Are We Blockheads When it Comes to Energy?
I was pretty surprised that when I posted this summary/review of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists a few days ago, not a single person bit on the article "The Dirty Parts of the Computing World." So I'm going to dig a little deeper and try again. The article lists statistics on the various environmental costs of computing: energy, water, and pollution from mining on the front end and e-waste disposal on the back end.
We're going to stick with energy for this post. For context:
According to a 2011 study by Greenpeace, data centers alone account for almost 2 percent of all global electricity use, and this use is projected to increase by at least 12 percent annually. In the 2014 update to this report, Greenpeace noted that if the Cloud were a country, it would rank sixth overall in national energy consumption, behind the United States, China, Russia, India, and Japan—but well ahead of Germany, Canada, Brazil, and France.
Then it introduces the blockchain in a pretty damning way.
And to make matters worse, some bold new computing technologies, such as virtual currency, were deliberately set up in such as way to be as wasteful as possible—such as the “mining” of Bitcoins.
After a short discussion of what a blockchain is and how it works, there are these more concrete energy use statistics:
To give you some sense of the scale of this relationship of power, on a single day in September, 2013, near the height of the market value of a Bitcoin, more than 18,000 megawatts of electricity were devoted to the race to solve the arbitrary Bitcoin cryptographic puzzle. To put this number into perspective, this puts the total annual energy consumption of the Bitcoin network somewhere between the nation states of Iceland and Ireland. And on an average day, when only 983 megawatts are used to mine bitcoins, that is still about half of what it takes to power the Large Hadron Collider for a day. Although there is some dispute about the exact energy requirements of the current Bitcoin network, the collective energy demand of Bitcoin is and will remain significant. Two-hundred exaflops of computing power costs a lot of electricity to operate, and although individual Bitcoin mining devices are becoming more energy efficient, the overall energy use and greenhouse gas emissions of the entire network will continue to increase over time—and is in fact designed to.
I'm posting this to (hopefully) open up a discussion. Read the full article. Is the Bulletin's assessment of the situation accurate? Is the social problem of human trust and cooperation more important (or harder to solve) than the technical problem of energy cost? Do these problems interact? Do their solutions? I'm not an expert on any of these technologies, so these are honest questions for me.
It's true that the bitcoin network needs a lot of power to function but something was ommited in this report:
How much power do banks need to operate?
We need to know it before criticising bitcoin's consumption.
There is definitely something to the Bulletin's damning assessment of computing technology's environmental impact. And BTC's 100% proof-of-work blockchain does basically amount to manufacturing money by lighting stuff on fire. But steemit's 'graphene' blockchain functions differently (it uses proof-of-stake) and does not require nearly as much energy. Incidentally, ETH seems to be planning to switch to (some mysteriously complex) proof-of-stake mining in the near future.
My suspicion is that there's no magic bullet which could solve all of these problems. But there are huge advances in material science, nanotech, biotech, and int'l business happening at a fairly steady clip. So my thinking is that a diverse array of highly localized solutions to these problems will be rolled out all over the world in the next 5-10 years, and (probably after a couple of major wars) we will get a decent handle on minimizing the environmental impacts of computing technologies about the time the global climate goes really haywire as a result of the stuff that has already happened.