How to dig bitcoin without wasting electricity

Bitcoin is currently one of the most valuable virtual currencies today and the need to use it is increasing. It is because the number of people digging Bitcoin is increasing. Besides the value that virtual currencies bring, digging virtual money also consumes a significant amount of power. Accordingly, the bitcoin network is consuming about 32 TWh / year, each bitcoin transaction consumes 250 kWh, enough for households to use for many days.

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This situation has raised concerns about the stability of the electricity network. According to experts' predictions, by 2020, the bitcoin network will consume the same amount of electricity as the world currently used.

And in the next few years, the amount of electricity produced cannot be doubled to meet the current demand for digging bitcoin from humans, and it will cause a terrible environmental disaster.

1. Consume a lot of power

Digging bitcoin is the process of creating new bitcoin coins. And many people cannot understand how this process works and how much electricity they actually consume.

Here are some earnings figures for this industry: Bitcoin digger earns 75 bitcoin each hour with the latest exchange rate of USD 15,000 / bitcoin, which accounts for $ 1,125,000 per hour, 9 years per year. , 8 billion USD.

And the biggest obstacle to this industry is electricity. When the price of bitcoin is increased, it means consuming more power until the cost of electricity is equal to revenue.

This is the method that the Digiconomist website uses to calculate the power consumption of bitcoin networks.

The price of bitcoin increases, the digging of bitcoin will be more, the greater the amount of electricity consumed. If bitcoin prices rise to $ 25,000, power consumption will double the figure given above.

Conversely, if bitcoin is down, people will not be very interested in digging bitcoin, because it does not bring them much profit. At this time, digging bitcoin will decrease, meaning that the electricity consumption will also decrease significantly.

It is estimated that Bitcoin is consuming less than 1% of the electricity of the entire US economy. However, when bitcoin increases 100 times today (over $ 1 million / bitcoin), this network will consume more electricity than the US economy.

Will this scenario happen before 2020? This is unpredictable. However, bitcoin has skyrocketed in the past 2 years.

If early in 2015, the price of bitcoin reached only USD 200, then in 2017 bitcoin increased to USD 15,000, up 70 times.

2. Myth about bitcoin

Many people mistakenly believe that digging bitcoin based on the mathematical process and digging becomes difficult when the number is increasing.

But in fact, this is not so. The bitcoin network has the ability to automatically adjust the difficulty of digging money to ensure that every 10 minutes a block is created, regardless of whether there are more or fewer resources on the network.

In 2009, when new bitcoin appeared, each block was rewarded with 50 bit of money when it was new. After four years this figure has halved, equivalent to 25 bitcoin in 2013 and 12.5 bitcoin in 2016.

By 2020, this number is only 6.25 bitcoin. As bitcoin revenue drops, power consumption will also be reduced.

Similarly, by 2024 and 2028, the reward will decrease by half. So, if the price of bitcoin is stable, the power consumption of the bitcoin network will decrease steadily in the next decade.

Another very important detail is that the fixed prize 12.5 bit depends on the number of transactions that the bitcoin network handles. Traders still charge each session from bitcoin users but with much smaller value than fixed rewards on each block.

That means bitcoin networks can be upgraded to handle more transactions without costing the digger or consuming more power.

3. Can power consumption be reduced?

To reduce the amount of energy consumed when digging bitcoin, we have 3 ways.

Method 1: As mentioned above, we need to lower the price of bitcoin as it appears.

Method 2: Narrow the bitcoin reward mechanism for those who have just created the block before 2020. However, this may not seem feasible, because of the unanimity of the diggers and the traders.

Method 3: Change the process of digging bitcoin. Currently, the bitcoin digging algorithm is based on processing a large number of cryptographic hash functions (cryptographic hash functions), but there are also virtual currencies that use other digging methods.

Considered as a bitcoin version, gold bitcoin uses memory-based digging algorithms that consume less power, though still consuming a lot of energy. In addition, there are many other energy saving virtual money digging algorithms.

However, the conversion of money digging algorithms is not easy and is often opposed by digers. This can also blow away the hundreds of millions of dollars invested by companies into money-digging hardware.

As the price of Bitcoin goes higher, people will increasingly rush to invest in hardware to dig virtual money, leading to an increase in overall electricity demand. If Bitcoin miners are concerned about the environment, even if they are only a small fraction of their interest in profits, they should switch to using cleaner power sources.

See more:

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