Cryptomining Eats More Energy Than Most Real Mining - Research
Tech enthusiasts have plenty of reasons to dislike cryptocurrency miners. Their demand for GPUs during the Ethereum mining craze astronomically raised graphics card prices, their setups take a cryptocurrency from 'accessible to everyone' to 'you need to invest tens of thousands of dollars to make any money' as soon as it becomes popular, and now it turns out their activities could be worse for Earth than real mining operations.
That claim arrives courtesy of a study in the Nature scientific journal by Max J. Krause and Thabet Tolaymat. The researchers developed a way to determine how much energy various cryptocurrency mining networks are using to generate $1USD worth of value (around 0.77 GBP). Those figures are constantly in flux, given the nature of cryptocurrencies and their worth on exchanges, but they aren't unknowable.
Here's what Krause and Tolaymat said about their findings in the paper's abstract:
"From 1 January 2016 to 30 June 2018, we estimate that mining Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Monero consumed an average of 17, 7, 7 and 14 MJ [megajoules, an energy measurement unit] to generate one US$, respectively. Comparatively, conventional mining of aluminium, copper, gold, platinum and rare earth oxides consumed 122, 4, 5, 7 and 9 MJ to generate one US$, respectively, indicating that (with the exception of aluminium) cryptomining consumed more energy than mineral mining to produce an equivalent market value."
And those are just four cryptocurrencies. Other coins have also become popular in recent months, so odds are good that the cryptocurrency market as a whole even more energy. The volatility of cryptocurrency doesn't seem to matter; people are still mining enough to use a lot of energy.
This isn't the first study to warn about the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining. Another one by the University of Hawaii at Manoa that Nature published on October 29 found that "Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2 degrees Celsius" in less than 30 years. Based on that study, cryptocurrency mining doesn't just have the ability to make components more expensive; it also has the potential to affect the rate of climate change.
EDIT: also note, that the numbers are estimates. At least in the Tom's article, no margin of error is given.
Not saying that they aren't right, but I'm not saying they are either without more information.
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1105624/cryptomonnaie-hydro-quebec-depassee-par-les-demandes-delectricite
It is in french, but our government banned any new crypto project on the go because the power consumption was draining all the capacity of some cities.
We are talking about the biggest hydro-electricity distributor in the world... it is having a huge impact on environment. There is nothing to gain from crypto except the proof of concept.
Solar and wind has its limitations. If you want to move away from oil and coal on the scale that is necessary you need to invest in nuclear and the greenies throw a fit at that.
Neither of that changes how cryptocurrency mining is an inherently wasteful endeavour.
Actually, Solar is the only renewable that can truly scale to meet global energy needs. Wind isn't very economical and has other issues. Not saying it never makes sense, but won't truly scale.
Nuclear has a fuel problem, in that known deposits would be exhausted mid-century, though I heard that a while ago and I'm not sure what rate of adoption that figure assumed. Nuclear is only a stop gap, until enough solar can be deployed.
On one hand, I definitely understand this. On the other, I think what's needed is actually more development in crypto, in order to create a currency that's more efficient and scalable.
Cryptocurrencies will be around for the foreseeable future. That genie can't be put back in the bottle.
1. Strictly speaking, solar energy isn't renewable. Sun is burning itself out, and once it's burned out there's no more energy coming. It will take some time though, and it's clean.
2. Every other source of energy we use can trace its roots back to the sun, so solar energy is the only type of energy we have, just given different intermediate types of energy storage.
We will all be long gone by the time the sun burns out. It's irrelevant.
Mainly money laundering, anonymous buying and selling (usually illicit) and international transfer of large sums with lower fees.
Though there are other great ideas that have yet to be implemented into mainstream.
can control your money.But let's not be naive,cryptocurrency is used mainly for money laundering,it's vulnerable to hack attacks,not friendly to the environment due to high energy requirements and heat dispassion and ruined the GPU market for new and used cards.Also some people think cryptocurrency is a job.Probably people who never had a real job.
Another point to make on solar... and our own sun. It will continue to use its resources, until exhausted, regardless of whether we take advantage of the energy we we receive from it or not. Our use of solar does not affect the rate at which our sun expends its energy even in the slightest.
Maybe if we could connect community grid calculations to cryptocurrency instead of wasting energy into meaningless math
WILLIAM_X89 10 hours ago
Is any of the impressive processing power being used to mine cryptocurrencies directed towards anything useful or just wasted solving meaningless problems?
There are a few cryptocurrencies that deal with this exact issue, in which the computing power is used for research (protein folding, climate models, theoretical physics, astronomy, etc) and rewarded in coins. A couple of examples are Gridcoin and Cure Coin, and there are certainly more out there.
Selfish waste of energy, resources and increase to electronic waste.