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Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

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Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#391

Slightly tangential question: Couldn't Bitcoin be implemented on something other Blockchain, since Blockchain is so computationally intensive. Like why not use a SQL database instead. It's definitely not technically infeasible, and you can reliably achieve all objectives of Bitcoin by doing so. The idea of independent financial system is great, but the inefficiency of it's usage is something I am very doubtful about.

A decentralized application requires you to download all of its data so that you can verify it yourself. An SQL database on top of a blockchain doesn't really change anything except make data storage less efficient.

No, I meant instead of blockchain.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#392

Slightly tangential question: Couldn't Bitcoin be implemented on something other Blockchain, since Blockchain is so computationally intensive. Like why not use a SQL database instead. It's definitely not technically infeasible, and you can reliably achieve all objectives of Bitcoin by doing so. The idea of independent financial system is great, but the inefficiency of it's usage is something I am very doubtful about.

The blockchain model is designed to be immutable, a block of transactions are locked in place by the blocks before and after it. A traditional database structure wouldn't have that form of baked-in security, though I'm sure there are other models that could work.

You, that’s the word I was looking for. There are solutions out there which achieve similar objective. It’s like they the benefits of blockchain are being used for bitcoin, but if you designed one with bitcoin in mind, there is efficient solution there.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#393

I had an interesting conversation with a friend a few days ago. We both installed larger solar systems than we need. We are net exporters of energy. And we are both disgusted by how the energy company takes this energy and, effectively, pays us nothing for it while charging our neighbors who use it full rate. One of the ideas that was floated in the conversation was to setup a Bitcoin (or some other crypto) mining sy…

It would take decades just to recoup the equipment costs. It currently takes about 12-18 months to recoup the equipment costs ignoring electricity costs This assumes running the miners 24/7. If you only run your equipment a few hours a day in the summer months when your excess solar power is most abundant, then a decade feels about right.

While I never took the time to quantify this, as I said, I always had a sense that this was not a viable idea. In other words, my educated guess told me it would be a waste of time to even evaluate the concept.

> If you only run your equipment a few hours a day in the summer months when your excess solar power is most abundant

As a point of interest, in my region (Southern California) the point of peak efficiency is shifted into the March-April-May period. Most people assume summer is when you do best. I too made that assumption before installing my array.

There's an interplay between available solar radiation and panel temperature. As panels get hotter they become less efficient. This negative temperature coefficient is about 0.4% per degree C. Baseline specification are given for a panel operating at 25 degrees C. In the summer panels easily reach more than double that temperature. Which means that, in round numbers, you lose at least 10% of your generation capacity. A system that peaks at 10 kW in April might only yield somewhere in the 8 kW to 9 kW region in the summer.

There's also how the energy is used. In the summer we have to run the air conditioning system nearly all day. That's about 5 kW for, say, ten hours a day. The AC system is off outside of the hottest months of the year. Which means we have a lot more excess energy during that time, in fact, if the AC isn't running we could run mining equipment consuming 5 kW for about 8 to 10 hours per day and still come out net positive in terms of energy costs to the utilities.

Also as @Nbox9 mentioned, miner heat could be used for heating the home. This means that using excess energy outside of the period of the year during which air conditioning is necessary could be used for both mining and some nominal amount of heating. I can imagine a fully optimized system where you can use this to heat water and perhaps some of the home. Crazy, I know.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#394

Bitcoin and Data centers are two major global warming behemoths no one talks about. It's about time it became an issue.

People are working at making data centers more energy efficient rather than less.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/femp/energy-efficiency-data-cent...

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/green-data-ce...

From the later article:

> What we do know is this: if the latest efficiency improvements in data center hardware and infrastructure continues apace, it should be possible to accommodate a 60 percent increase in demand for both traditional and hyperscale data center services over the next 12 months, without an accompanying increase in the energy they consume. But in order to achieve this feat, it is imperative that data center operators follow energy-efficient design principles.

https://www.comsoc.org/publications/tcn/2019-nov/energy-effi...

> The report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has an encouraging conclusion. It states that improved energy is almost canceling out growing capacity. In 2014, data centers in the United States consumed 70 billion kilowatt hours. If energy efficiency levels remained as they were in 2010, the energy consumption by data centers today would be 160 billion kilowatt hours. The surprising reality is that the estimate for 2020 is only 73 billion kilowatt hours.

---

Data center power consumption is a big topic, and a lot of people are talking about it and working on improving its energy efficiency.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#395
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is a classic tragedy of the commons situation, and that is what politics - collective action - is good at fixing (at least sometimes).

Tragedy of the commons is often due to ineffective or free pricing of government regulated items. Parks look free and become an appealing place to make homeless encampments. The free market with enforceable property rights fixes this government problem. If you don't like that people run computers to play games or wash laundry or watch videos or hash strings, re-pricing electricity fixes that. Germans are experiencing…

A good and correct counter. Perhaps the other poster meant that this (electricity consumption) has mis-priced externalities, which is probably true.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but if we start playing the “which energy use is more valid” game then quickly we realize energy is in the eye of the beholder, and the solution is a pollution tax. Bitcoin shouldn’t be outlawed anymore than video games (a totally useless tech from a society viewpoint) but HNers love their video games and Google paychecks.

Would you consider having USA impose environmental parity tariffs as a way to tax over-polluting countries (which are used by Apple because of the lack of environmental and human protections which make things cheaper to manufacturer over there)?

I have nuanced and specific views on this, but to summarize, I don't think we can ever rely on that as a solution. I think a more realistic solution is more exotic - chemicals in the atmosphere, giant mirrors in space, some sort of carbon sequestration, etc. The majority of environmental damage is to the immediate vicinity (air / water) of the factories, and the citizens of the nation will have to demand change from their leaders, just as happened in England and then America throughout the industrial revolution. The global environmental risks we need to solve in more advanced ways.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#397
post #61

PoW mining (at least), must be made illegal. I have no doubts that it will end by becoming illegal, the question is how and when. It boggles the mind that there is now essentially a worldwide tax on semiconductors, which is used to do... nothing of any value whatsoever. And this thing just keeps growing. The effects will be felt in more and more economic sectors. Something will have to give. So, the only question is:…

What else would you make illegal? High fidelity 3d graphics in gaming? It is clearly wasteful and games are hardly any better because of high polygon count, right?

[deleted]

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#398
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't have faith in the mainstream financial system and are fleeing for the exits.

It amazes me, how many people seem not to see this point

Because it's not actually happening, if you look at the amount of money invested in cryptocurrencies and their transaction volume for goods and services compared to fiat currencies.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#399

Slightly tangential question: Couldn't Bitcoin be implemented on something other Blockchain, since Blockchain is so computationally intensive. Like why not use a SQL database instead. It's definitely not technically infeasible, and you can reliably achieve all objectives of Bitcoin by doing so. The idea of independent financial system is great, but the inefficiency of it's usage is something I am very doubtful about.

I think technologically a blockchain like DB could be implemented I Cassandra: every person has a node which replicates n% of the ledger. We implement a "block-chain" verification system by hashing the content of each previous transaction and there you have a ledger.

The main issue is concensus in a distributed system were we dobt trust each other (i.e. no central source of truth/authority) If 2 transactions collide/conflict with each other, who do you trust? Who has the last word? How do you prevent double spending? (Given the eventual co consistency of the DB and an adversarial environment).

The truth is that these questions and more are answered to a certain degree by different Blockchain protocols. Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance is one, PoS is other, PoW yet another and we even have crazy ones like Chia (proof of space time).

It's like the token ring vs star topilogies ir ipx/spx vs tcp/IP or http vs gopher vs ftp vs nntp vs smtp.

Did you know that around the 90s there were a lot of us purists that made a lot of noise because people were sharing files in a very inefficient way through SMTP? you've got to base64 or uuencode it... its wasteful. FTP instead was made for file transfer.

The same thing will happen with blockchain technology. Inefficiencies will be ironed out.

Re: Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total during 2021

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no new dirty power plants like coal or nuclear built specifically for bitcoin mining. There are definitely new renewable energy sources built for bitcoin mining. So dirty energy would be used anyway! The rate of new renewable energy sources created because of bitcoin is higher overall than without bitcoin.

>like coal or nuclear Nuclear is dirty? How?

Fukushima
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