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.
Questions tagged [energy-consumption]
67 questions
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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 resource intensive, doesn't it make more sense for…
Oscar Serna
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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-effective for most people because electricity isn't…
Phil
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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 hour, given the current rate of 50BTC each 10…
D.H.
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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 the most efficient ASICs): 2.000 GH/s…
Sebastian Kovats
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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 seem to promote a long term trend of mining in…
Chris Silva
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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 computational power for protein folding vs Bitcoin and…
cyphunk
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Where in the world is bitcoin mining the most profitiable?
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 thus most profitable Bitcoin mining in the world?
Thomas Van Riper
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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 the cryptocurrency requires a high intrinsic value…
LateralFractal
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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?
John
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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 the whole I don't think these local decisions…
makerofthings7
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How much energy will the Bitcoin network eventually consume?
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 the mark, it is undeniable that the network's…
Manish
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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 predictability every 10 minutes throughout the life of…
Colin Dean
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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 the price of Bitcoin will have increased so much…
lex82
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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 power, to turn on even 10 computers…
Alex
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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 script to accomplish this?
Geremia
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