Drive 5281 km (3281 miles) for the energy of a single Bitcoin transaction

[log234]

Digiconomist have published an article about how much energy is spent computing Bitcoin transactions.

There are some interesting comparisons putting the numbers in perspective:
 

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The entire Bitcoin network now consumes more energy than a number of countries, based on a report published by the International Energy Agency.

 

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Number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin:

6,770,506

 

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Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption:

Austria

 

They also state that 1 Bitcoin transaction consumes 935 KWh of energy, in comparison 100,000 VISA transactions only consumes 169 KWh.

 

According to https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/modelx the Tesla Model X can drive 351 miles on 100 kWh.

Extrapolating from this information, you could drive a whole 3281 miles or 5281 km for the energy consumed by a single Bitcoin transaction.

That would equal driving more than the full horizontal width of the USA, or driving the full height of the USA twice. (source)

Or from the south point of Portugal to the northern point of Finland. (source)

 

This raises some serious questions regarding sustainability, another topic which they touch upon in the article.

 

Link to article: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[Fasauceome]

Bitcoin has never really been about sustainability, moreso about decentralization. That or a quick buck.

[ZcanKal]

3 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

Bitcoin has never really been about sustainability, moreso about decentralization. That or a quick buck.

But don't you think it's a bit much that you can haul several tons across the country for the same energy cost as a single currency transaction?

[Fasauceome]

Just now, ZcanKal said:

But don't you think it's a bit much that you can haul several tons across the country for the same energy cost as a single currency transaction?

There's also been a bit of a mindless obsession about Bitcoin simply for the sake of that decentralization. It's probably the least efficient currency ever, and its value is so arbitrary, constantly fluctuating wildly. I think Bitcoin deserves to die a horrible death, and this new revelation makes me feel that way even more.

[rcmaehl]

3 hours ago, fasauceome said:

Bitcoin has never really been about sustainability, moreso about decentralization. That or a quick buck.

And then when their bitcoins get stolen they get upset there's no protections.

[Froody129]

So it's one guy mining on his GTX 480

[GDRRiley]

28 minutes ago, Froody129 said:

So it's one guy mining on his GTX 480

no someones got quad SLI GTX 480s  and Cross Fire R9 295X all in the same rig, with an OCed threadripper 2.

It's also how 3 nearby schools are heated

[Ja50n]

1 hour ago, GDRRiley said:

no someones got quad SLI GTX 480s  and Cross Fire R9 295X all in the same rig, with an OCed threadripper 2.

It's also how 3 nearby schools are heated

I heated my room with mining last winter. It was either that or put that electricity through my space heater, and that wouldn’t make any money...

[asus killer]

if that's right, holly crap Bitcoining is cancer on the planet.

[Thaldor]

2 minutes ago, asus killer said:

if that's right, holly crap Bitcoining is cancer on the planet.

This and also not to mention that every single [whatever]coin sounds like a pyramid scam when you know that whoever made it in the first place mined a lot of them during developing and testing, probably even so much that no one else can ever mine as much.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

If Bitcoin would move from "proof of work" to "proof of stake", there would be no more need for GPU mining and the energy consumption would go way down.  But right now it's a mess indeed. 

[Madgemade]

13 minutes ago, Captain Chaos said:

If Bitcoin would move from "proof of work" to "proof of stake", there would be no more need for GPU mining and the energy consumption would go way down.  But right now it's a mess indeed. 

Who would provide the computer power for transactions if they didn't get anything for it. Without mining nobody would bother and no (or vert few slow) transactions could happen, the whole thing would collapse. This is why all crypto is doomed after the difficultly gets too high. The speed of transactions will just drop and then nobody will bother. It's an excellent pyramid scheme little more. Miners are in it for money. Once they stop getting it they are gone. The endless stream or new alt currencies is how they work. And each time the guy who launched in makes a ton in pre mine. The cycle continues.

[The Benjamins]

This is kinda miss leading, The transaction verification is very light weight, the reason their is so much power used it do to how mining works. Mining has a big incentive to do it so it causes many people to mine with a LOT of hardware, which drives the electricity usage up, but BTC can do the same thing with using 1/1000 of the power or even less.

 

Over time when the mining reward gets cut down (1/2 every 4 years) the demand to mass mine will go down which in turn will make it use less power.

[The Benjamins]

3 minutes ago, Madgemade said:

Who would provide the computer power for transactions if they didn't get anything for it. Without mining nobody would bother and no (or vert few slow) transactions could happen, the whole thing would collapse. This is why all crypto is doomed after the difficultly gets too high. The speed of transactions will just drop and then nobody will bother. It's an excellent pyramid scheme little more. Miners are in it for money. Once they stop getting it they are gone. The endless stream or new alt currencies is how they work. And each time the guy who launched in makes a ton in pre mine. The cycle continues.

Difficulty would just get easier, it is self adjusting.

[Madgemade]

My fundamental point is that if for some reason you had NO reward or only a small transaction reward. Which I believe will eventually happen to bitcoin. With no reward why would anyone mine to get nothing and spend money on hardware and power. Really it needs a rethink and some coins are doing this.

 

The worst case in that one day only corporations run the transactions because they can afford to while making money running wallet managing services. At that point bitcoin is just another fiat.

[The Benjamins]

18 minutes ago, Madgemade said:

My fundamental point is that if for some reason you had NO reward or only a small transaction reward. Which I believe will eventually happen to bitcoin. With no reward why would anyone mine to get nothing and spend money on hardware and power. Really it needs a rethink and some coins are doing this.

 

The worst case in that one day only corporations run the transactions because they can afford to while making money running wallet managing services. At that point bitcoin is just another fiat.

The idea is when reward is no longer a reason to mine BTC will be big enough where mining can be flipped back to wallets and set to use only a little bit of resources, and the network difficulty would drop accordingly.

 

 

[Lurick]

10 hours ago, GDRRiley said:

no someones got quad SLI GTX 480s  and Cross Fire R9 295X all in the same rig, with an OCed threadripper 2.

It's also how 3 nearby school districts are heated

Fixed that for you

[ARikozuM]

That's three years of my running days that could have gone to making Bitcoin!

[BuckGup]

But what if they came out and said all the power was from nuclear and sustainable energy. 

[MrKickkiller]

1 minute ago, BuckGup said:

But what if they came out and said all the power was from nuclear and sustainable energy. 

The energy is basically wasted.
The energy used by bitcoin could be spent powering equipment that is doing cancer research or finding ET.
Could also be used to power manufacturing facilities to make produced items cheaper, making them more affordable to poorer countries.

[TorqueS]

What's wrong with normal cash?

[asus killer]

11 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

But what if they came out and said all the power was from nuclear and sustainable energy. 

there's virtually no country on earth that can sustain itself just by renewables, you would just be diverting power from the overall pool of energy, creating more need for carbon based energies to compensate.

 

Nuclear is by no means less undesirable than burning coal, there is loads of problems with it's waste.

[BuckGup]

49 minutes ago, MrKickkiller said:

The energy is basically wasted.
The energy used by bitcoin could be spent powering equipment that is doing cancer research or finding ET.
Could also be used to power manufacturing facilities to make produced items cheaper, making them more affordable to poorer countries.

You could say that about A LOT of other things that use much more power on earth. 

[BuckGup]

38 minutes ago, asus killer said:

there's virtually no country on earth that can sustain itself just by renewables, you would just be diverting power from the overall pool of energy, creating more need for carbon based energies to compensate.

 

Nuclear is by no means less undesirable than burning coal, there is loads of problems with it's waste.

Not really considering we have the Yuka mountains all set up and would have been fine

[asus killer]

2 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

Not really considering we have the Yuka mountains all set up and would have been fine

just because we all speak English where, we are not citizens of the USA, each country has a different problem with it. But i guess you guys are sorting the problem, nice.