Questions tagged [energy-consumption]
The energy-consumption tag has no usage guidance.
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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 ...
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Will mining significantly increase the power consumption of my PC?
I have a PC that is always on 24/7. I use it as an SSH and backup server, and it has a modest, not-too-great GPU that sits idle most of the time.
I hear a lot of talk about mining not being cost-...
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Will the amount of electricity used for mining be huge if Bitcoin is widely adopted?
A quick and very rough estimation: If the USD/BTC exchange rate grows to $1000/BTC (not that far-fetched if Bitcoin is actually widely adopted) bitcoins for a value of $300000 would be produced every ...
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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 ...
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4
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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 ...
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What is the ecological effect of increased work for the Bitcoin chain?
As more users use Bitcoin and "forced work" difficulty increases what effect does this have ecologically? It is a silly question I know. I'm just comparing let's say value or effect of using ...
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Where in the world is bitcoin mining the most profitiable? [closed]
This is a question for Bitcoin miners. High cost of electricity can really cut down on the profitability of Bitcoin mining. I want to know what geographic location has the cheapest electricity and ...
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Will the energy cost and deflationary nature of Bitcoins doom the currency to obscurity?
I couldn't find enough questions that ask this head-on1, so consider that if:
Bitcoins are designed to reflect the deflationary characteristics of a specie currency; and
The distributed nature of ...
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World-wide price for generating 1BTC
Can we find an algorithm to compute the average price (as energy consumption) of 1 BTC being generated if we know: hash rate, difficulty, energy price?
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How much energy will the Bitcoin network eventually consume? [duplicate]
A recent Bloomberg article stated that the Bitcoin network currently consumes about half as much energy as the Large Hadron Collider or enough to power 31,000 US homes. Even if the article is way off ...
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Is the current network difficulty algorithm appropriate for "Peak transaction-only mining"?
At some point in the future miners will depend more on the Tx fee than per-block payout.
Right now people turn on and off their equipment based on local trends such as price of electricity, etc. On ...
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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 ...
5
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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 ...
5
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2
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Does difficulty ever stop increasing?
I know we don't have to worry about this for a very long time, but...
One argument against Bitcoin, and really, digital currencies as a whole, is that, in order to time blocks with reasonable ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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?
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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 ...
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What has a lower long term cost per hash: LTC, BTC or other alt coin?
I'm trying to understand the cost per hash operation with Litecoin vs Bitcoin over time. The theory is that the network that has the best prospects for long-term security (via hashing) will set a ...
4
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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." ...
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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 ...
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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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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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Mining costs, impact on long term viability of BTC
Given the rapidly rising difficulty level and electricity consumption/$30 cost per transaction, is the protocol sustainable as-is, and if not what is most likely to happen in the evolution of BTC.
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What is the average amount of electrical power required to complete one Bitcoin transaction? [closed]
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 ...
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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 ...
2
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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 ...
2
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Electricity cost of mining
I've checked with my electricity provider, and I have been told the following:
Unit Rate (per kWh) = 0.1399USD
Standard Charge (per day) = 0.1645USD
While mining, if my computer is using 100w (which ...
2
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2
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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 ...
2
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1
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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 ...
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How do I protect my mining rig from brownouts and electrical surges?
My mining rig consumes 1,250w. What additional information do I need, or how do I shop for a product that will protect me from Brownouts and Electrical surges.
I'm not interested in UPS ...
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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 ...
2
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1
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How can one estimate the amount of Watts that is consumed by the mining network as a whole?
I'm trying to estimate the Wattage used in mining operations over time and compare that YoY cost with mining physical materials (gold, silver, etc). I hope that the electrical impact is less than ...
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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?
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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 ...
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If Bitcoin mining is becoming more and more impractical, what then?
If Bitcoin mining is becoming more and more impractical, where you'll need to buy like a ButterflyLabs unit, and where even eventually a room full of these units might not be enough some day, what ...
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Bitcoin mining by using solar energy. Is it possible? [closed]
I have a peculiar question concerning about bitcoin mining, for example, in Brazil it is unfeasible due to the high cost of electric power. Is it possible to do mining by using solar energy?
Does ...
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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 ...
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2
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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 ...
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1
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A Butterflylabs 5 GH/s Bitcoin Miner running at 270 Watts?
A 5 GH/s Bitcoin Miner is running at around 270 Watt. I tested it with an Wattmeter. Is that a reasonable amount of Watt? In the comparison list on Bitcoin.it it says that those devices are running at ...
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1
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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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2
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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 ...
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1
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disregard power costs for mining in the winter? [duplicate]
My theory is that if you are mining in the winter you should discount power costs completely, since the heat generated by your miner will contribute to the heating of your home and thus cause your ...
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3
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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 ...
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1
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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 ...
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0
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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 ...
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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
...
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Which percentage of miners are using ASICs vs GPUs or FPGA? Is it possible to know?
One of the common arguments against Bitcoin is the energy consumed by the network. The total hash-power of the network can be obtained fairly easily, but I'd like to estimate how much of that is due ...
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3
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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?
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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 ...