Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Will latte sipping Silicon Valley Trendies give up their high carbon Cryptocurrencies to save the planet from global warming?
THE HARD MATH BEHIND BITCOIN’S GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM
ADAM ROGERS
SCIENCE 12.15.17 07:00 AM
LET ME FREAK you out for a second. You know what bitcoinis, right? I mean, no, but quickly, it’s a “cryptocurrency” that’s basically secret computer money. One bitcoin, which doesn’t actually have a real, physical form, is worth at this moment upwards of $16,000. But to get one, you either have to buy them from online exchanges or use specialized computing hardware to “mine” it. That last bit is where the freak-out comes in.
In a report last week, the cryptocurrency website Digiconomics said that worldwide bitcoin mining was using more electricity than Serbia. The country. Writing for Grist, Eric Holthaus calculated that by July 2019, the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network—remember BitTorrent? Like that—would require more electricity than all of the United States. And by November of 2020, it’d use more electricity than the entire world does today.
That’s bad. It means Bitcoin emits the equivalent of 17.7 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, a big middle finger to Earth’s climate and anyone who enjoys things like coastlines, forests, and not dying of mosquito-borne diseases. Refracted through a different metaphor, the Bitcoin P2P network is essentially a distributed superintelligence utterly dedicated to generating bitcoins, so of course it wants to convert all the energy (and therefore matter) in the universe into bitcoin. That is literally its job. And if it has to recruit greedy nerds by paying them phantom value, well, OK. Unleash the hypnocurrency!
…
The thing that makes Bitcoin bitcoiny is the blockchain, the secure ledger of all payments and trades. The point of the P2P bitcoin network is the generation and maintenance of that ledger, and technically anyone can contribute updates—those recordings of transactions are blocks in the chain. But there’s a catch. (This was the bit of genius in bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto’s pitch, whoever the almost certainly psuedonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto” is or are.) In order to contribute a block, you also have to solve some really hard math, a “hashing algorithm” called SHA-256.
You can’t trick your way into solving that math. The SHA-256 algorithm is designed, intentionally, to be so hard that it requires brute-force computing. Try as many computational answers as you can, as fast as you can. Which means you have to keep your computer turned on all the time, running the fan to cool off your hot, overclocked processor. “The energy consumption is a security feature. It’s a good thing,” Sirer says. “To take over the system, you’d have to spend at least as much as what the system is spending now. You have to own 51 percent of all the hashing power.”
…
Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-global-warming/
The expenditure of all this electricity, the proof of work, is the keystone of Bitcoin payment security. People whose computers crack the code breaking problem at the heart of Bitcoin, and in doing so help enforce Bitcoin’s payment transaction integrity, get to reward themselves with a few newly minted bitcoin.
This CO2 belching code breaking effort can’t be made too much easier. While the difficulty can be adjusted by mutual consent, making the code breaking problem too easy would allow people to steal other people’s bitcoins. The whole system would break down into a shambles of fraud and misplaced coins.
To put it another way, given that most of the cost of mining bitcoin is the cost of the electricity you have to burn to solve the proof of work problem, the thousands of dollars you have to pay to buy a single bitcoin is the electricity bill you would have to pay if you mined that bitcoin yourself.
The delicious irony is, the people who created and promoted and popularised this pointless carbon belching monstrosity are mostly also the people driving California’s green agenda.
What can be done to fix this disaster?
Some alternative cryptocurrencies like Ethereum have attempted to replace Bitcoin style proof of work with a low energy alternative, proof of stake. Instead of rewarding people with the most powerful computer, proof of stake seeks to reward investors who got in on the ground floor, giving the lions share of new coins to founders.
Switching Bitcoin to proof of stake, assuming it works as well as proponents claim, would likely be enormously unpopular with those bitcoin entrepreneurs who invested millions building expensive high tech proof of work bitcoin mining rigs.
All this ongoing Bitcoin climate harm could be averted if Californian greens reject Bitcoins and go back to using good old US dollars. Less fashionable, but also way less carbon intensive.
Perhaps concerned greens could start putting signs in their shops “Bitcoins not welcome”.
I’m sure given a choice between giving up Bitcoins and saving the penguins and polar bears, or gross climate hypocrisy, green Californian trendies will make the same choice they always make.
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Eric, or Anthony..there is a comment of mine which seems to have ended up in to the ‘abyss’ , if you would not mind please let it be if is not much to ask and if that comment not considered as silly one…..Just asking as I have not or could not spare much time at this moment in consideration of any probable replies…
Thanks..
In order to properly understand Bitcoin (and other crypto-currencies plus the Blockchain) you need to do 3 things:
1. Read this book: “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds” (Charles MacKay).
2. Read this book: “Attack of the 50 foot Blockchain” (David Gerard).
3. Spend at least 1 month on the Reddit site r/buttcoin (Yes, BUTTcoin).
Whatever you do please do NOT put any of your hard earned money into any cryptocurrency scheme as you will very likely lose every single cent/penny of it by one means or another. This stuff is one of the most toxic things seen this century.
It’s the “casino” phase of the bitcoin market. Ultimately, we want price stability for our fungible stores of value. And unfortunately for bitcoin, extreme price volatility is not good for what stable money does: separate the two sides of a trade. Knowing that bitcoin is volatile, would you borrow money denominated in bitcoin, knowing that it could be more expensive to pay back a year from now? How do we agree on a price for something denominated in bitcoin, if the bitcoin price is shifting beneath our feet? We don’t. The only reason to buy bitcoin, like all manias, is because the price is going up. FYI, the cost of production for 1 bitcoin is about $1,000 USD.
My cost is lower, but I benefit from cheap power and have invested in the fastest currently available gear.
And most energy-efficient hardware.
The cost of producing 200 US one-hundred-dollar bills is negligible. Indeed, since the Fed invents its funny money out of thin air, it’s practically zero.
But is now worth $20,000 dollars to me right now. Fiat currency or not, I could have a helluva lot of fun with that.
Dave,
As I could with one bitcoin. But my bitcoins are appreciating in value against the dollar, while the US fiat currency continues its decline against real assets, although it is not losing the race to debase, since other imaginary state funny phony money issues are in even worse shape, not being reserve currencies.
The state of Montana has entered into the Bitcoin mania, providing funding for a server farm at the site of the old logging sawmill in Bonnet MT.
US State of Montana Invests Directly in a Bitcoin Mining Operation
http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/06/13/us-state-montana-invests-directly-bitcoin-mining-operation
Ironically, the Bonner MT hydroelectric dam and facilities, built in 1908 to power the saw mill, were breached and removed in 2008. Local residents are not happy, as the server farm emits a persistent whine described as similar to a jet engine winding up.
The idiocy of politicians never ceases to amaze.
I love the Orwellian use of terms like ‘mining’ and ‘work’, when applied to the crypto currency crappola!
I think you’d fin a fair few IT folk in government departments and businesses are using their employers gear to mine bitcoin on the sly – at a college I worked at we found this was the case (along with one IT bloke who maintained and served a .. how do I put it, pRon site and a P2P video sharing site )
hmm, I wonder whether anyone’s looked at BOM’s supercomputer lately
Earthling
“creating new value/money/cyrpto currency out of thin air? What does that even mean?”. This is exactly what private banks do when they loan money, its just an entry in a ledger (a central ledger, unlike bitcoins distributed ledger, very little energy required and just as much a ponzi scheme, only if the system collapses, it is we, the tax payers who will bail out the banks. To some the bitcoin form on “democratised” currency is fairer.
The energy issue is a problem, as although reducing line widths in the silicon will mean faster and more energy efficient gates, this efficiency can not go on forever, because of the discreteness of matter. Already the number of carriers in a gate is getting so small the statistics that define its operation are getting shaky and the gates correspondingly unreliable. Also the exponential growth in bitcoins value will drive an exponential growth in the resources thrown at mining. The problem is inherently parallel, so that an arbitrary number of processors can be used to test the nonces against the restricted range of hashes (i.e. n leading zeros). Indeed your browser may be mining crypto currencies at this very moment!!
Private banks are not supposed to loan money that they do not have.
Curious George: “Private banks are not supposed to loan money that they do not have.”
Banks have been doing this since the goldsmiths realised very few people came in to claim their gold, preferring notes instead. Some 95% of money in circulation is created out of thin air by private banks… at interest. This has the unfortunate effect of requiring perpetual (compounded) growth in the economy to pay down the interest. This of course is unsustainable and leads to cycles of boom and bust. Read “Between Debt and the Devil” by Adair Turner for an analysis of the issue.
Serbia is not a very big country.
Something of imaginary value is contributing to the imaginary cause of an imaginary problem, all of which only exist in the virtual world of Man’s imagination.
People need to out more.
I know what a $20 gold piece feels like. What does a $20 bitcoin feel like?
If the “renewable/sustainable” power goes out, does it still exist?
+ 100!!!
Yep
Never more than 21,000,000 Bitcoins.
Already this is INCORRECT. Bitcoin has already forked with there being now 2 versions, Bitcoin and BitcoinCash. So now there are 42,000,000 crypto coins and a forked blockchain.
Expect even more forks in the future as various factions continue to argue which features they want / don’t want.
There have been at least two hard forks in bitcoin.
And a few years ago, Apple did a 7 for 1 stock split.
So what?
If you put $1000 in bitcoin a year ago, and then sold half of it when the price doubled, you now are playing with the casinos money.
You could have done the same thing 2 weeks ago, and would have your dollars back and an equal amount of bitcoin (in dollar terms) sitting in your digital wallet.
Hell, I know people that never shut up for years after March 2009, about the suckers rally in the stock market and how they would lose every cent.
You sound like someone who would like to short sell bitcoin.
I suspect you and anyone else of a like mind will very soon be able to place your bets against bitcoin.
Menicholas, please visit my hometown of Las Vegas. People like you keep my taxes very low.
Betting is a rather selfish pastime.
I think one can do more good for mankind by talking about why Bitcoin “investment” is a bad idea rather than shorting it. I think efforts in this direction will probably help hundreds , if not thousands, of people avoid rather serious financial consequences. Just think what we could have done if the internet was around when tulips were being traded.
This is an interesting observation.
It made me think of the Australian pre-decimal currency versus contemporary currency – both still technically legal tender and both fall under the Currency Act protection against counterfeiting (I mention this last bit as counterfeit 1950’s crowns are turning up nowdays out of china – if you get ripped off buying one you can refer the matter to the federal police, the penalty is severe) – the old currency may not change hands much these days but with it’s 90% and the later debased 50% silver content, they’ve done a damned fine job preserving wealth – more so that the current contemporary currency. No surprise really that people in the know recognize a debased currency, whether it’s easily traded or not. For the rest there’s whatever is easiest. Perfect for folk who can’t be bothered thinking much. Like those kids that squeal with excitement at the prospect of a future cashless society /facepalm
Talking about 50%/90% silver just shows you are talking about chunks of metal, NOT currency. Purely fortuitous that the particular metal content in the particular coin becomes worth more as “scrap” metal than the previously assigned currency unit. For every coin that’s a metal content “winner” you can find even more that are “losers”.
You can regularly buy lots of old coins in pallet sized boxes from the banks weighing about 4000 kg. They tend to sell to coin dealers who have the time to sort them all out and market them in small lots. In the UK older (non magnetic) 2p and 1p pieces become worth more than face value when copper/nickel prices are high. It’s illegal to melt them down but if, hypothetically, you throw some copper scrap into the mix…..
chunks of metal, like slabs of beer can and are used as currency. I know what you’re saying though, but they’re currency nonetheless – the fact that money as we know it today is deemed a currency is almost an abomination – currency.. money was designed to preserve wealth and facilitate transfer. volatile and fiats can only do this for a while before they fail.
I saw the Canadian mint was selling off scrap pure nickel coins at metal value a time back.. it was an eye opener and one I’ve used as an example to explain how munted the system is – when people willingly hand over $600 in metal (value) and take $200 in (nickel plated steel) coin in exchange.
A US copper penny weighs over 3 grams.
There are about 456 grams in a pound, so about $1.47 worth of old copper pennies is one pound.
The price of copper has been far above this amount for many years. We are now over twice that, and rising.
I doubt anyone is selling pallets of old coins for less than half their value in scrap.
I was gonna say, there’s no way the 21 mil figure can stay static if it costs $19 to process a single bitcoin transaction. Ponzi schemes always need new blood, so to speak, to keep going.
btw, $19 seems outrageously high for a single transaction.
Bitcoin Cash (bCash) is a dividend from Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the real deal.
BCash is a scam.
Yes Doug. Sliced White Medium Bread is the real deal, that Sliced White Thick Bread is clearly a scam. Use that for your toast and you will regret it!
And don’t go anywhere near that Seedy Wholemeal Etherium, you will choke on it!
This was an EVIL article to publish. I haven’t had that much BOVINE EXCREMENT come out of my Computer, since I stopped using my web cams to monitor my cattle barns.
Then I guess you missed out on a few bitcoins? 😎
Eric never ceases to entertain. I am tempted to assign characters from The Big Bang to the moderators on WUWT but fear it may not be taken as the good natured humour which is my trademark.
Wait for it…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Eric wrote:
Deep down, the smarter ones know(like most regular commenters here at WUWT, probably even Griff) that the IPCC’s Climate Change game is a hustle on stupid people.
Once the the use of the bitcoin is widely accepted, its value will level close to the mining costs
Long term that is what The best mining companies plan for.
basically Utility level margins
Bitcoin will NEVER be widely accepted because it does not have the features necessary in a currency for everyday use by the ordinary Joe. Not least of which is the ability to correct for errors caused by the ubiquitous FAT FINGER.
Remember the time you entered one character incorrectly on your keyboard and sent your entire retirement savings pot into a cryptographic address without having the corresponding private key.
These are objections to a point in time whose conditions to exist won’t exist for your dystopia to emerge. If wide acceptance was being blocked by mistrust then market solutions would emerge like private key custodians like banks. Cryptocurrency insurance. Underwriters would demand further safeguards.
“Hooray for Bitcoin (but Don’t Buy It): The price reached $19,000 last week. It is certain to hit zero.” by
Lawrence Baxter on Dec. 11, 2017
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hooray-for-bitcoin-but-dont-buy-it-1513035892
… But in the long run, the smart bet is against bitcoin, for at least four reasons.
First, bitcoin is too volatile to be a reliable store of value. National currencies rest on the real productivity and fiscal capacity of citizens. With bitcoin there is no there there—only some kind of euphoric trust. …
Second, the bitcoin community is using breathtaking amounts of electricity …. When environmentalists begin to understand this, there will be a firestorm.
Third, the currency is a vehicle for criminal transactions and for avoiding government restrictions on moving capital. …
Fourth and most important, bitcoin is on a collision course with sovereign states. … King Philip IV of France once could not repay his debts to his bankers, the Knights Templar. So in 1307 he had their leaders arrested on trumped-up charges and then burned at the stake. ..
At the first serious (and likely coordinated) move by governments to regulate or bank the digital currency, bitcoin’s price will crash to zero. Panicked owners will rush to exit and the bubble will burst. Bitcoin futures and options may just as well be based on pixies and fairies. Nothing will be able to save them. Speculators will depart for the next lunacy, leaving behind the greater fools to wonder where their supposed wealth went and demand that government do something about it.
I like the warning about the fate of the Knights Templar. And they had some serious military chops. You don’t want to wind up like them.
Really, you don’t.
Most bitcoin mining happens in China, done in larger server warehouses co-located next to hydro-electric plants. The warehouses use the cheap, spare hydro capacity to efficiently mine. It’s about the only place where it’s cost effective apart from certain cold-climate locations. There is little to no CO2 emitted. The sleight-of-hand is in the article where it mentions ‘CO2 equivalency’, a common trick regular readers here will have seen used many times before in many contexts.
My mining occurs in a cold climate next to abundant hydro. But it’s also a hot climate.
In summer, I move my machines outdoors, just as my grandparents used to do their cooking. I use their summer cookhouse, now turned into a clean room.
Cool gabro!
the ingenuity of the mining community is second to none.
As for cryptos being reliant on cyberspace, so are most people’s retirement and investment portfolios. How many people have paper stock certificates. Ditto bank accounts.
Yup
Its almost all Hydro. More importantly its Hydro that is Not being used or sold until miners show up
We pay to amortorize Green tech faster.
This is true outside China as Well.
In the Middle east all of the customers use solar.. sub 1 cent per hour electricity costs.
US customers are all Hydro.
andrewd
“Most bitcoin mining happens in China”
PERFECT. Here’s all my life savings, sign me up, we can trust the Chinese to look after our financial interests. OK, they might have poor human rights and bad pollution but they have never acted dishonestly in financial dealings with another country, ever.
Bitcoin mining no doubt competes with other high energy activities colocated with cheap hydro such as Aluminium Smelting. But thats OK, Aluminium is valuable enough so any shortage caused by hydro providers selling cheap energy to bitcoin miners can be filled by buying cheap Chinese coal power. And of course the Bitcoin miners can also top up their electricity with cheap coal, when the hydro isn’t available.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/22/are-stringent-vehicle-emissions-standards-driving-a-surge-in-coal/
Pretty much all wrong.
“The expenditure of all this electricity, the proof of work, is the keystone of Bitcoin payment security. People whose computers crack the code breaking problem at the heart of Bitcoin, and in doing so help enforce Bitcoin’s payment transaction integrity, get to reward themselves with a few newly minted bitcoin.”
1. “Nobody used their computer. People use the speclalized hardware that we build and design.
Rack and racks of miners. ”
“This CO2 belching code breaking effort can’t be made too much easier. While the difficulty can be adjusted by mutual consent, making the code breaking problem too easy would allow people to steal other people’s bitcoins. The whole system would break down into a shambles of fraud and misplaced coins.”
1. Most of my customers use Renewables. Its the best priced power one the planet.
2. The difficulty cannot be adjusted by “mutual consent” It would require a hard fork
3. Changing difficulty would speed up the issuance of money. Thats it. NOT a shambles
of fraud and “misplaced” coins.
“To put it another way, given that most of the cost of mining bitcoin is the cost of the electricity you have to burn to solve the proof of work problem, the thousands of dollars you have to pay to buy a single bitcoin is the electricity bill you would have to pay if you mined that bitcoin yourself.”
WRONG.
Lets just do a simple calculation with The last machine I sold. The next one will use even less power
1. Landed Cost of the hardware: $897
2. Total Cost of operation after two years $1602 ( daily electricity charge for the machine
is around 97 cents
3. Total revenue $5263 ( after 2 years assuming compounding 5% bi weking increase in difficulty)
4. At the end of two years that single machine will have mined .27 Bitcoin ( priced at 19K)
for a cost of $1602
“The delicious irony is, the people who created and promoted and popularised this pointless carbon belching monstrosity are mostly also the people driving California’s green agenda.”
1. Huh most of us are libertarians and not driving a green agenda.
2. This is not a california silicon valley driven movement. China, Korea, Japan
3. The Mining actually helps to pay for the amortization of terawatts of green infrastructure.
Most of the power is STRANDED.. think Hydro damn in the middle of nowhere china.
4. Coal, gas, Oil is way to expensive for BTC mining unless you find/own a plant that is operating
at low capacity.
What can be done to fix this disaster?
“Some alternative cryptocurrencies like Ethereum have attempted to replace Bitcoin style proof of work with a low energy alternative, proof of stake. Instead of rewarding people with the most powerful computer, proof of stake seeks to reward investors who got in on the ground floor, giving the lions share of new coins to founders.”
1. full on Stupid you dont understand PoS proof of stake.
2. PoS Rewards ANYONE who stakes ( escrows) ether to earn the right to audit transactions
My ASICS have payback in less than 90 days and gross of $700 p/mth per machine and at 0.12 per kWh and daily cost running at $2.3 leaves profit hovering around $620 to $640 per machine per month. Useful life about 18 months then next investment cycle. You can operate profitably with a mix of generating sources. Ours are gas and nuclear primarily. Nuclear plant is close by.
Mosh what are you building sub $900? Multi GPUs? Sourced in China?
Useful life?
the product is designed to last 2 years.
in field failure rate is 1.5%
Chips are designed to dynamically overclock themselves and adjust to the operating conditions
while maintaining hash validity in exces of 98%
Useful economic life depends on your operating expenses of course. I have guys still running old gear
for more than 2 years
I KNEW IT! Mr. Mosher’s Weed Patch is a Bitcoin scam! OMG: Wandering In The Bitcoin Weeds.
I will never again read a Mr. Mosher Weed Patch Wandering post without laughing out loud.
PoS: Pile of Sh!t.
Cryptocurrencies offer the hope, at least of breaking the government monopoly on money so rightly denounced by Hayek and the other Austrian economists. Governments are indeed liable to fight back, in order to keep their subject populations in financial servitude.
But IMO in the end freedom will win and serfdom lose. It’s in the process of doing so in Venezuela.
Gabro, fiat currency has little to nothing to do with what is going on in Venezuela; it is socialism, pure and simple.
Dave,
Fiat currency is an instrument of socialism, as so well described by Hayek in his seminal “The Road to Serfdom”. Same as state monopolies on education, violence, travel, work, you name it.
History has a habit of proving that the only groups to take out evil groups are one step worse or they fail. Yes the banks and governments are often greedy and corrupt but clearly the creators of bitcoin are one step worse already and their power is so far minimal.
Doug
You asked about early blockchain technology, i.e. before Satoshi’s Whitepaper.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm
https://www.anf.es/pdf/Haber_Stornetta.pdf
I wonder if bitcoin becomes a significant terrorist funding liability how long before instead of bothering with the bitcoin source the bitcoin input terminals will be monitored and all the information zero security. There are other ways of intercepting data without cracking codes
Cryptocurrencies aren’t really currencies, IMO. They’re more like commodities like gold and silver. Just like gold, you can’t just make an infinite number of Bitcoins.
The problem is that Bitcoins etc. don’t have any industrial use, unlike gold and silver. And you can always create new cryptocurrencies ad infinitum.
I wonder if blockchains can’t be used for something a bit more imaginative, like, say, those Japanese toys which use barcodes as power points. Products that have barcodes which yield lots of points will sell very well. It’s still a very volatile market – toys can go out of fashion very quickly.
HAS BITCOIN REACHED PEAK STUPIDITY?
by yours truly
http://www.maxphoton.com/bitcoin-reached-peak-stupidity/
Bitcoin is backed by mathematically proven trust. You may think this has no value until you realize it’s the thing we lack most in this civilisation. People in this forum should be first in line to realize this IMO.
Max, you make a rather fine distinction between speculation and gambling. When futures markets exceed the physical supply by orders of magnitude, your speculation is equivalent to gambling. Apart from that I agree with a lot of what you say in your blog. Oh and by the way Smart money is not smart it just has access to almost unlimited funds at close to zero % interest.
The Author does not seem to know much about Bitcoin, and as always assumes there is something wrong with CO2 production.
A few years ago live on Earth almost perished because of lack of CO2. We are not in starvation mode. Be a long time before we hit “Jurassic” type CO2 levels.
As far as the amount of electricity used – that is getting under control. The heat being released is being used to produce electricity with big gains being realised.
Nothing like the smell of Bitcoin worth a Million Dollars to bring out the inventiveness in people.
I’m in beijing, run global sales.
We built the very first FPGA and ASIC miners.
2017 we opened sales outside of China and I sold out ..
We just EOL’d the 741.. Sold it for around $700 through sept. raised the price recently and still
sold out within minutes. Crazy volumes and demand.
http://www.canaan.io
Next gen ships in January. I’ll probably announce on the 20th of December. Doing final tests after the first
run through mass pro.
I built this for customers if you want to do some quick and dirty calcs.
https://canaan.shinyapps.io/BTCmining/
test facility
http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/power-cooling/canaan-creative-is-opening-a-10mw-bitcoin-mine-at-the-node-pole/97793.fullarticle
sayonara
Now concern that bitcoin mining will affect coal prices. I guess not all power for miners is from hydro:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-apos-wild-volatility-could-152200499.html
Mosh,
At least you can defend yourself from charges of CO2 production by pointing out that your machines are more energy efficient than the primitive CPU and GPU rigs of yore.
Thanks Mosh!
Thanks Mosh!
I don’t believe in CO2 belching Bitcoin at the current price but I would if I got in on the ground floor when it was lots Greener. It’s come as a bit of a shock to discover deep down I’m really a Greeny.
The article completely ignores the rate of increase of hash’s per watt which have been going up with each new generation of mining machines. I made one bitcoin the old fashioned way with 2 video cards in a PC a few years ago. It took 3 weeks to make at probably about 100 dollars in electricity cost. All the computers doing the same thing when I made mine had a total worldwide hash rate less than one dedicated ASIC based mining computer you can buy now for about 2700. That sole ASIC computer will take about 8 months to mine one bitcoin now. But the coins are worth more now.
Definitely not a green currency anyway you cut it, but the premise of the article ignores the moores law effect on increasing efficiency of mining.
It would be good to put some names to this, because this aspect of bitcoin was so really obvious, anyone who persuades governments to erect bird chomping turbines or bird fry-alive solar concentrators, and who also takes any part in the bitcoin mania, deserves to be publicly humiliated.
(Of course, more CO2 is actually good, but that is not their claim, and they have to be judged by their own standard: “As you judge, so shall ye be judged.”)
For those of you interested or have a stake and not checked recently – BTC/USD down more than $4000 points in the last few days. Now that is volatility….