Quote from: Amph on June 25, 2015, 06:56:16 PM

Quote from: kingcolex on June 25, 2015, 06:34:21 PM

Quote from: mrkubanftw on June 25, 2015, 05:55:08 PM

I rarely see discussion on the impact of bitcoin. No, not financially, not from an economic standpoint.

How about the eco-system?

Our network hashrate for bitcoin alone (there are also many alts out there) is 177,943,954.

Now lets assume that everyone mining right now is rocking the best of the best hardware (they aren't) grabbing 0.5w/ghs. FYI electricity cost in washington is cheap. REALLY CHEAP. Due to all the hydroelectric power. That been said its about .04$ on an industrial tier. Which means they can run really inefficient hardware by our standards and still be profitable so this is a lot worse than iv'e calculated. I should note EVERYONE is flocking to washington right now with their miners. That means with bitcoins total hash-rate of 177,943,954 GH/s that its energy consumption would be around 88,971,977 Watts or 88.9 Megawatts of power.

Again these numbers are likely far below actual. I would tack on an additional 30% even for people running older hardware.

88.9 MEGAWATTS OF POWER PEOPLE

We can only assume that with the reward drop coming up that either hashrate will double or the price of bitcoin will have to rise. Maybe a bit of both as im speculating but regardless.

Does this seem responsible? We are basically polluting on a massive scale to make pennies on the dollar.

You have to assume at some point governments will come together to put this to an end?

Efficiency will keep increasing and we can hope that the wattage used goes down but when more people get involved and bitcoin use increase there will probably be an increase of miners but that's just standard growth to use.

if the wattage will go down because of a better efficiency, then more miners will be added = the same result as today(with more hashpower, but same consumption), you can't escape from that equation

the only thing to reduce it would be that bitcoin will remain at current price(after the halving), therefore miners need to shut down 50% of the total hash, unless they manage to double their efficiency in 1 year

so there is a percentage of possibility that nothing will change with the reward(besides the difficulty), highly unlikely though

For worldwide use the wattage isn't that bad, I mean if we take the top ten nation that consume power we get 13615000MWH if we take 88 and divide it by that number we get .00000646345942 that's not a lot in global usage now is it.

I mean one Solar farm in arizona makes 290MW, as technology increase and we produce more green electric I don't see this being too much of a concern.