Energy cost of 'mining' bitcoin more than twice that of copper or gold

["DAVID FARBER" <dfarber () me com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Energy cost of 'mining' bitcoin more than twice that of copper or gold
> Date: November 6, 2018 at 1:31:29 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Energy cost of 'mining' bitcoin more than twice that of copper or gold
> New research reveals that cryptocurrencies require far more electricity per-dollar than it takes to mine most real 
> metals
> By Alex Hern
> Nov 5 2018
> <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/05/energy-cost-of-mining-bitcoin-more-than-twice-that-of-copper-or-gold>
>
> The amount of energy required to “mine” one dollar’s worth of bitcoin is more than twice that required to mine the 
> same value of copper, gold or platinum, according to a new paper, suggesting that the virtual work that underpins 
> bitcoin, ethereum and similar projects is more similar to real mining than anyone intended.
>
> One dollar’s worth of bitcoin takes about 17 megajoules of energy to mine, according to researchers from the Oak 
> Ridge Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio, compared with four, five and seven megajoules for copper, gold and platinum.
>
> Other cryptocurrencies also fair poorly in comparison, the researchers write in the journal Nature Sustainability, 
> ascribing a cost-per-dollar of 7MJ for ethereum and 14MJ for the privacy focused cryptocurrency monero. But all the 
> cryptocurrencies examined come off well compared with aluminium, which takes an astonishing 122MJ to mine one 
> dollar’s worth of ore.
>
> “Mining” is the name for the process by which blockchains, such as those that underpin cryptocurrencies, are 
> regulated and verified. In bitcoin’s case, for instance, the currency is backed by “miners” due to the absence of a 
> centralised authority confirming transactions. These miners effectively enter a competition to waste the most 
> electricity possible by doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second. One lucky competitor wins both a 
> reward, worth about eighty thousand dollars in bitcoin, and the right to verify all transactions made in the last 10 
> minutes.
>
> The rewards may be virtual, but the energy cost is very real. Previous attempts to gauge how much electricity is 
> burned to power the bitcoin network, still the largest blockchain in existence, have focused on looking at the size 
> of the network in aggregate. In November 2017, one estimate placed the power consumption of the network as equivalent 
> to that of the nation of Ireland. Another noted it was producing the same annual carbon emissions as one million 
> transatlantic flights.
>
> The new paper is the first to look at the mining efforts from the point of view of energy cost per dollar benefit. 
> “The comparison is made to quantify and contextualise the decentralised energy demand that the mining of these 
> cryptocurrencies requires,” the authors write, “and to encourage debate on whether these energy demands are both 
> sustainable and appropriate given the product that results from relatively similar energy consumption (when 
> normalised by market price).”
>
> To account for the wild fluctuations in cryptocurrency price, and therefore effort expended by miners, the 
> researchers used a median of all the values between 1 January 2016 and 30 June 2018, and attempted to account for the 
> geographic dispersal of bitcoin miners. “Any cryptocurrency mined in China would generate four times the amount of 
> CO2 compared to the amount generated in Canada,” they write, highlighting the importance of such country-dependent 
> accounting.
>
> [snip]
>
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