How much energy consume of Bitcoin?

The Cryptocurrency fever is in full swing. ICO sold out at the stage of pre-sales. The price of coins of the top 10 hard to keep up. Whatever the social or technological implications of the widespread introduction of the technology of the blockchain, it's hard to deny that the market is a lot of confusion and speculation.

In the midst of this fever is also hard to come up with a rational justification of their own position. If you are a cryptocurrency enthusiast, people will accuse you that you benefit from rising prices. If you are against this, supporters will accuse you that you regret the lost opportunity to buy at a low price and now rage I hope that this price will collapse. Or perhaps you lack the imagination to understand the revolutionary potential of the blockchain. The cynics say about "Tulip fever" and "dot com bubble"; enthusiasts say "HODL" and "Fiat is dead."

what is the value of Bitcoin?

The Investors argue that the apparent lack of intrinsic value of bitcoins besides the fact that people are willing to pay for them, this is the same disadvantage as gold, and Fiat currencies. Cynics argue that cryptocurrency is a speculative bubble scheme, the pump and dump, especially when it comes to unknown coins.

All technologies have their cycles of hype and approval. It seems obvious that the technology of the blockchain sounds where no hitting: any company can change its name to include the word "blockchain" and enjoy the increase in value of the shares doubled. Even if you don't reveal how the company that makes iced tea, uses the incredible power of cryptographic databases for their benefit. The technology of the blockchain may be the new Internet, making transactions and recording what the Internet did for information. But before the Internet all we won was the dot-com bubble and the collapse of the dot-com. When the dust settles, we will see, but I wonder if Bitcoin will not crack and not burst a couple of times before it settles in long-term value. However, the cries that Bitcoin is dead, we've heard already too many times.

A lot more people concerned about the growing energy requirements of Bitcoin.

eating How much energy is the Bitcoin network?

Eric Holthaus of Grist notes that 35 terawatt-hours (HDTV) used by the computers that handle mathematical operations required for mining of new bitcoins is starting to cause concern. "More than 150 separate countries around the world consume less energy per year. And this hungry to energy network in real time each day uses 450 gigawatt-hours more. The same amount of electricity of Haiti consumes in a year," he writes. The more people joins the race for bitcoins, the more complex the computation, the more energy consumption is increasing for each transaction.

One of the problems of exponential growth in a confined space is that you quickly end the space. If energy consumption will rise so at the same pace in a few years we'll hit the limitations of energy that can afford to produce. This does not mean that cryptocurrency will be covered with a copper basin. Already trying to make crypto currencies less dependent on electricity, for example, Ethereum will go on . But still, 35 HDTV, as many say, it is too much how to get started.

Bitcoin requires too much energy?

The Distributed computing power of the network of the blockchain today is much higher than that of the best supercomputers in the world; according to some estimates, exceeds hundreds of thousands of times. Technically speaking, mining operations of the network of bitcoin optimized for "hashing" — integrated calculations, which are not operations of General purpose floating point — but if you crush them, investment in equipment, and in General, the power consumption will be unintelligible.

The SHA-256 Algorithm, which is supposed to "hack" the bitcoin miners, does not allow the individual to obtain centralized control over the database. But it is wasteful expenditure of electricity. Emin Sirer Gyun studying cryptocurrency at Cornell University, says he sees it this way: "It is a perversion. If mainily bitcoins for something useful, it would be the ratio between the useful work and the number of mined bitcoins. In the minds of people born a particular bitcoin price".

Naturally, many would like to part of the computational power that leaks to nowhere in the Empire of Bitcoin are used to benefit science. In the history of civil science was a lot of cool projects such as climate@home, SETI@home, Fold.it used force computing power received from the user, and simple computing power of our brains in certain cases.

Application was the best: simulation of climate change, scanning the sky in search of extraterrestrial life, the solution to the problems of protein folding. Instead of having to use a wind turbine for bitcoin mining to Fund research in the field of climate change, it would be much better if the bitcoin mining fueled the study of climate change.

In science there are so many problems that require access to the computing power of that time on the telescopes and supercomputers literally painted for months and even for years to come. The power of the blockchain would be enough for modeling processes in fusion reactors.

Instead, in a time when we absolutely need science to solve the world's problems, one of the most powerful computer network in the world makes a simple job to prove to others the fact of the work done (proof-of-work). The world is not perfect. But if you think about it, without this revolution already does.