Is Cryptocurrency mining killing the planet? Short answer HELL YES! (Fuzzy math highly likely!)
Using Graphics Cards (GPU's) and CPU's to mine cryptocurrency is incredibly taxing on the world's electricity supply, but how can we estimate the actual scale? It is incredibly difficult to calculate the overall energy consumption of Proof of Work mining (PoW) but the average daily hashrate of ETH is 66,074,466,799,999.99 H/s (66 TH/s), BTC 6,032,092 Th/s, and LTC 6.8 TH/s. I am no math wizard, and I dropped out of Calculus II, so this is the best I can do. Please correct any mistakes if you have nothing better to do! I am also not the biggest fan of math, so I am only going to do the calculations for Ethereum because I mine it and know what the consumption rate of my rig is :) If I were to calculate the power consumption of Bitcoin, I might have a heart attack.
Breakdown of Ethereum mining power consumption
Ethereum power consumption is a little bit difficult to calculate because all GPU's are created differently. I will use the card I currently mine with, which is pretty efficient in regards to electricity consumption. The 1070 Founders Edition produces around 25-32 MH/s (30 is a nice round number) at a rate of about 100W (simplified for calculations).
Lets calculate the energy consumption of 1 GPU
So at a current average of 100 watts or .1 KiloWatts
(.1 kW * 24 hours) = 2.4 kW per day per card
(2.4 kW * 365 days) = 876 kW per card per year
Now, lets calculate about how many of these cards it would take to produce this hash rate
(66,074,466,799,999.99 overall Hash of ETH network/3000000 H/s per GPU) = 2,202,482.22 GPUs running
This would consume roughly (2,202,482.22 GPU x .1 kW) = 220,248.22 kW EVERY HOUR!!
2,202,482.22 GPUs * 876 kW/year = 1,929,374,430.05 kW/h a year total
1.9 Trillion Kilowatt Hours, which is roughly the consumption of Suriname or Malawi (both #143 and #144 on the worldwide consumption chart respectively)
Plug that into the EPA's nifty calculator and we are generating 1,355,918 Metric Tons of CO2 equivalent with just Ethereum!! This graphic represents a few comparisons that help tether quantities to tangible things.
So now what do we do? I am an American capitalist pig, running my miner right NOW consuming .2 kW/hour. Well, Ethereum will hit the Ice Age and become unminable, and Bitcoin is finite so it will eventually be stopped. Graphene (steemit, peerplays, bitshares, & golos) are all delegated proof of stake coins that only use witness servers to verify blocks. I am actually investing most of my mining profits into steemit, thus transitioning my currency into a more environmentally sustainable currency.
I know there is no stopping what is happening, and as a participant I will continue to mine until it's no longer profitable. All I wanted to do was quantify exactly how destructive all of this mining was and share it with my fellow steemians. Since we allow a small number of witness servers verify our blocks instead of miners, we are a far less destructive bunch :)
Thanks to @kristyglas for these beautiful line breaks, she gives them away for free HERE
If you are a witness and would like to be interviewed, you can find me in the PALnet discord chat or hit me up at [email protected]
Check out some of my previous posts if you like what you've read
Witness Awareness Series: Interviews with various witnesses
Interviews with @aggroed, @theprophet0, and @ausbitbank
Recent Vacation Photos
Because I'm addicted to steemit and I like to share photos
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