Bitcoin fundamental analysis: energy consumption unsustainable
Bitcoin's energy consumption is out of control.
The network's energy needs come primarily from mining. The current industry standard miner is still the Antminer S9 from Bitmain. The power consumption trend is proportional to global hash rate which continues to increase exponentially, yet innovation in the mining sector has stalled since 2016. Recent developments in 2018, i.e. 10nm ASICs from Innosilicon and 7nm ASICs from GMO have not brought any significant increases in efficiency, please see this chart.
It is unlikely that a breakdown in price from here will be sustainable for miners over any prolonged period, i.e. bear market, that is probably why market makers have prevented this from happening. Without increases in efficiency a bear market will not be possible as energy consumption is too high already.
However a bull market will lead to unbelievable energy requirements and the world is well within its rights to demand cessation of mining (which can be legislated against, indeed UK facist-liberal daily the Guardian advocates just for that Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it). It is not really possible to estimate a reliable figure due to various hidden costs (be suspicious of anyone that says otherwise), but even back of envelope estimates such as mine put Bitcoin's electricity consumption as being the equivalent of 0.2- 0.4 % of global electricity consumption.
There are simply too many miners and too much hash rate. Satoshi once said he thought in the future mining would be performed on specialised farms, of which there would be around 100 worldwide. He never considered mining pools and he didn't care much about the lack of decentralisation in mining. And I am assuming he never expected the global hashrate to reach the tens of millions of terahashes. (Currently 45,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes/second). Koomey's Law states that computing power should double every 1.6 years on average. Well Bitcoin mining has far outstripped this and without significant increases in miner efficiency (exponential increases), proof of work in its current form is dead.
Miner Specs
Hash rate: 13.5 TH/s
Power: 1300 W
Efficiency Calculation
E = 1300 W / 13.5 TH/s = 92.3 W/Th/s (Watts per Terahash)
Weekly Power Consumption Calculation (chart)
P = Global Hash Rate * E / 1000000 * 24 hrs/day * 7 days
(we divide by 1000000 to convert from Watts to Megawatts, i.e. 1 MW = 1,000,000 W)
The network's energy needs come primarily from mining. The current industry standard miner is still the Antminer S9 from Bitmain. The power consumption trend is proportional to global hash rate which continues to increase exponentially, yet innovation in the mining sector has stalled since 2016. Recent developments in 2018, i.e. 10nm ASICs from Innosilicon and 7nm ASICs from GMO have not brought any significant increases in efficiency, please see this chart.
It is unlikely that a breakdown in price from here will be sustainable for miners over any prolonged period, i.e. bear market, that is probably why market makers have prevented this from happening. Without increases in efficiency a bear market will not be possible as energy consumption is too high already.
However a bull market will lead to unbelievable energy requirements and the world is well within its rights to demand cessation of mining (which can be legislated against, indeed UK facist-liberal daily the Guardian advocates just for that Bitcoin’s energy usage is huge – we can't afford to ignore it). It is not really possible to estimate a reliable figure due to various hidden costs (be suspicious of anyone that says otherwise), but even back of envelope estimates such as mine put Bitcoin's electricity consumption as being the equivalent of 0.2- 0.4 % of global electricity consumption.
There are simply too many miners and too much hash rate. Satoshi once said he thought in the future mining would be performed on specialised farms, of which there would be around 100 worldwide. He never considered mining pools and he didn't care much about the lack of decentralisation in mining. And I am assuming he never expected the global hashrate to reach the tens of millions of terahashes. (Currently 45,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes/second). Koomey's Law states that computing power should double every 1.6 years on average. Well Bitcoin mining has far outstripped this and without significant increases in miner efficiency (exponential increases), proof of work in its current form is dead.
Miner Specs
Hash rate: 13.5 TH/s
Power: 1300 W
Efficiency Calculation
E = 1300 W / 13.5 TH/s = 92.3 W/Th/s (Watts per Terahash)
Weekly Power Consumption Calculation (chart)
P = Global Hash Rate * E / 1000000 * 24 hrs/day * 7 days
(we divide by 1000000 to convert from Watts to Megawatts, i.e. 1 MW = 1,000,000 W)
Bình luận:
EBANG release new 7nm 45 J/TH miner !https://twitter.com/Excellion/status/1043367120329826304
Bình luận:
sorry ebang is 10nm
Bình luận:
Bitmain unveil the Antminer S15. Nominally 1.7x S9 efficiency. COmpetes directly with Bitfury's Tardis in terms of performance: ibb.co/fxWtHq
Here is an update of exponential trend with latest Bitmain entry ibb.co/nzkJBe
Article: cointelegraph.com/ne...ew-antminer-machines