Amount of Electricity Wasted on Crypto Mining and the Wastes it Generates

[mikegg]

How much electricity has been wasted on mining crypto coins in total? This includes bitcoins and all of the other coins.

And then what's the equivalent amount of pollution and waste mining has generated?

 

[John Connor]

Hard to say since there are ASIC's now.

 

[Rakehellion]

Negligible, compared to the energy used on other consumer and industrial tasks. Also Folding and SETI@Home have existed for years.

 

[lakedude]

Can't speak to the coin mining but Folding and BOINC projects were adding about $100 to my electric bill per month. I was running a PS3 and 10-12 computers all with at least one video card.

Now I only Fold if I need extra heat so that energy isn't really wasted.

 

[lamedude]

1.21 jigawatts, but Mr. Fusion doesn't produce any waste so its all good.

 

[BrightCandle]

The total bitcoin network is putting out ~ 2.8 * 10^8 mhash/s.

A butterfly Asic can deliver 5000 mhash/s at 44 watts. So in total that is 2464 Kwatts of power (and that is definitely the best case in efficiency of the network) which is about 2464 KW. So about $275000 worth of electricity a month.

Of course a lot of people were mining at 500 mhash/s for 300W with GPUs and that turns the calculation kind of ugly. Then it would be more like 168,000 KW and that would be more like $18,748,800 a month.

 

[Gunbuster]

Some of the "waste" is offset because its winter and miners are using less of whatever utility they would normally be heating with.

 

[mikegg]

The total bitcoin network is putting out ~ 2.8 * 10^8 mhash/s.

A butterfly Asic can deliver 5000 mhash/s at 44 watts. So in total that is 2464 Kwatts of power (and that is definitely the best case in efficiency of the network) which is about 2464 KW. So about $275000 worth of electricity a month.

Of course a lot of people were mining at 500 mhash/s for 300W with GPUs and that turns the calculation kind of ugly. Then it would be more like 168,000 KW and that would be more like $18,748,800 a month.

What about combining others like litecoin and dogecoin?

 

[pm]

It's worth noting that the current system for electronic transactions isn't "free" or even that efficient either. Consider how much electricity is wasted in credit card point-of-sale terminals in stores and by the big data centers used by the large credit card companies.

Visa has 7 data centers nationwide. From this link there are details on one data center.

The company's flagship data center... is a 140,000-square-foot facility. It consists of seven independent physical pods that are linked by a corridor as long as three football fields, and which are filled with the latest hardware from IBM, Cisco, EMC, Hitachi and the like. Two of the pods run the company's powerful VisaNet payment-authorization system, three more act as backups and run Visa's internal systems, and the last two are shells awaiting an expansion of services and data requirements.

Inside the pods, 376 servers, 277 switches, 85 routers and 42 firewalls--all connected by 3,000 miles of cable--hum around the clock, enabling transactions around the globe in near real-time and keeping Visa's business running.

So for 5 pods, there's 1880 servers, 1385 switches, 425 routers and 210 firewalls. And they have 7 data centers like this nationwide. So let's be conservative and say a server is 100W, a switch is 30W, a router is 20W and a firewall is 30W - all numbers that I think most people would say are a bit low - that's roughly 1.6MW. But then you need all the energy to cool that data center - this study says the average PUE of a data center is 2.9 as of last year so that's 4.8MW total power for all of them factoring in facility energy. And then according to this link there are 10 million credit card point-of-sale terminals in the US. So say, they use 5W each... That's 50MW.

So any fair discussion of bitcoin energy "wasted" should at least have some form of estimate about how much energy is wasted on the current electronic fund systems.

 

[who?]

I know what problems Folding@home is helping solve. What problems are bitcoin miners helping with?

 

[who?]

Are bitcoins as "real" as the money (or electronic records of money) in the current electronic funds transfer systems?

 

[BrightCandle]

Bitcoin mining is basically validating the key chain to ensure that its not been hacked. So its purpose is that of security of the currency and the transactions listed.

I don't think any money is real, the paper you have in your wallet is just printed paper but because we are all willing to exchange it for goods and such is how it gains value. If you can find someone willing to either exchange bitcoins for goods or services or another currency then its as real as any other currency.

 

[code65536]

It's probably not worse than the waste that goes into mining gold. Now that is devastating, particularly in the Third-World countries where that happens.

I dislike bitbuggers for the same reason I dislike goldbuggers.

I fully agree with Warren Buffett's sentiments on gold:

Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.

 

[Mand]

It's probably not worse than the waste that goes into mining gold. Now that is devastating, particularly in the Third-World countries where that happens.

I dislike bitbuggers for the same reason I dislike goldbuggers.

I fully agree with Warren Buffett's sentiments on gold:

Particularly since we use truly nasty things in the extraction process, like mercury.

 

[greenhawk]

Some of the "waste" is offset because its winter and miners are using less of whatever utility they would normally be heating with.

it is not winter everywhere though.

as to the original q, it depends on how the power is generated as well in some situations as some types of power have a far higher carbon effect to the environment.

If you want to count just $, then different areas have way different power costs. Some people are mining at locations where they get free power (renting in some fashion).

Though in terms of waste, you can point to a lot of things in the first world countries and just have to shake your head at it. The amount of food wasted as "it does not look right" at every level of manufacturing/growing is just mind boggling. fresh Grapes are one example that I learnt during a summer job. 3/4 of them do not get off the vine (cut early and dropped on the ground) as the growers want unblemished grapes of a given bunch size. And that is before they even leave the vines to be packaged / shipped / unpacked / displayed or get left behind as too many people have "grazed" a few grapes off of a bunch while still in the store/supermarket.

 

[greenhawk]

Particularly since we use truly nasty things in the extraction process, like mercury.

That is at the start of the process. What goes on at the other end when a device that has gold in it becomes end of life is not much better. Lots of time and effort is put into stopping the electronics going to land fill / being burnt, but what happens is the collected items are sometimes sent to third world countries where they burn it anyway to reclaim metals like gold.

 

[serpretetsky]

Are bitcoins as "real" as the money (or electronic records of money) in the current electronic funds transfer systems?

Why did you put quotes around "real"? It seems like you realize "real" has no meaning when it comes to money, in which case why are you asking if one is real and one isn't?

Did you know at some point paper money was actually an "I owe you" from banks which means you could get coins (the actual currency) from the bank. There is no longer enough coins to back paper currency. So these "I owe you" notes became actual currency.

The only value money has is the value people put into it. 100$ dollar bills are not worth one hundred dollars as a resource. Most transactions are not even represented by paper currency in modern times, it's all numbers in computers. In the future, most likely, physical currency in developed nations will be replaced completely with virtual currency.

 

[brett_stevens]

Also Folding and SETI@Home have existed for years.

Check out some of the results of folding@home research:

http://folding.stanford.edu/home/papers

I don't know how SETI has turned out, but I haven't seen any Klingons around lately.

 

[devhda]

Are bitcoins as "real" as the money (or electronic records of money) in the current electronic funds transfer systems?

what is real, Neo?

 

[Red Squirrel]

The real waste is if/when the whole bitcoin thing crashes and all these ASICs that were made specifically for bitcoin mining will be of no use. If Bitcoin does not crash, it's still inevitable that these ASICs will eventually be replaced either with much more powerful ones or a new tech since the difficulty increases. Though I'm sure someone smart will figure out a way to use those ASICs to do something else like other type of decryption. Heck, this whole Bitcoin thing could have been started by the RSA to stimulate the industry to make these cards in first place so the NSA does not have to spend money researching it. *tin foil hat*

 

[lagokc]

Negligible, compared to the energy used on other consumer and industrial tasks. Also Folding and SETI@Home have existed for years.

SETI@Home should have started rewarding people with "Spacebucks" which could be traded between accounts. :whiste:

 

[Red Squirrel]

IS SETI@home still a thing? That is probably the most wasteful way to use up cpu cycles lol. At least stuff like F@H has some kind of purpose. I don't know if it's actually helped at all or not but at least the goal is there.

 

[dorion]

IS SETI@home still a thing? That is probably the most wasteful way to use up cpu cycles lol. At least stuff like F@H has some kind of purpose. I don't know if it's actually helped at all or not but at least the goal is there.

No, the most wasteful thing to use CPU cycles on is DRM. I don't find the manpower put into maintaining or inventing new DRM schemes to be very useful either.

 

[IEC]

Are bitcoins as "real" as the money (or electronic records of money) in the current electronic funds transfer systems?

You realize they are all the same 1's and 0's, just with different encryption and transaction logging schemes, right?

To the OP, to get a fair comparison of the energy "wasted" you would need to compare the energy used to process normal credit and debit card transactions (including POS machines, networking hubs, servers, etc.) versus the energy used to "mine" cryptos (which also secures the network).

As for the heat, for many of us it is useful (in reducing the amount we turn on the heater) for much of the year. When I lived in the frigid north that meant pretty much all the time except 3 months of the year.

Before BTC and LTC mining I did F@H and other distributed computing projects so I'd be using the same amount of electricity anyways.

 

[jagec]

what is real, Neo?

Yup. All currency is powered by belief. Of course, not as many people are clapping their hands for the cryptos, and having the world's biggest economy backed by the world's biggest military behind the dollar is enough to make anyone religious.

What's REALLY funny is watching different crypto-nerds argue about how the other guy's coin is a "joke" whereas theirs is, presumably, real.