Quote from: flug on June 30, 2011, 09:51:27 AM

Quote from: wareen on June 29, 2011, 12:04:30 AM

To conclude from my perspective:
Yes, if price shoots up 200 fold within a year, Bitcoin's total energy consumption will be much higher by the end of that year but your conclusion of a 1:1 relationship is ignoring so many factors that it most certainly does not even hit the right order of magnitude.

This isn't mindless extrapolation. This is concentrating on the primary market driver.

I'm sorry, I did not intend to accuse you of anything mindless - your concerns are very valid!
I just think that the development of the Bitcoin economy is so hard to predict - even for weeks - that I think its just not feasible to make useful forecasts over years or decades.

Quote from: flug on June 30, 2011, 10:15:35 AM

In summary.. if bitcoin becomes a major world currency its price will soar -> mining rewards will soar -> amounts spent on mining will soar -> amount of energy consumed will soar -> number of power stations will soar.

Yes that connection is indisputable - as for the exact numbers and the timeframes our opinions diverge, so lets settle with that Wink

Of course, if Bitcoin really does become a major world currency, the implications for large parts of the world economy would be very severe, making predictions of the overall ecological impact even harder.

One more point I'd like to add: the potential of Bitcoin to "sell electricity" without having a good connection to the power grid.
There are lots of remote places where electricity could be generated efficiently but where it's not economical because it is too far off the grid. A single wireless / satellite uplink is much easier to install than building a long-distance power line.

Regarding future mining hardware: I could imagine solar panels in connection with decent GPUs to be a long term competitor to FPGAs or even ASICs. They share high one-time costs and little or even no operating costs but with the solar+GPU combo you always have the possibility to earn money on selling electricity whenever Bitcoin mining stops being profitable (or even in the case of a Bitcoin collapse). If Bitcoin will ever play a major role in the world economy, Bitcoin mining will probably be tightly connected to power plant operators for its unique usage of electricity.