Putting Bitcoin's Energy use debate to bed...
Bitcoin uses a ton of energy, but it's not using much extra energy...
You've likely heard the argument by now... the one that says bitcoin uses more energy than X country.
It's been the negative talking point on bitcoin for a couple months now, and for good reason considering the major push towards renewables with the new administration.
However, there's quite a bit more to the story...
(Source: https://twitter.com/BTC_Archive/status/1391747174950752260)
The world produces 50,000 TWh that is literally wasted every single year, it goes unused.
For some perspective, bitcoin uses roughly 120 TWh.
And don't even get me started on the comparison between bitcoin mining and gold mining etc in terms of total energy usage and environmental impact.
As well as the fact that bitcoin is an entire monetary settlement layer, which should be compared more closely to the entire banking industry, which as you could have guesses uses orders of magnitude more energy than bitcoin.
So many issues here that the media tends to gloss over...
We need people to keep reminding the world of this so that the negative narrative surround bitcoin energy usage doesn't become the quasi truth that the politicians run with.
Stay informed my friends.
-Doc
Thank you for this awareness!
It's not just energy consumption of Bitcoin mining... It's also about collecting the heat generated by the mining farms and using it for heating houses or office buildings. Heat generated by electronics has almost zero harmful emissions.
Well said. Not to mention a lot of the mining is using excess energy. Energy that was going to be produced regardless.
Energy isn't actually produced as amount of energy in the universe is constant... It's just form of the energy that is converted back and forth.
This is also the core reason for avalanche effect in required hashing power for most proof-of-work coins... It's essentially self-feeding loop. Because it takes longer to unlock the mining rewards than to unlock normal transfers, people need to constantly mine more blocks to get rewards of previous blocks.
Like I've written before, only way to solve the issue is to avoid accepting blocks with too small amount of transactions. When the actual time between subsequent blocks increases too much compared to expected time, it will drive the difficulty down and that makes mining blocks easier, thus less profitable with powerful hardware.
If difficulty drops too much, it causes the network to generate more potential blocks and that causes more competition between miners and mining pools and that drives the difficulty back higher...
Lovely analysis 👍