i strongly urge skepticism when reading articles about the environmental impacts of bitcoin. I am not saying that bitcoin is a sensible use of resources - rather that the claims made about the environmental impacts are often overstated and based on models extrapolated to absurdity. For example, see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8 where Mora, Camilo et al suggested that “Bitcoin Emissions Alone Could Push Global Warming Above 2°C”. Then read Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions by Masanet et al.
Again - the environmental impacts of cloud computing in general and bitcoin in particular are something we should be concerned about. But there are a number of researchers who have made wild claims that should be treated with a critical eye.
(Checking if outbound federation is back)
Yeah, if they had said 10 gallons, I’d buy that, but a whole swimming pool of water would be worth far more than a transaction fee I’d expect.
Yeah, generally miners will set up in places with cheap electricity. And excluding places like Azerbaijan, those sources are generally renewables.
These data centers consume water for cooling systems
How does a data center consume water? Doesn’t every liter that enters as freshwater leave as slightly warmer freshwater? What am I missing here?
Some of the water is evaporated so it doesn’t leave as a liquid.
That’s unlikely in a closed heat exchange system. Maybe some additional evaporation because the water is slightly warmer. But unless I’m missing something, it seems very misleading to suggest that a Bitcoin transaction uses 16 kilolitres because of evaporation. Napkin math, it would require about 10 megawatt/hours of energy to evaporate that much water (please correct me if I’m wrong). I’m not a Bitcoin fanboy, I just don’t like BS.
Some water is used in humidifiers, there are also systems that use direct evaporative cooling where the water is eveporated to cool the hot air. There are probably other ways the water is lost.
AWS’ preferred cooling strategy for its data centers is known as direct evaporative cooling. In this system, hot air is pulled from outside and pushed through water-soaked cooling pads. The water evaporates, reducing the air’s temperature, and the cool air is then sent into the server rooms.
Even if so, does evaporating cause it to exit the water cycle?
These cooling systems remove and release all of the heat produced inside a data center – from servers, IT equipment, and mechanical infrastructure – into the outside environment, through a cooling tower that uses a water evaporation process.
It goes outside and eventually becomes rain.
someone from a totally different thread mentioned that the water can’t stay in the system because of whatever mineral stuff from the cooling pipe/anti-algae/anti-corrosive has to leave the system after certain cycles. So unless you have a treatment plant down stream it’s not exactly “drinkable” freshwater. (and I doubt water regulation would allow that to happen.)
The consume here means that water is not usable for other application. How? I don’t know, maybe it can be used for power wash?
It probably is still a lot easier to make potable than sewer water or even river water though. At lease you know exactly what contamination is in it.
Water used to cool data centers is either consumed, meaning it evaporates into the atmosphere via the data center’s cooling towers or discharged, as industrial wastewater, usually to a local wastewater treatment plant.
It can’t just be dumped into a river, has to go to a sewer treatment plant.
edit: They do recirculate it, but it eventually needs to be replaced. And some facilities have treatment plants on site, so doesn’t necessarily needed to go to a sewer treatment plant.
I agree, it would eventually have it’s own ecosystem around that water usage if “fresh” water or not really drinking water related use is required. At this point I think it’s just cost related, cheaper just to dump into ocean.
Swamp coolers.
Fans blow over water to lower the pressure, causing evaporation to occur at room temperature.
Evaporating water absorbs heat from its surroundings without raising the water’s temperature as it undergoes a phase change. It absorbs nearly 20 times more heat than it would from being heated from 50 degrees F to 100 degrees.
Aquafers do not refill as quickly as industry sucks them dry. It’s not just a Bitcoin or even a cloud computing problem, but the author is using this fact to make Bitcoin look even more ridiculous.
Ok thats not even remotely accurate. wtf is this clickbait shit. You can argue that bitcoin is bad for the environment but if you’re gonna invent statistics at least make is plausible.
False. Mining is what uses electricity (and water) in bitcoin, not transactions. Adding more transactions does not add to the cost. Calculating consumption per transaction is misleading as the two are not related.
What does add to the cost is complexity, and complexity is calculated based on number of miners in the network in order to achieve the sweet spot of 1 block every 10 mins (if i remember correctly). If there’s a lot of competition, each miner will have to use more electricity to win.
Finally someone that get’s it
These calculations are a bit off IMO. They factor the total amount of mining and divide it by the number of transactions.
However, the amount of mining is not dependent on the amount of transactions.
I’m not a fan of bitcoin due to the wasteful proof of work mechanism but ‘blaming’ the transactions is not really fair IMO, especially because people don’t really use bitcoin as a payment method anymore. It’s just used by speculators now.
Wasteful and unsustainable.
However, the amount of mining is not dependent on the amount of transactions.
Entertain my ignorance on this for a second, but isn’t there some sort of dependence here? Like not a strictly casual dependence, but if transactions were, say, to magically halve for a few days, would that not affect the mining required and thus the total energy expenditure of the mining?
(Obviously the limit case would show this to be true, in that in the absence of any transactions at all, mining would cease. But I’m after something a bit more clearly casually related, somewhat like supply and demand in the marketplace – consumption of beef driving more supply and more methane, e.g.)
The mining isn’t based on transactions, the mining is set to target a 10 minute block time, the difficulty changes based on how much mining capacity there is.
If a block takes less than 10 minutes the difficulty goes up. If it takes more the difficulty goes down.
Each block has a maximum capacity of 2500 transactions, which is why gas is used to prioritize who gets added in a block.
There have been many blocks with zero transactions.
(May bot be correct #)
Thanks for clarifying that!
No, transactions piggyback on the mined blocks but if there are no transactions mining still happens.
I see. But in the limit case where just everybody decided BTC is nonsense and stopped transacting entirely, while mining could continue, eventually it would die out, right?
So in a sense, do transactions not drive the need for mining? If that’s the case, the connection isn’t directly casual so much as one of complicity. Does that make sense or am I still barking up the wrong tree with this way of thinking?
I see. But in the limit case where just everybody decided BTC is nonsense and stopped transacting entirely, while mining could continue, eventually it would die out, right?
Probably, yes. But it’s important to realise that bitcoin started as a payment system. Meaning lots of daily transactions would be done. These days it’s used more for speculation, as a value storage system and for transferring to other coins. Which implies a lot less transactions.
Everybody basically has already decided that BTC is nonsense for payments and stopped using it for that. This is exactly why the transactions have so much “overhead” because so few transactions are compared to so much mining.
So in a sense, do transactions not drive the need for mining? If that’s the case, the connection isn’t directly casual so much as one of complicity. Does that make sense or am I still barking up the wrong tree with this way of thinking?
Not really, no. Miners mine as an investment. The whole payment system community has already been taken over by other systems which are much better suited for that, like Etherium, which has proof of stake for low overhead, fast transaction time and smart contracts. Or Monero, which hides the identity better so it’s more common in the purchasing of certain illicit substances.
The BTC community reacted with lightning but it was too little too late to solve this usecase. The BCH (bitcoin cash) fork was also motivated by this as far as I understand, because the miners were opposed to any changes to facilitate easier payments and lower transaction costs. But this is more hearsay I have to admit, I’m not a cryptobro and not fully into this.
So now BTC is less like a “bank” and more like a “goldmine”. That’s how you should see it. Even though gold is a useful material, most investors that buy gold don’t buy it with the intention to ever sell it to a factory making connectors or whatever. They just buy it because it’s scarce and the price keeps going up, and people assign value to it.
Bitcoin is in the same position now. It has value because people decide it has value. This is not really related to its potential use as a payment system. Miners (the ones who control the bitcoin stack now) are not even interested in its use for that purpose and seem to actively block enhancements to make that easier. Though transactions are still necessary for trading between investors, it’s much much less in volume than it would be if people were still using it to pay for stuff in shops.
But anyway, going back to my original point: Articles like the link here that claim that Bitcoin is a really shitty payment system are kinda stating the obvious. It’s practically speaking not a payment system anymore even though it technically could be used as such.
Thanks for that, interesting stuff.
That’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works. BS clickbait
Care to expand?
Whether the energy consumption of an action is justified depends on the efficiency of the energy use, the practical aim of the action, whether it would replace any more or less efficient actions, and the energy source.
Simply stating it has no purpose and that the energy use of Bitcoin is somehow analogous to mass water wastage, does not seek to investigate whether Bitcoin’s energy use is justified. It’s disingenuous and reactionary.
So the quibble is not with the claim that it uses that much water, only that they didn’t do a comparison to other things that meet the same/similar needs?
To draw a comparison between bitcoin energy consumption and water use is plainly seeking to remove context from the conditional justification for Bitcoin’s energy use, which has nothing to do with water. It’s deliberately sensationalistic. Anything that consumes energy can be described as consuming or wasting an equivalent amount of water. As a statement on whether that consumption is justified, it’s meaningless.
Anything that consumes energy can be described as consuming or wasting an equivalent amount of water.
Then do so. What equivalent exchange of any value of money uses as much water as Bitcoin? If I’m not asking you the right question here, can you tell me the actual question and what the answer is?
You’d need to qualify what you mean by ‘exchanging any value of money’. If it’s handing a note of currency to your friend, the energy cost of circulating the bill is associated. If you mean someone not in the same room, then you need to accept the associated caveats of running the traditional finance system e.g. ATM costs, financed emissions, and other essential components of the fractional reserve bank concept. Totally aside from the server requirements to physically run the network. Without all of those things, you can’t exchange any value of money.
Traditional finance almost certainly consumes as much water as Bitcoin on a per-capita basis, and on an absolute basis traditional finance uses way, way more. The difference is the global network of banking operations is opaque. For Greenidge Generation, their 2.5EH/s hashrate is a part of their product, advertising it is a sales tactic. Just makes it a bit less abstract to pick apart and then make broad generalisations about the sum hashrate of the network based on this LNG-powered site the report is based on. For what it’s worth, that’s not really a feasible way to mine Bitcoin. It suggests energy generation is their real product.
The real answer is a rhetorical question: what is the impetus for the traditional finance system to operate sustainably, either now or in future? Because for Bitcoin miners it’s clear. The monetary policy essentially dictates it over time. Reward yield decreases for the same amount of work. You don’t need to get into whether it’s environmentally sustainable, because it’s not economically sustainable unless you’re generating a fully renewable energy source.
You’d need to qualify what you mean by ‘exchanging any value of money’.
Previously you said “whether it would replace any more or less efficient actions” and I’m trying to get to the bottom of what you mean. I even asked for clarification if i was asking the wrong question. I feel like I’m now being asked to qualify what I just asked you to qualify.
The real answer is a rhetorical question: what is the impetus for the traditional finance system to operate sustainably, either now or in future? Because for Bitcoin miners it’s clear.
This sounds like it’s agreeing with the premise of the article here: Bitcoin is not sustainable. This isn’t to say other things are sustainable. It’s just pointing out that it uses a ton of water, and a lot of it has moved to a place that can’t really handle the increased water usage so it might cause a water shortage. If this is the reason the article is “not how any of this works” and “BS clickbait” then I disagree.
No bitcoin is useless, but using it doesn’t cause water waste
Do you mean “No bitcoin is useless” - none of the bitcoins are useless.
or
“No. Bitcoins are useless” - all the bitcoins are useless.
Yeah this
I feel like the “but” makes it obvious, but I could.be wrong.
I meant all bitcoins are useless
OP, your “news” article sucks. It’s just clickbait
As tradition I won’t read the actual article and only comment on the headline - while BTC is a massive energy waste, it seems unlikely that each transaction would waste so much cooling water. Maybe each mined block, but each block should contain thousands of transactions
Not only is the science underlying all these findings completely non-existent, they only “guesstimate” what the water usage of what every thing that uses water is; then blindly divide that by the transaction volume per time period.
Not only is that method highly flawed; it’s incorrect. Computers do more than mine crypto; and 1 transaction typically costs not even 1 tenth of a percent of most miners’ overall computer resources. This is due to the fact that many miners are utilizing either a GPU or FPGA style device to power optimize and optimize the mathematics necessary to secure a transaction.
That might have been true a decade ago. But GPUs and FPGAs have long been obsolete for mining Bitcoin.
Mining is happening on custom silicon in large-scale operations. They specifically observed several of those large-scale operations in multiple nations and extrapolated out. I don’t see how that methodology is flawed.
700kWh per transaction? That’s absurd amount of power. That’s 70 EUR of energy per one transaction at current (EU) exchange price.
Is there anyone here knowledgeable enough about this issue to say whether those numbers are correct, or just an overestimate? It feels wrong.
They are insanely off, yes.
The number varies a little bit (I’ve seen estimates 600-1200 kWh) but this is well within an order of magnitude of being correct. It’s the nature of the competitive mining network and the proof of work system: if you can spend more computing power (i.e. energy) than everyone else there are lucrative mining rewards to be had. At the same time adding more computing power to the network doesn’t add more transaction processing power, because mining difficulty is constantly adjusted to keep the speed more or less constant.
This naturally leads to exorbitant power consumption per transaction. Note that most of this power is not being purchased at EU exchange prices (mining naturally moves to where electricity can be had for cheap to maximize profits).
I just hope bitcoin will finally die. It’s literally just wasting absurd amount of energy, only to allow scammers to scam billions of dollars from victims, and regular people to steal from eachother by investing into it. I mean, if the only use of bitcoin by now is for speculation and investment, then it means that any dollar you made, you literally stole from someone else who will be left with useless bitcoin once it’s all over. There’s no value, and with the ledger getting bigger and bigger, and bitcoin more expensive to mine, it will eventually be worthless. And we all know it, so anyone who makes thousands of dollars, there’s someone who probably financially ruined himself by making a wrong and stupid investment at the wrong time.
I hate crypto so much :D.
You can exchange it for goods and services in the same way as the dollar. Which is the goal of it in the first place. Disregarding the cost for the sake of this point, it functions in a similar way as the dollar, which you could argue is also just used for speculation, but it would be equally inaccurate. Then there is describing bitcoin as all of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which is also incorrect. It’s an evolving technology, and the system bitcoin uses is legacy and expensive, and is currently being kept alive by being the first in the space, money interests wanting to keep it dominant because of investment and a horde of cultlike followers. However, in the ethereum ecosystem, transactions keep getting cheaper through layer 2 protocols and upgrades to the system. It uses proof of stake which is vastly cheaper. I think there certainly are valid arguments against cryprocurrency, but the stuff everyone keeps NPC copypasting is generally nonsense.
You can exchange it for goods and services in the same way as the dollar. Which is the goal of it in the first place. Disregarding the cost for the sake of this point
But you can’t disregard the cost. No big box retailer is going to start accepting BTC transactions at the point of sale. It takes too long, and is too resource intensive. So you’re essentially limited to secondary markets or person-to-person transactions where seconds in processing the transaction don’t count. Not to mention the volatility of the exchange rate. A business or a government aren’t going to accept that the currency they accepted today could potentially be worth half its value tomorrow. Without some sort of major catastrophic world event, something like that isn’t going to happen to the dollar. That kind of shit destabilizes entire economies and nations.
There’s also the issue of reputation. Regardless of validity, cryptocurrency is seen as something used for criminal activity. If your local city government said they’d start accepting BTC for your water bill or trash bill, the majority of average folk are going to think “that stuff people buy drugs with on the Internet?”
BTC has never been and will never be viable as a mass market currency system.
I agree, BTC is awful. But I also think its just a starting point for something that has the potential to become much better.
You are right I shouldn’t have equaled bitcoin with the rest of the crypto ecosystem. While most crypto is utter scam, it’s true that there have been some slight advances here and there, and there are coins that may be actually useful for some cases, mostly Monero and I suppose Ethereum. I’d still say that crypto has done more harm than good in the world, and I say that as someone who’s really focused at privacy, care about it a lot and have invested significant amount of time and effort into staying as private as possible.
But it’s great that Ethereum managed to solve most of the issues with Bitcoin - unless I’m mistaken, it’s not really used for investment speculation, and if it managed to keep the energy requirements low, that’s good. But last time I remember researching about blockchain (it was few months, so feel free to correct me), isn’t it running into serious issues with ledger size, that makes it infeasible for long-term (decades) of use, without sacrificing some of it’s guarantees? Which is one of the main issues with blockchain tech in general, that I don’t think has been solved so far.
It’s a process. There certainly are a lot of scams, and correct regulations need to be in place. It is a tool used by people who do harm, though it is not the cause of harm. At the same time, it’s helped a lot of startups innovate in non-traditional ways, and i think a global and affordable currency that is not tied to the local currency has the potential to help a lot of people. Ethereum in theory should be more stable in terms of price as it keeps being minted and destroyed trough use of the blockchain. You can speculate with it, or the ERC-20 tokens in it’s ecosystem. Ledger size is an issue i’ve had to deal with myself setting up a node, but it’s also an issue that can be fixed in several ways if it looks like it could become a significant enough issue, as they did with PoW to PoS.
I think it’s hard to measure what good and bad crypto is done when you only hear about outragous corruption and crime but not how the everyday person uses it. I use it in a way that helps myself and others and I’m no north korean drug lord scamming people.
It’s incorrect. I would comparing to fuel consumption in a car based on how many times you turned. If you make more turns on your way, it would seem your car is more efficient, when in reality there’s very little relation between turns and fuel usage, just like there is little relation between number of blocks mined and transactions.
I do wonder how this compares to current payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, etc)
Well my understanding is that visa, MasterCard ECT. Are far more efficient in terms of energy and transaction time when compared to Bitcoin and Ether. Visa uses about a quarter of the power per 100,000 transactions.
So I would assume that would mean fewer data center computers to cool and therefore less water used per transaction
By design.
Bitcoin has pretty much no incentive to make the transactions efficient. The load is distributed to other people (their customers), and their biggest customers have a perverse incentive to want the transactions to be as inefficient as possible in order to discourage competition.
Vista et al have to pay for their own transactions, so keeping it light is simple cost savings and totally rational.
Sorry, I’ve not kept up to date with crypto, but wasn’t ethereum due to move from computational mining to staking? Wouldn’t that be a lot more efficient, or is that not a thing yet?
ethereum moved to proof of stake sometime back. BTC and I think a few other (very) minor cryptos still use proof of work which is where the significant power usage goes. Not something I track but I believe the vast majority of non-BTC cyptos are proof of stake or something not proof of work anyway and BTC is the only one that uses proof of work and is used at all. That might not exactly be technically correct but it is in the practical realm.
When the alternative to prove of works (vouched by those hoarding compute resources) is prove of stake (vouched by those who can afford to park piles of money), both are suck for their own reasons.
It’s a necessary sacrifice to push more ponzi schemes
It’s actually a scam pushed by Big Water to get you to use more water and line their pockets.
I don’t understand some things in the water consumption.
Why do they need to humidify the air for the datacenter?
Why is there water consumption for cooling? Aren’t they recirculating water used for watercooling? Or are they using f*ing tap water then throwing it out?
Water for electricity production, kinda, yes. Could be indirectly attributed to their water consumption as they are using the electricity produced by the sources using water.
Why do they need to humidify the air for the datacenter?
Static electricity. Humidified air dissipates static charges before they can build up enough to arc and cause damage to sensitive components.
Yeah and too much is bad too, because it can condense on coolers. I’ve been told it’s also bad for bearings in HDDs when it’s too low.
Of course in a datacenter being low on humidity is a much more likely thing as there is nothing to emit humidity (e.g. humans).
Not even a mention of lightning? I have no idea if it works as I’ve been hearing both yes and no for several years, but writing such an article without mentioning what at least theoretically would be the solution just seems bad.
