Questions tagged [energy-consumption]

Mining Bitcoin consumes energy in the form of electrical energy used by ASICs and other computer hardware necessary for Bitcoin's "proof-of-work" security system.

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What is a lower bound for global bitcoin mining energy usage?

How can we estimate a lower bound for the electrical energy consumed by Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism? Obviously there is no hard bound, but there are some market laws at work and I think it'...
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Impact of mining technology on global bitcoin energy usage?

I often hear that improvements of mining technology (more hashes per kWh) would improve Bitcoin energy usage. Isn't that just a misunderstanding? Isn't the energy usage hardly dependent on the actual ...
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Breakdown of BTC mining and correlation with past metrics

I am having trouble understand the current BTC market. Do current (technical) indicators like mining difficulty, hashing power, electricity costs not mean that the price should be trending upwards?
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Electricity bills to bitcoin earned [duplicate]

Im running an acer aspire 5 with an Intel i5 10th gen CPU with 16 gigs of memory. With only crypto tab open and mining Bitcoin, how much electricity is consumed if I run it for a week straight? I am ...
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Why is Bitcoin inefficient? Would other cryptocurrencies do better if they were as popular?

I'm new to blockchain stuff. I have few questions. Why are Bitcoin fees are so high compared to Litecoin or other currencies? Why does Bitcoin use so much computing power (more than Ireland)? I heard ...
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do miner hashrates vary during block production?

When a block is mined, the remaining mempool txs can be mined into a new block. Is there a difference in blocktime between accepting all streaming mempool txs into the mining block and sticking with ...
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Making the block reward dependent on the difficulty?

I am looking for papers which discuss, if making the block rewards dependent on the difficulty could be used to curb excessive PoW growth. Idea is that BTC price roughly drives difficulty and energy ...
Nordic Mainframe's user avatar
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Why must the entire chain be included in calculations if it's already been validated. Why can't the validated portions be archived to save energy? [duplicate]

I'm new to this so don't laugh. If all of the previous transactions in a blockchain have been validated as authentic, why does the entire chain have to be carried forward in the calculations? Why ...
Ed Would's user avatar
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Is BTC inherently much more energy-hungry than other currencies, or just been around longer?

A beginner question, but my understanding is that BTC (and many others) rely on solving ever increasingly complex algorithmic problems, which acts as a self-gating mechanism on the ever-decreasing ...
Mr. Boy's user avatar
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Could BTC be changed so that it limited the amount of computation power a given miner used?

I am assuming this would be hard or impossible to prevent miners from circumventing but would there be a way to change the algorithm to limit how many transactions a given mining installation could ...
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Decreasing Energy Consumption of Bitcoin's PoW with paired mining rounds

I found the following whitepaper on an algorithm called "Green-PoW" by the authors and i'm quite sure this would be a perfacet solution and also would get acceptance by the miners and the ...
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Is there a way to change Bitcoin Open Source code to be more Environmentally friendly?

If Bitcoin is open source as proponents mention, why can't make Bitcoin as environmentally friendly as Ripple, Dogecoin, Cardono etc? Elon Musk tanked the market by mentioning Dogecoin is More ...
mattsmith5's user avatar
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3 answers
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Bitcoin Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint a good long term investment?

How can Bitcoin a good long term investment, given one transaction is equivalent to carbon footprint of 986,125 VISA transactions? If they use the Lightning network which takes transactions Off the ...
mattsmith5's user avatar
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Are there any academic papers on the link between energy markets and Bitcoin mining?

I am keen to see if there have been any academic papers that have studied the link between bitcoin miners and energy markets, in-particular, if there is a so called 'no-arbitrage' requirement, or a ...
Hamish Gibson's user avatar
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Energy cost of bitcoin vs physical currency?

The bitcoin mining infrastructure uses a certain amount of energy and processing power to operate. The resource usage is often cited as part of arguments critical of bitcoin. But relatively speaking ...
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What is the ecological impact of the crypto endgame

I'm interested in the long-term ecological implications of using cryptocurrencies. kraken states in The Truth About Bitcoin: For example, according to a report from 2017, Bitcoin consumes around 8.27 ...
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To be more energy efficient, wouldn't be a consensual fork - right now - without the reward of new mined btc for each block helpful?

As the reward is lower, less effort is spend in mining new bitcoins. How the transactions fees will evolve would be quite crucial the get the miners activity down (and their energy consumption). I ...
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Can you use lower dual fuel electricity rates to run a crypto miner for heating with a second back up heat source?

Dual fuel electricity rates are significantly lower than standard rates. There are devices made in Russia that are specifically sold as Bitcoin mining space heaters. Is it permitted to use a crypto ...
Steve Rorem's user avatar
2 votes
4 answers
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Who is paying for the running costs of Bitcoin?

Bitcoin mining will consume around 70TWh for 2020 (~3 nuclear power plants). As far as I know, electricity is paid using fiat money. If 1 kWh costs 0.1 $, without counting hardware costs, that means ...
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Why doesn't Bitcoin migrate to proof-of-stake?

After reading a little bit about different consensus algorithms, I am just trying to understand why Bitcoin still uses proof-of-work. This consensus algorithm being exponentially expensive, and ...
Oscar Serna's user avatar
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How much more energy efficient is PoS (proof of stake) than PoW (proof of work)? Are there any figures on this?

I've been trying to look for some evidence showing that PoS is more energy-efficient than PoW. In theory, it's true, but if there are any figures or stats you can share on this, I'd be very grateful. ...
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How much money in terms of electricity and hardware was invested into blockchain? [closed]

Right now in this moment Thu 11 July 2019 22:08 UK time That's a sizeable number. Almost as big a fraud comitted by a single bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danske_Bank_money_laundering_scandal ...
Mars Robertson's user avatar
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How much electricity and time would mining a bitcoin consume right now? [duplicate]

I live in an area where electricity is really cheap, I'm talking 0.003 USD per kilowatts/hour. I've searched myself around internet apparently it takes 15 000 kilowatts/hour of power to mine a bitcoin,...
Thesnake123's user avatar
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What is the reason to pay miners "monetary rewards" for mining process?

Is it correct to say that: In Bitcoin, it is crucial to incentivize miners by monetary reward, because mining process has significant monetary cost (energy/electricity cost). ? otherwise, mining ...
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What is the marginal energy cost of a bitcoin transaction?

According to this web page: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained/ ...one bitcoin transaction consumes about 250 kWh of energy. Is this the ...
juhist's user avatar
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How much power for mining single Bitcoin or bitcoin cash?

Is there a fixed amount, or maybe just the average, power used to mine one single bitcoin coin or single bitcoin cash coin? How low can the price fall until miners start red numbers?
Jean Knowl's user avatar
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Can Bitcoin be "shutdown" if energy consumption for mining is heavily regulated?

Can Bitcoin be "shutdown" or heavily hampered if energy consumption for mining is heavily regulated? Can transactions still be processed if mining for new coins is hampered? I am thinking it would be ...
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Is there a significance as to why bitcoin mining "costs" time/energy/money?

I have heard that the bitcoin mining process was created in a way that purposefully required the expenditure of resources (energy/money) in order to add real value to bitcoins. In this way, when more ...
Eric Solberg's user avatar
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Why proof of work rather than posting to a public forum?

I understand that proof-of-work plus a block chain is one way of creating a trustworthy public ledger of transactions. But holy hell, the cost to society in terms of energy consumption is VERY high ...
Josh Brown Kramer's user avatar
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As transactions are getting increasingly slow and expensive, how can Bitcoin compete against newer better currencies? [closed]

If I understand correctly, every transaction needs new blocks to be created (mined), which is becoming increasingly hard, slow and expensive. Not mentioning the massive energy consumption, already ...
Dmitri Zaitsev's user avatar
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How many CPU's work on blockchain today?

How many CPU's are working on blockchain now? How much energy is estimated to be consumed? I read an article on coindesk saying it may surpass all other energy consumption by 2020..... seriously?
user152037's user avatar
5 votes
4 answers
658 views

What is a likely solution to Bitcoin's energy consumption problem?

If the price of Bitcoin continues to climb, the total energy consumption of the system will increase proportionally at least until 2020 when block reward halves. It is not unlikely that at this point ...
lex82's user avatar
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How does bitcoins power consumption compare to other financial institutions/exchanges? (ie banks, stock exchanges)

So recently in the news there has been some negative reporting bout bitcoins power consumption. "the Bitcoin network is consuming power at an annual rate of 32TWh—about as much as Denmark." ...
Dan Anderson's user avatar
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In the case that I have free electricity, is mining worth it?

As the title indicates, I have three options that are gonna make me free of charge in terms are electricity, which I describe below: I have free access to electricity. I can have as much as I want ...
Alex's user avatar
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How does the computational cost of verifying transactions scale with the number of total transactions?

As more transactions are added to the block chain, does each individual transaction (ie. I send a bitcoin to a friend) get more expensive (in terms of FLOPS) to verify and commit to the chain? If each ...
wroscoe's user avatar
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What is the average amount of electrical power required to complete one Bitcoin transaction? [duplicate]

Once a bitcoin has been mined, if I want to use it to pay for something, what is the average amount of electrical power required to process that payment or bitcoin transfer? Does this vary with the ...
user's user avatar
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What would be the benefits of 10x the energy spent

Let's suppose the bitcoin network grew to be 10x the size it currently is in terms of the amount of energy spent. No other changes to the protocol were made. What benefits would this have versus ...
Douglas Drouillard's user avatar
2 votes
3 answers
367 views

can cryptocurrencies be energy efficient?

Is there an intrinsic reason why cryptocurrencies currently take a lot of energy to keep working? Is there a way to make a cryptocurrency still widely used but make it energy efficient?
user59049's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
200 views

Is this the answer to Bitcoin's massive energy consumption issues? [closed]

In today’s world carbon footprint and efficiency matter. A lot of real world resources are burned away and a massive amount of computing power and electricity is spent on the bitcoin ledger to verify ...
Jordan Lindsey's user avatar
5 votes
4 answers
2k views

Keeping old blocks on an external hard drive and latest blocks on an SSD

I would like to keep the latest 512 MB of blocks on my SSD (using pruning?) and the rest of the blockchain on an external non-SSD hard-drive. Is there a way to do this already, or do I need to write a ...
Geremia's user avatar
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What are the political and environmental implications of growing Bitcoin electricity consumption?

I have found lots of articles talking about how bitcoin works, and quite a few that analyze the growing industry around it. Relatively little though speaks to the potential political implications of ...
Bradley Thomas's user avatar
1 vote
3 answers
426 views

Who Really Controls Bitcoin?

Source: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@dantheman/who-really-controls-bitcoin This article suggests that governments and electricity companies have the power to control bitcoin. Any truth in this ...
oshirowanen's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
545 views

Would free energy cause a market collapse?

Consider a world where energy is free and plentiful. Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, are given value since they are 'proof' of work. This work comes at the cost of: a. time b. energy By ...
Dylan Madisetti's user avatar
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1 answer
1k views

BTC transaction cost vs fees

According to https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/11/how-do-ethereums-transaction-fees-compare-to-bitcoin current BTC transaction fees vary anywhere from $0.01 to $0.09 USD. But according to ...
Juan Ignacio Pérez Sacristán's user avatar
11 votes
4 answers
1k views

What can be done to slow/prevent mining centralization?

Assuming all buyers have access to the same ASICs (ignoring that ASICs developers and manufacturers will always have the latest first, even if only used for "testing" prior to sale) energy costs would ...
Chris Silva's user avatar
5 votes
1 answer
1k views

What can be done with old (unprofitable) ASICs? [duplicate]

GPUs used for bitcoin mining have many other purposes and can generally be sold after they are no longer mining enough Bitcoin to meet variable (electricity, etc) costs. What uses do old ASICs have ...
opensourceprivacy's user avatar
5 votes
1 answer
198 views

All else being equal which is better for the environment, Litecoin or Bitcoin?

Does scrypt mining inherently confer any environmental benefit or energy efficiency for the same level of service provided?
Bradley Thomas's user avatar
13 votes
1 answer
2k views

Can it really be true that the Bitcoin system consumes almost $1.000.000 in electricity per day?

So I've been trying to figure out how much running the Bitcoin system really costs using the following numbers: Total Bitcoin Hash Rate: 300.000.000 GH/s Hashrate of an ANTMINER S4 (currently one of ...
Sebastian Kovats's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
625 views

What are the limits of ASIC Mining?

My assumption is that ASIC miners optimize for the "hashes per joule" metric, as did GPU miners over CPU miners. It would seem that after some time, the decision to mine Bitcoins would be based on if ...
locksley's user avatar
4 votes
4 answers
439 views

Mining costs, impact on long term viability of BTC [closed]

Given the rapidly rising difficulty level and electricity consumption, is the protocol sustainable as-is, and if not what is most likely to happen in the evolution of BTC?
Bradley Thomas's user avatar