In a recent article on Vice’s technology news feed, Motherboard, author Sebastiaan Deetman explores the energy efficiency of Bitcoin.
The article begins with a brief and fatalistic assertion regarding the environmental impact of mass migration to Bitcoin (or a similar energy intensive cryptocurrency).
Another Vice Motherboard contributor, Christopher Malmo, is quoted as saying , “Adopting Bitcoin as a major currency anytime in the next few decades would just exacerbate anthropogenic climate change by needlessly increasing electricity consumption until it’s too late.” At the time that Malmo published his sustainability piece in mid-2015 on the energy sustainability of Bitcoin, he calculated that the “a single bitcoin transaction requires as much electricity as the daily consumption of 1.6 American households.” This is a substantial figure no matter how you slice it.
Deetman goes through a series of bottom-up calculations starting with how hashing is related to mining which consumes energy. He then moves into a discussion into the efficiency of available mining hardware. He crafts some interesting plots on Cartesian planes comparing efficiency and product ship dates. Then moves to brief discussions of mining trends and scalability.
Deetman provides a cool chart that discusses his “optimistic” and “pessimistic” energy forecasts. These numbers are sizable and definitely noteworthy.
One of Deetman’s most salient points he presents during his conclusion. He states, “Personally, I haven’t given up on the idea of distributed network transactions, but a radical rethinking of how these may be secured would be beneficial, be it at least for the environment. Perhaps a system where all miners are rewarded for their pledged surplus in CPU processing power, but the actual hashing is performed only by a few thousand randomly selected and continuously changing CPUs, would be a solution.
“We could throw the remnants of our destructive arms race for hashing power out the window, perhaps […]
