40e6 (watt) / 0.06 (joule/gigahash) / 1e6 (petahash/gigahash) = ~650 petahash/second
BitFury's immersion cooling tech:
http://datacenterfrontier.com/immersion-cooling-bitcoin/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7MDhqNyXE&t=0m42s (shows the fluid boiling - starts at 0m42s)
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151211005837/en/Bit...
BitFury's 16nm chips:
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151216005453/en/BitF...
Plus, with BitFury online, the cost of a 51% attack just raised to $200 million.
The only reason it is (currently, for a short time) hypothetically possible to 51%-attack the network with a budget in the low hundreds of million of dollars is because most of the miners are not using such efficient 16 nm chips. As the market migrate to these last generation chips, expect the cost to increase to $1+ billion in the next year.
https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=30days&sho...
50MW is enough power to supply ~14k homes from different references I've seen.
I'm curious about what normal data centers use for backup power since natural gas and diesel generators don't get much bigger than 2MW. Or maybe they just don't have backup generators.
[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-pa...
[1] This also means that putting 650 Phash/s gigs into the network is not as profitable as it seems, since it will double (55%) the ratio while three times more expensive (if it linearly scales).
* The constant amount actually changes periodically when the coinbase reward is adjusted downward but that only happens about once every 4 years and historically exchange rate price appreciation has outstripped the reduced coinbase mining rewards. eventually the coinbase reward will go to zero and the number of coins that go to miners each day will be their relative share of the total fees being paid by users transacting on the network. Miners choose which transactions to include in a mined block so in the future a large miner may have some pricing power over transactions because they could refuse to process any transaction with a fee that falls below some threshold.
To put this into context, by comparing it with a centralized version, an equivalent number of actual transactions could be done at a bank with a crud app running on a $5 complete desktop PC which the Raspberry Pi foundation just released[1]. It is a 1 ghz computer with 512 MB of RAM. It draws up to 0.7 Watts.
Wait, wait, wait. did I say an equivalent number? Since Bitcoin is limited to 7 TPS (7 transactions per second), I should modify this to 100x more transactions (700 transactions per second), if you wrote it in C, or if not a hundred times, then at least ten times as many in python. If it were a crud app running at a bank, a $5 computer could do 100 times the transactions that 650 Phash/s of wasted effort collectively give. And 40 megawatts.
Bitcoin is a supreme waste of resources through the proof of work hack. It is like emulating a GPU in a CPU...in javascript. I mean, sure, you can do that. You can run Open GL by emulating a GPU in single-threaded Javascript.
But it's a stupid, wrong solution. The basic idea sucks. It's bad.
(by the by my target price for btc is $600,000 based on a comparison with how bad gold is physically, and the market cap of gold. :-P.)
I love fiat currencies, they're one of the great achievements of modern civilization. (This sentence isn't ironic, it's actually how I feel.) Despite my target price I don't hold any bitcoins at all. I hope some of the numbers I've given can put into perspective why.
> But it's a stupid, wrong solution. The basic idea sucks. It's bad.
instead of explaining that the cost is the cost of guaranteeing the authenticity of the transaction. HackerNews likes technical comments, and will happily burry expletives.
You could find more compelling example, such as estimate the ecological cost of having most of the current world-wide banking transactions on BitCoin, and prove your point.
Also, you don't seem to understand the point of PoW.
No, you're being downvoted by technical people because you're missing the whole point of decentralized digital currencies. Educate yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency#Timestamping
> I love fiat currencies, they're one of the great achievements of modern civilization.
Yeah, unless you want to export some Cuban cigars from Germany to Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Worldwide_Interban...
Hash rate has increased by 41.9% over the same period, so the difficulty has kept the time-to-generate relatively fixed - just the way it's supposed to work.
The real news is that someone or someone(s) have added ~200PH/s worth of processing power to the network in the past 30 days. This is probably from some high-power ASIC miner being released, or from some consolidated mining concern going live.
https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0B4-bDFu_72Beelkxd3VlbXoyd0E&...
Excerpt: According to our estimates then, the whole Bitcoin network is consuming maybe 10% of a large power plant’s worth of electricity. Although this is not an insignificant amount of power, it's not yet a large amount of electricity compared to all the other things that people are using electricity for on the planet.
Any payment system requires energy and electricity. With traditional currency, lots of energy is consumed guarding and moving gold bullions around, running ATM machines, coin sorting machines, cash registers, and payment processing services, and transporting money in armored cars.
Some people say Bitcoin wastes energy because the energy expended computing SHA-256 hashes doesn’t serve any apparent purpose. But you could make this same argument for traditional currency as well — there’s a lot of energy being wasted and it doesn't serve any purpose besides maintaining the currency system. So, if we value Bitcoin as a useful currency system, then the energy required to support it is not really being wasted.
That said, we can ask if there’s a way to do better ...
BitCoin tends to waste energy irrecoverably.
Apples-to-apples comparison is a challenging task, but the modern financial system hardly has that feature of burning more for the sake of burning more.
Whenever the topic of bitcoin's inherent wastefulness is discussed, someone always brings up this point, but it's a fallacious comparison because most of the power consumed by the traditional financial system is spent in its capacity as a ubiquitous pillar of modern society, wherein bitcoin would be completely subsumed were it to become anything more than a technical novelty.
Even when you subtract the common denominator that represents the vast majority of the world's financial intuitions, bitcoin is still the only currency that burns resources as a function of its circulation.
I forget where I read it, but when countries and banks buy and sell large amounts of gold bullion they don't usually move it around because it's expensive and inconvenient.
The ownership changes, but it's usually left where it is.
I'm not an expert but it makes a lot of sense to me. Most real-world decentralized institutions work kind of like this.
https://medium.com/a-stellar-journey/on-worldwide-consensus-...
It's not obscene to me that a truly global currency, that is decentralized and not controlled by any government, would cost a tenth of the energy output of a modest-sized power plant.
Instead of 'proof of work' it should require actual, /useful/ work. I think it should be a mix of work /types/ to promote general purpose computing, instead of ASICs. Imagine if a comity decided, and the owners of existing coins voted on, what work was worthy of being included. Folding proteins for medical research, SETI, attacking DRM/bootloader encryption keys... things that benefit the world.
I hope figures out how to get a solar powered, interchangeable bitcoin miner in a box at a positive ROI. It may seem impossible now, but solar prices are falling faster than expected.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151216005453/en/BitF...
"Valery Vavilov, CEO of BitFury, said: “We are very excited to launch mass production of our super 16nm ASIC Chip. The final results of our hard work have fully met our expectations. We understand that it will be nearly impossible for any older technology to compete with the performance of our new 16nm technology. As a responsible player in the Bitcoin community, we will be working with integration partners and resellers to make our unique technology widely available ensuring that the network remains decentralized and we move into the exahash era together. BitFury warmly welcomes all companies interested in joining our integration and reseller program.”"
I'd have thought that because fossil fuels are cheaper, it will literally never be possible to have have a positive ROI bitcoin miner on a renewable energy source, assuming that people are willing to mine using $0.99 of energy to make $0.01 profit.
EDIT: Downvotes and no comments for a simple question? WTF is going on with HN these days, can we not ask questions?
Does the new capacity make a bitcoin more valuable or less valuable?
Intuitively seems like more valuable, but the average cost in energy to mine the marginal block has gone down (otherwise the new miner wouldn't be mining) and that's often though of as the floor on BTC value.
Seems like having a stronger network is a net plus, and since they're probably not near the 50%+1 threshold it probably is in fact a stronger network. Although maybe they will get close if marginal miners are forced to turn off if the price of XBT drops and BitFury is enough more efficient.
Although BitFury is probably not a bad actor, technically a 50%+1 attack is not obviously illegal (IANAL), although a government might step in ironically enough. It seems to me these types of more centralized setups do introduce some tail risk to the system.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/chainbook/The+Anatomy+of+...
> we now know that there is a near precise model that describes the cost of running and maintaining the network. The way the cost estimate is determined is through how Bitcoin acts as a decentralized waste heat creator that activates and deactivates heat generation based on market participation and pricing signals. What do the randomizations necessary for cryptography and the waste heat produced by computing devices have in common? One word: “exergy,” a term of art describing the maximum useful work possible during a process that brings a system into equilibrium with a heat reservoir. Exergy is always destroyed in the seigniorage hashing process - for example - if a token's value increases to $1,000, this means that at most $1,000 worth of waste heat will be generated somewhere in its creation.
From my reading of the text, it's not so much the additional hash power that's valuable, it's the additional money spent building and operating the ASICs. In theory, the market cap of a proof-of-work system should approach its total cumulative cost to secure. The more watts you see being dumped into the environment calculating hashes, the more you should value Bitcoin.
If Bitcoin is worth less than its cost to mine, no rational miner will mine (if they want BTC they'll just use their electricity budget to buy it on the market), so the competition (and therefore the cost) to mine each block goes down. If Bitcoin is worth more than its cost to mine, mining becomes profitable to anyone willing to put up the capex, so the competition (and therefore the cost) to mine each block goes up. There's an equilibrium where the value of Bitcoin is equal to its cost to mine.
The actual price of bitcoin as seen by the average consumer is insulated from the cost to mine because of effects like speculation, perceived future movement, and the value provided by ease of spending / anonymity, so the economic theory isn't really accurate, but that's why it's a theory!
We are in a world where the energy has a frightening ecologic cost and people to spend it in gigantic quantities just to create a virtual money...
I am. But this is a drop in the bucket compared to financial sectors that deal with "real" money. Really, isn't nearly all modern money "virtual"? Nevermind the fact that a lot of money only exists electronically, modern money doesn't actually physically represent anything. Therefore: virtual.
The idea behind it is that you need energy to gather money (metalic money for example). but this is pointless for bitcoin, it's just wasted without any utility.
All that mining does is give the person with the most hashrate more voting power in which transactions will be accepted. Innovation in mining hardware and data centers does not in any way increase bitcoin's security.
I also have paper draft about better Proof-of-Stake protocol, and would like to share it with people from academias to get a feedback. Please write me ( kushti at protonmail dot ch ). I also have half-written paper draft about PoW+PoS hybrid chain.
The recent rise in price justifies bringing miners online or shifting them away from other cryptocoins.
Halving day is coming soon too.
This has been a really interesting tech to watch over the years.
What about this: Why not just diversify your risk by doing transactions or investing in currencies/assets across a diversified set of untrusted counterparties? Same net effect, and a lot less electricity wasted.
As soon as Satoshi tries to convert any of his coins into dollars or any other legacy currency everyone will know who he is.
