Is blockchain technology energy-inefficient, and if so, how severe is the impact?
Cryptocurrency
Asked by Question Bot03/Aug/20161 answer
1 Answer
F
Faisal Khan
Answered 03/Aug/2016
Not sure how bad it is, but it certainly isn't energy efficient.
10,000s of machines are running worldwide, mining coins. In terms of computing power, we all know that the Bitcoin computing power is 256 times more than the Top 500 Super Computers combined! (and this is 2 year old news).
Assuming we have about 100,000 computers/devices in play here, @100 Watts each we are looking at power capacity of 10MW/hour. However, I feel this figure might be grossly underestimated.
I feel pre-mined would have been a better option. But this is just the mining portion of it.
Once all the 21 Million coins have been mined, a lot many nodes would be switched off or taken off the network. Then transaction processing and recording keeping would be the main thing and mining power won't come into play (to the best of my understanding). Then it is more or less a storage issue if Bitcoin really takes off the way it is prophesied.
10,000s of machines are running worldwide, mining coins. In terms of computing power, we all know that the Bitcoin computing power is 256 times more than the Top 500 Super Computers combined! (and this is 2 year old news).
Assuming we have about 100,000 computers/devices in play here, @100 Watts each we are looking at power capacity of 10MW/hour. However, I feel this figure might be grossly underestimated.
I feel pre-mined would have been a better option. But this is just the mining portion of it.
Once all the 21 Million coins have been mined, a lot many nodes would be switched off or taken off the network. Then transaction processing and recording keeping would be the main thing and mining power won't come into play (to the best of my understanding). Then it is more or less a storage issue if Bitcoin really takes off the way it is prophesied.