Debate about the environmental effects of bitcoin mining has resurfaced following claims by an Australia-based sustainability think tank that bitcoin could eventually consume 60% of annual global electricity production.According to the Long Future Foundation's website, its calculations are based on the assumption that 1 BTC is valued at £1m, the cost of mining this resource is $500,000 and 3,600 bitcoins are produced every day."Bitcoin miners can get power cheaply for $0.05 per kilowatt hour (kWh) which means that they get 20 kWh per dollar spent," notes the website.By multiplying these numbers (500,000 x 20 x 3,600 x 365) on its Bitcurrent calculator – an interactive spreadsheet – the foundation arrives at the conclusion that bitcoin mines would consume 13,140,000,000,000 kWh – or 13,140 terawatt hours (TWh) – per annum, or the amount of energy required to power 1.5bn homes.Guy Lane, an environmental scientist and spokesperson for the foundation, said: "While bitcoin is a virtual currency, it has very real economic, social and environmental effects […] Bitcoin has the potential to have an enormous impact on our global resources and energy use if not managed properly.” Lane explained that the foundation’s bitcoin energy model assumes that miners will spend half the value of a potential million-dollar bitcoin on mining.

“As their [bitcoin] value increases, more people will certainly look to create more bitcoins, the cost and energy used in this process will logically grow so long as people can make money.” “There is a lot to be said for bitcoin as a currency, but it may ultimately be fatally flawed because of its growing energy consumption,” Lane concluded.bitcoin fedoraThe think tank's findings have been widely contested by the bitcoin mining community.ethereum protocolSam Cole, co-founder of KnCMiner AB, spoke to CoinDesk about the relative shortcomings in the foundation's research.bitcoin escrow transaction"The main thing that they [the foundation] appear to be missing is that the amount of coins released to the network is halved every four years [...] the people who produced the report are very bullish on the coin price."litecoin will rise

Lane said the foundation's argument rested on a "scientific theory based on an understanding of the bitcoin technology and economic system.bitcoin w sklepieThe scenario of $1m bitcoins is just one of the many that can be applied to the Bitcurrent Calculator."bitcoin south dakota"If bitcoin replaces gold and the US dollar as a global currency, maybe $1m is a low figure.bitcoin cotizacion eurEven if bitcoin only gets to $400,000 it still consumes 23% of global electricity supply," he added.asic bitcoin for saleDave Hudson, author at HashingIt, a blog that looks at statistics of the bitcoin ecosystem, noted that although the essence of the foundation's argument was not fundamentally wrong, he thought that there were making a "very extreme argument more for effect than anything else".bitcoin plugin firefox

Lane, however, rebutted the claims that the presented argument was extreme."What is extreme is the possibility of a simple technology that did not exist a decade ago threatening to overwhelm global energy supply," he noted.Despite this, Hudson agreed that if potential profit margins from bitcoin mining were large, this would incentivise people to continue reaping the profits and "one unfortunate consequence of this is energy use", he said.According to him, one of the issues is that the foundation's calculations assume a daily production of 3,600 bitcoins, but Hudson pointed out that as of next year this would drop to 1,800 and in another five years it would be halved further to 900 bitcoins a day."To reach the sorts of values being talked about here we're now thinking of bitcoin as the major international settlement system and I'm pretty certain that the views of the current bitcoin developers would be deemed pretty-much irrelevant at that point; things would long have moved to being regulated."

Hudson added: "For one thing at these sorts of levels the entities controlling mining operations would now be huge corporations (the infrequency of blocks means that a degree of block-maker centralisation is inevitable) and with that would come accountability.Green credentials would need to be established otherwise we'd see governments elected with a remit to tax such unfriendly businesses of all profits."Although he said that some of the more ardent decentralisation fans would potentially dispute his reasoning, Hudson believes that the only way to achieve mass-scale decentralisation would be to have hashing distributed over a vast number of devices and locations.In turn, this would mean that system-wide upgrades or protocol changes would be unpractical.The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is an independent media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies.Interested in offering your expertise or insights to our reporting?

Contact us at [email protected]/* */.It's all in our collective hive-mind right?Coming and going in bits and bytes.Nothing to see here.So why is a hacking process called "Bitcoin mining" using $150,000 worth of electricity a day?This had better be good.Miners need a lot of computing power to dredge up digital currency.And if they're cobbling a setup together, using Energy Star appliances is probably not their first priority.A lot of miners end up relying on the GPUs in graphics cards because they have better efficiency than CPUs, but this computing power translates to huge consumption of electricity.According to a Bitcoin tracking site, blockchain.info, miners are consuming about 1,000 megawatt hours of electricity a day.