Article 3QEGZ New study quantifies bitcoin’s ludicrous energy consumption

New study quantifies bitcoin’s ludicrous energy consumption

by
Timothy B. Lee
from Ars Technica - All content on (#3QEGZ)
MV5BYzJhMzFiZmEtNjNlZC00MmFmLWIzOGUtZDJi

Enlarge / The bitcoin network uses several times the 1.21 gigawatts required to travel back in time. (credit: Universal Pictures)

The bitcoin network is run by miners, computers that maintain the shared transaction ledger called the blockchain. A new study estimates that this process consumes at least 2.6GW of power-almost as much electric power as Ireland consumes. This figure could rise to 7.7GW before the end of 2018-accounting for almost half a percent of the world's electricity consumption.

The study is an updated version of calculations performed late last year by analyst Alex de Vries. In this new version, de Vries has gathered more detailed information about the economics of the mining business. But his new numbers are broadly consistent with the old ones. Last December, he estimated that the bitcoin network was consuming roughly 32TWh annually, or 3.65GW. His website, which is updated daily, now shows the network consuming 67TWh annually, just under that upper bound of 7.7GW shown in his new study.

As de Vries makes clear in his new paper, these numbers are necessarily speculative. Bitcoin mining is a decentralized and secretive industry. We know how much computing power the bitcoin network has-right now it's about 30 trillion SHA-256 hashes per second. But miners are making these calculations on different types of hardware with different levels of energy efficiency, so we can't convert that figure directly to energy consumption.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

index?i=kggY3dZ28j4:nGzxdqC-Wzk:V_sGLiPB index?i=kggY3dZ28j4:nGzxdqC-Wzk:F7zBnMyn index?d=qj6IDK7rITs index?d=yIl2AUoC8zA
External Content
Source RSS or Atom Feed
Feed Location http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index
Feed Title Ars Technica - All content
Feed Link https://arstechnica.com/
Reply 0 comments