This thread is lame. There are many clean energy solutions, they're just not politically feasible in our corrupt system.

There's a white paper on low energy nuclear reactions out there. The media was so bearish on cold fusion they had to re-name it.

When having a conversation about the energy usage of bitcoin's mining network, it is important to know what the facts are.  Here are some important facts:

Total power deposited on earth by sun:

   130 million gigawatts

Total (average) power consumed by humans:

   16 thousand gigawatts

Total power consumed by bitcoin mining:

   0.68 gigawatts (assuming all bitcoin inflation buys electricity at $0.10 kw-hr)
   0.07 gigawatts (assuming 1 W GHash)

So, humans are using 0.012% of the sun's energy that hits earth, bitcoin is using somewhere between 5x10^-8% and 5x10^-7% of the energy available from the sun or 0.0004% - 0.004% of the total energy consumed by humans.  

I think you mean the total luminosity of the milky way:

   5000000000000000000000000000 gigawatts     (5×10^36 W)

Quiz: assuming you could run bitcoin miners off the total luminosity of the milky way, and assuming each watt provides 1 GHash/s of hashing power, approximately how long would it take to find two 512-bit numbers that had the same sha256 hash?  If you used your miners to mine bitcoin, approximately what would network difficult increase to and is there enough resolution in the bitcoin protocol to support this or we would need a hard fork?

The media speaking abouit it is just randomly looking for hooks because they have to keep their mouths moving. They don't care about the ecological impact of anything and they won't bother again with that angle once they've nudged it a little and determined that it doesn't have any "legs," as they say.

Why isn't the content of the section entitled "Bitcoin mining is a waste of energy and harmful for ecology" not sufficient to debunk the recent spate of articles about Bitcoin being an "ecological disaster" and whatnot?

Bitcoin has become boring. This is a good thing.

First let's put things into perspective

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27d793/research_is_the_bitcoin_network_sustainable/


Second in my opinion mining energy will turn into a feature. There is lots of energy wasted. Electricity utilities waste excess power during nights. They can use bitcoin to earn income with that wasted power. Same for geothermal. For solar panels people will replace batteries to store excess energy value with bitcoin. Lower cost for them.

It is not feasible now because chips are very expensive but once competition heats and hashing chips prices drop to the ground all the mining will move to energy waste resources. Even biking has excess energy that we don't have a commonly used battery to store. Why not store it in bitcoin.

Cars harness wasted energy into expensive batteries costing thousands each. Storing in bitcoin will be cheaper.

All the wasted energy can be stored in bitcoins.

it's funny: mining BTC is harmful for ecology and some ecological projects are donating BTC