Grist (originally Grist Magazine; also referred to as Grist.org) is an American non-profit online magazine that has been publishing environmental news and commentary since 1999. Grist's taglines are "Gloom and doom with a sense of humor" and "A beacon in the smog". Grist is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and has 35 writers and employees. Its CEO is former state representative Brady Walkinshaw. Its stated mission is "to inform, entertain, provoke, and encourage its readers to think creatively about environmental problems and solutions."
Etymologically the word "grist" originates in the process of the grinding of grain at the mill. The proverb "all is grist for the mill" means "everything can be made useful, or be a source of profit." There are some minor variations, such as "all's grist that comes to his mill", meaning that the person in question can make something positive out of anything that comes along.
A miller ground whatever grain was brought to him, and charged a portion of the final product for the service. Therefore, all grain arriving at the mill represented income, regardless of its quality. The first recorded usage was in the 16th century, but the term is probably much older. The term "gristmill" was once common in the United States and Britain to describe a small mill open to all comers.
Bitcoin’s energy footprint has more than doubled since Grist first wrote about it six months ago.
It’s expected to double again by the end of the year, according to a new peer-reviewed study out Wednesday. And if that happens, bitcoin would be gobbling up 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, about as much as the Netherlands.
That’s a troubling trajectory, especially for a world that should be working overtime to root out energy waste and fight climate change. By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.
Although the author of the study, Alex de Vries, an economist and data consultant based in the Netherlands, has shared these calculations publicly before, this is the first time that an analysis of bitcoin’s energy appetite has appeared in a peer-reviewed journal.
Bitcoin continues to soar in popularity — mostly as a speculative investment. And like any supercharged speculative investment, it swings wildly. Within the past 18 months, the price of bitcoin has soared ten-fold, crashed by 75 percent, only to double again, all while hedge funds and wealthy libertarians debate the future of the virtual currency.
Beyond its tentative success as a get-rich-quick scheme, bitcoin has an increasingly real-world cost. The process of “mining” for coins requires a globally distributed computer network racing to solve math problems — and also helps keep any individual transaction confidential and tamper-proof. That, in turn, requires an ever-escalating arms race of computing power — and electricity use — which, at the moment, has no end in sight. A single bitcoin transaction is so energy intensive that it could power the average U.S. household for a month. A fluctuating bitcoin price, along with increases in computer efficiency, has slowed the cryptocurrency’s energy footprint growth rate to “just” 20 percent per month so far in this year. If that keeps up, bitcoin would consume all the world’s electricity by January 2021.
That simply won’t happen — government regulators would surely come to their senses by then — but it is a sign of bitcoin’s disastrous growth rate. In recent months, bitcoin supporters have criticized de Vries for being too pessimistic about its energy usage. But, as de Vries writes in the study, his estimates could also be missing out on secretive or illegal participation in the network, meaning there’s maybe even more happening than meets the eye. In at least one instance that de Vries found, a researcher was caught diverting a National Science Foundation supercomputer to mining bitcoin.
It’s a telling social phenomenon of late capitalism that we are willing to construct elaborate computer networks to conduct secure transactions with each other — and in the process torpedoing our hopes at a clean energy future.
This article for the Guardian by Alex Hern claims that the Bitcoin's cryptocurrency energy use results in carbon emissions equivalent to one million transatlantic flights:
Bitcoin’s electricity usage is enormous. In November, the power consumed by the entire bitcoin network was estimated to be higher than that of the Republic of Ireland. Since then, its demands have only grown. It’s now on pace to use just over 42TWh of electricity in a year, placing it ahead of New Zealand and Hungary and just behind Peru, according to estimates from Digiconomist. That’s commensurate with CO2 emissions of 20 megatonnes – or roughly 1m transatlantic flights.
That fact should be a grave notion to anyone who hopes for the cryptocurrency to grow further in stature and enter widespread usage. But even more alarming is that things could get much, much worse, helping to increase climate change in the process.
Burning huge amounts of electricity isn’t incidental to bitcoin: instead, it’s embedded into the innermost core of the currency, as the operation known as “mining”. In simplified terms, bitcoin mining is a competition to waste the most electricity possible by doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second. The more electricity you burn, and the faster your computer, the higher your chance of winning the competition. The prize? 12.5 bitcoin – still worth over $100,000 – plus all the transaction fees paid in the past 10 minutes, which according analysts’ estimates is another $2,500 or so.
This is a winner-takes-all game, where the prize is guaranteed to be paid to one, and only one, miner every 10 minutes. Burning more electricity increases your chances of winning, but correspondingly decreases everyone else’s – and so they have a motivation to burn more electricity in turn.
The economic outcome of all of this is laid bare in a Credit Suisse briefing note published on Tuesday: the network as a whole will reinvest almost all the bitcoin paid out as mining rewards back into its electricity consumption. (Credit Suisse’s ballpark figure assumes that 80% of the expenses of bitcoin miners are spent on electricity).
At current prices for electricity and bitcoin, the bank calculates a maximum profitable power draw of bitcoin at around 100TWh – two-and-a-half times higher than its current rate. Any higher and the miner will lose money.
But it gets worse. If bitcoin were to become the global currency its supporters hope it will, its price would increase. And if its price increases, so too does the amount of electricity miners can afford to burn.
Credit Suisse estimate that a bitcoin price of $50,000 – five times its level as I write – would increase the electricity consumption tenfold. And at a bitcoin price of $1.1m, it would be profitable to use almost all the electricity currently generated in the world for mining.
Hong Kong technology traders sell bitcoin mining computers.
The bank views the latter prospect as not worth worrying about, for two reasons: it doesn’t think bitcoin will ever reach that value, since the competition from other cryptocurrencies is too strong; and it thinks that power consumption of mining will fall over time as better technologies are used for miners. Credit Suisse explicitly compares bitcoin to marijuana cultivation and data centres, two other industries that once sparked fears they would have huge power draws.
And while marijuana farmers and data centre engineers managed to reduce their power demands, the fundamentally wasteful nature of bitcoin mining means there’s no easy technological solution coming.
Mining computers have become more power-efficient, with the latest generation of machines able to do roughly 20% more useless calculations per MWh of electricity. But in the zero-sum game of bitcoin mining, that just means a miner can afford to run more machines at the same time, leaving their power usage roughly stable.
In the end, there’s only one real reason why bitcoin’s energy consumption would fall, and that is if the price of the currency drops.
On that point, there is good news to be had: bitcoin is down to just over $10,000, almost half the level it was trading at a month ago. If it continues to fall, we might be able to return to worrying about more conventional sources of climate change, like the automotive industry, plane travel, and Donald Trump.
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