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?

EDIT****

WE ARE NOT COMPARING CURRENT BANKING SYSTEMS TO BITCOIN. FOR THE FOURTH TIME. READ COMMENTS IF YOU PLAN ON CONTRIBUTING TO THIS DISCUSSION.

You pose an interesting question here. What are the environmental impacts of mining? First, I think your numbers are a bit low. The network hash rate is far closer to 350PH/s than the 177PH/s you quoted. We certainly haven't seen a doubling of the hash power in the past 4 days since you wrote your initial post, so I'm not entirely sure where you got that value. Assuming the vast majority of the network is between 0.75W and 1W per GH/s, the total power consumption on a daily basis is between 262.5 MW and 350 MW.

I don't know enough about energy production to speculate, but here's an example. The smallest nuclear plant in the US (located in Nebraska) can produce 502MW per hour. So, in a day, that's 12,048 MW of power. Even if every single bitcoin miner on the planet was powered by this single facility, it would only consume 2.9% of the facility's capacity.