transaction for EFTPOS or Credit Cards, if you take everything in to account that is required to make those possible it's going to be a heck of a lot of power.

Actually I'd love to know what those numbers are for comparison.  I wonder if anyone has bothered to do a study or if they've all been too busy ragging on bitcoin.  I'd expect it to be a tiny fraction of this though to be honest.

 

2 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

That's a lot of electricity

As much as 7 average American houses use in an entire day

[leadeater]

14 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Actually I'd love to know what those numbers are for comparison.  I wonder if anyone has bothered to do a study or if they've all been too busy ragging on bitcoin.  I'd expect it to be a tiny fraction of this though to be honest.

Likely will be less, but I'd like to know.

 

Also the figure given is a little misrepresented, it's not the energy required per transaction it's the current efficiency of the network at the current transaction rate per transaction. The implication of this difference is actually huge.

 

Most of the energy is used in computation to find shares, miners get bonuses for also processing transactions. If people stopped trying to find new shares the energy usage of the network would be extremely small but the market/currency would effectively crash.

[patrick3027]

7 hours ago, dizmo said:

Is this meant to be another fear tactic type article? Oh no! People are using power!

If you're that worried about it, why don't you use less? On average the typical US household uses two to three times the power a typical European one does.

I think it's useful to know that paying with Bitcoin consumes A LOT more electricity than the traditional banking system. 

 

Makes you wonder how scalable Bitcoin is as a payment solution. 

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

52 minutes ago, patrick3027 said:

Makes you wonder how scalable Bitcoin is as a payment solution. 

Right now everyone and their dog is mining.  That pushes the energy consumption per transaction up. 

Once mining becomes less profitable, fewer people will do it and the amount of consumed electricity per transaction will drop.

[leadeater]

41 minutes ago, Captain Chaos said:

Right now everyone and their dog is mining.  That pushes the energy consumption per transaction up. 

Once mining becomes less profitable, fewer people will do it and the amount of consumed electricity per transaction will drop.

And the other counter to the energy efficiency of the network is a massive increase in transactions, if bitcoin was equally popular as EFTPOS/Credit Cards even with mining there is a potential for it to be energy competitive with traditional banking systems.

[vanished]

2 hours ago, Captain Chaos said:

Right now everyone and their dog is mining.  That pushes the energy consumption per transaction up. 

Once mining becomes less profitable, fewer people will do it and the amount of consumed electricity per transaction will drop.

Are you sure that's actually how it works?  My understanding is it takes a certain amount of computation to perform a transaction - and amount that is constantly increasing - and so if fewer people mine, it just means transactions will take longer, but they should end up using about the same amount of power.

[captain_to_fire]

11 hours ago, ChickenCake248 said:

I mean bitcoins are worth several thousand dollars now

1 BTC = 7325 USD 

[DildorTheDecent]

3 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

1 BTC = 7325 USD 

Jesus Christ, WTF.

 

That's insane. 

[dizmo]

4 hours ago, patrick3027 said:

I think it's useful to know that paying with Bitcoin consumes A LOT more electricity than the traditional banking system. 

 

Makes you wonder how scalable Bitcoin is as a payment solution. 

Thats not per payment, that's per mining transaction. Once it's mined it becomes like any other currency. It's definitely a bizarre thing entirely if you really think about it. 

[paddy-stone]

Unless I'm reading this wrong, that seems way cheaper than I'd have thought, 215KwH x 12p (the average inc VAT and standing charge in UK right now that I pay) = £25.80

 

[Dylanc1500]

So from what I figure at roughly 24 terra watt hours a year. That's 2.7 gigawatts every hour, so they are using roughly $328,000 worth of electricity every hour for mining (based on my local rate of .12 per KWh). Based on the rate of 215 kilowatt hours per Bitcoin, that's 12,742 BTC per hour. With the current exchange rate at ~$7370, that wand they are effectively making ~$93,915,000 per hour. 

 

Someone please double check my mental math.

[vanished]

38 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Unless I'm reading this wrong, that seems way cheaper than I'd have thought, 215KwH x 12p (the average inc VAT and standing charge in UK right now that I pay) = £25.80

 

Hm, so that would be the cost of a single block right?  And how many transactions do those contain?  Because I know each of those tends to cost the user a few bucks worth of bitcoin, so I'd imagine the sum total is a lot more than this, which would explain where the "profit" in doing this comes from I guess.

[paddy-stone]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Hm, so that would be the cost of a single block right?  And how many transactions do those contain?  Because I know each of those tends to cost the user a few bucks worth of bitcoin, so I'd imagine the sum total is a lot more than this, which would explain where the "profit" in doing this comes from I guess.

I've no idea? it can't be for the full bitcoin though, cos that would be hella cheap to mine

 

Seriously though, if that article is for real and accurate and the average US household consumes 901KwH per month, that is astounding - my household uses an average of around 450-550KwH per month, and that's for everything, my servers, computers, TVs, consoles etc, which I have a lot of... AND my household stuff like fridge/freezers etc.

 

I tell you what though, if it was £25.80 to mine a single bitcoin, there'd be a hell of a LOT more people mining them

I have little knowledge of mining at all and probably misudnerstood, but from what I understand, they might be quoting the average electricity used per transaction by everyone, so in other words if there were so much electric used X, by the number of bitcoin transactions Y, whether they actually mined a bitcoin or not, and regardless of the efficiency of the hardware used.

If someone DID actually understand it, please let me know.

[Dylanc1500]

8 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

I've no idea? it can't be for the full bitcoin though, cos that would be hella cheap to mine

 

Seriously though, if that article is for real and accurate and the average US household consumes 901KwH per month, that is astounding - my household uses an average of around 450-550KwH per month, and that's for everything, my servers, computers, TVs, consoles etc, which I have a lot of... AND my household stuff like fridge/freezers etc.

 

I tell you what though, if it was £25.80 to mine a single bitcoin, there'd be a hell of a LOT more people mining them

I have little knowledge of mining at all and probably misudnerstood, but from what I understand, they might be quoting the average electricity used per transaction by everyone, so in other words if there were so much electric used X, by the number of bitcoin transactions Y, whether they actually mined a bitcoin or not, and regardless of the efficiency of the hardware used.

If someone DID actually understand it, please let me know.

You aren't far off, with my local rate it is roughly $25.82 to mine a single Bitcoin. If you look at my break down in my previous post.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

4 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

My understanding is it takes a certain amount of computation to perform a transaction - and amount that is constantly increasing - and so if fewer people mine, it just means transactions will take longer, but they should end up using about the same amount of power.

The blockchain itself gets longer and longer indeed.  But that doesn't affect the miners.  Every 10 minutes one block gets added, regardless if there's 2 transactions in that block or 2 million transactions. 

The miners focus on solving that single block's computation, and there's a difficulty built in by the blockchain to make sure that mining the block takes around 10 minutes.  If more people mine, the difficulty goes up.  If fewer people mine, it goes down. 

 

A more thorough explanation here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=176108.0

 

EDIT : As for the power consumption and the environmental impact, my electricity supplier relies almost entirely on nuclear power (they have gas plants too, but those are only used in times of high demand) so I'm not too fussed about contributing to global warming.  Due to no accurate monthly data in the past years, I just can't predict the actual difference in monthly usage. 

In the summer I'm using a lot more electricity than I did before I started mining (duh!), but in the winter the PCs are helping with heating.  Seeing as a 500W PC generates as much heat as a 500W space heater, I save as much electricity on heating as I use to mine.  So in the winter I'm basically mining with free electricity. 

[vanished]

Just now, Captain Chaos said:

The blockchain itself gets longer and longer indeed.  But that doesn't affect the miners.  Every 10 minutes one block gets added, regardless if there's 2 transactions in that block or 2 million transactions. 

The miners focus on solving that single block's computation, and there's a difficulty built in by the blockchain to make sure that mining the block takes around 10 minutes.  If more people mine, the difficulty goes up.  If fewer people mine, it goes down. 

Oh, I thought there were a certain number of transactions assigned per block and a block just takes as long as it takes, being faster if there's more miners.  Good to know

[paddy-stone]

4 hours ago, Dylanc1500 said:

You aren't far off, with my local rate it is roughly $25.82 to mine a single Bitcoin. If you look at my break down in my previous post.

Not entirely sure I understand still... unless you mean for your share of the bitcoin? As, if you were able to mine a bitcoin on your own for only £25.80 that'd be amazing and very big profitable income. Whereas if you are sharing that bitcoin with a couple hundred others, then it sounds about right.

[yian88]

shut it down now, it costs too much CO2

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

Not entirely sure I understand still... unless you mean for your share of the bitcoin? As, if you were able to mine a bitcoin on your own for only £25.80 that'd be amazing and very big profitable income. Whereas if you are sharing that bitcoin with a couple hundred others, then it sounds about right.

There's also a probability factor to it, it's possible to never mine a single bitcoin even with a huge array of GPUs. Incredibly unlikely but possible. It's the whole law of averages and economy of scale thing.

 

It's possible that bitcoin mining as a whole is that profitable but on a micro scale is can be much much worse.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

7 hours ago, yian88 said:

shut it down now, it costs too much CO2

Let's shut down gaming too while we're at it.  That generates tons of CO2 as well, and all the sitting down in front of a screen isn't good for people's health either. 

 

And as I stated earlier, mining doesn't necessarily generate CO2 at all.  It all depends on the source of your electricity.