Why bitcoin uses so much energy
Story by: G.F.
BITCOIN has been alarming people for years because of the amount of electricity needed to mint new virtual coinage. Alex de Vries, a bitcoin specialist at PwC, estimates that the current global power consumption for the servers that run bitcoin’s software is a minimum of 2.55 gigawatts (GW), which amounts to energy consumption of 22 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year—almost the same as Ireland. Google, by comparison, used 5.7 TWh worldwide in 2015. What’s more, bitcoin “miners” consume about five times more power than they did last year, and orders of magnitude more than just a few years ago—and there are no signs of a slowdown. Why does bitcoin require so much energy to make something that exists only electronically?
Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies are founded on the notion of an immutable ledger, called the blockchain, which comprises transfers of value from one party to another. Cryptocurrency “miners” seek results to a kind of algorithmic puzzle that fits a very specific set of requirements. Every ten minutes on average, a server finds an acceptable solution, and the miner gets a reward from the bitcoin system. Currently they get 12.5 bitcoins (worth around $85,000) and about $1,000 in transaction fees. The miner’s combination of solution and transactions is also added to the blockchain. The new block does not become a de facto part of the ledger until a few more blocks are added, because valid solutions are sometimes found simultaneously, and it is not always clear straightaway which will become the longest, winning fork in the chain. To ensure that coins cannot be minted too quickly, as the overall network’s computational power increases, the bitcoin protocol continually makes it harder to find a putative solution. Every 2016 blocks (roughly every two weeks), the system is recalibrated. Miners are obliged therefore to keep upgrading in order to earn rewards as fast as competitors. And more computing power requires more electricity.
Original story: https://tinyurl.com/ycyr4ypd
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