Create more carbon dioxide than Ecuador !!!!

in #bitcoin8 years ago

 

Yup. And then some. Citibank estimates that the bitcoin network will  eventually consume roughly the same amount of electricity as Japan. The  problem is that the mining process is incredibly wasteful – and  deliberately so. Those miners are all competing to be the first to solve  an arbitrarily difficult computing problem, one that takes enormous  amounts of processor cycles to do and still comes down mostly to luck.  The computer that does solve it first, every 10 minutes, gets a sizable  reward – currently in the region of £65,000 in bitcoin – but every  computer, not just the winner, has had to spend that processing time to  do the maths. The reason for the mining requirement, which is essentially asking a  computer to continue rolling a dice until it rolls a few thousand sixes  in a row, is that it ensures that no single person can dictate what  happens on the network. The proof that the miner has solved the problem  is what it uses to claim its reward, but it also becomes the seal that  it uses to verify the last 10 minutes of transactions. “I, miner number 2357398, have solved this problem, and the answer is  [extremely long string of digits]. By the authority vested in me by the  network, I declare that the following list of transactions to be  confirmed:” and then they list every transaction that they have heard  about in the last ten minutes. From that point on, every machine on the network begins solving a new  problem, set by the last miner. But, crucially, they only do so if they  agree with the miner’s list of transactions. That means that even if  you do win the race, it’s not enough to simply insert your own lies in  the block, and declare that everyone sent you all their money, because  everyone else will simply ignore you and listen to the next miner in the  chain. (The reward itself isn’t really necessary to Bitcoin, but it’s there  to ensure that miners have some reason to throw their electricity at the  network. In the long-run, the hope is that voluntary transaction fees  for quicker confirmations will take over that role.)Because the problem  is so processor-intensive and so randomly rewarded, it’s prohibitively  expensive – in electricity and computing power – to attempt to fake it.  But it’s also a vast use of electricity, worldwide, used to do little  other than satisfy an arbitrary requirement for spending money. 

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It is becoming a concern about how much electricity is used. That's why some companies and miners use solar power, hydroelectric generation and wind power.

One of the companies is MGT that uses hydro power: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/john-mcafee-mgt-bitcoin-mining/

I have checked it, You are right. Thanks