The more and more I hear about BitCoin, the worse the story seems to get.
I found an article on ZDNet which which describes some of the issues with the energy cost to produce and the criminal element surrounding BitCoin in general.
The article can be found here: (Want to make money mining bitcoins? Criminals have you beat)
Criminality aside, as the article points out, the cost to produce BTC requires increasing computer resources. This is fine, but it doesn’t dive deep enough into the impact that this increase in resources requires. Let’s think about this a minute. Looking at blockchain.info, we can see that there are roughly 55,671 TeraHertz (55,671,000Ghz) of processing power dedicated to mining BitCoin constantly. Granted, a lot of this comes from specialized ASIC equipment, but still, that’s a staggering amount of resources and energy required either way.
Two words: Carbon Footprint.
I’m no expert, but I know the footprint for BitCoin mining must exceed anything allowable by any government entity for a single source. I’m not an activist either, but I can see that this has a tangible, negative impact on the rate of greenhouse gases produced. In fact, this is alarming, especially as BitCoin starts to come close to costing more energy to produce than they are worth in the first place.
Very fuzzy math:
Right now, 1 BTC is trading for $495.00 CAD. I’m Canadian, so this is what we’re going to base things off of. (They were previously trading for over 2x that amount, but the BTC economy seems to have suffered lately).
According to bitcoinwatch.com there are an average of 4.96 blocks produced every hour, and currently every block is worth about 25 BTC. This represents about 124 BTC per hour added to the BTC economy (or a CAD value of about $61,380).
Let’s see what this represents in electricity. I pay between $0.072 and $0.129 per kWh depending on peak usage hours. Let’s use $0.10/kWh as an easy average.
Lets assume that that all 55kT/hz in these pools are using the most fantastic technology available (28nm processors). We’ll use this card as an example (Butterfly Labs 1-th-bitcoin-miner) and that they consume 650W per 1T/hz as estimated. This is a VERY conservative estimate, as only the top end devices in these pools use the most efficient hardware.
Here it comes…
55,671 * 650W = 36,186,150W or 36MW … yes, 36 MEGAWATTS is consumed for the purpose of these pools alone worldwide, constantly.
36MW at my $0.10 per kWh = $3,600/h
Ok, this doesn’t come close to the current $61k worth of coin that are produced, but it’s still a sizable impact on other economies.
-Paul
Edit: Seems I’m not the only one concerned about this, I’ve found this older article which also highlights the concerns with BitCoin and carbon footprint: (Bitcoin has a dark side: its carbon footprint)
