I think we should focus on renewable energy instead of burning something in order to produce electricity. Instead of coal power plants or fossil fuel powerplants, use hydro, and windmill powerplant. But if the higher people are such greedy people, we can lessen it by lessening the mining of bitcoin.

We can't do anything in that.
Decentralization or Conservation. Only one is possible at once.
Due to the decentralization in Bitcoin mining, anyone can mine. When anyone can mine, the person with higher GPU power will get the mining rewards. This competition leads to increased usage of computing power. Hence, the competition will continue until miners will reach the break-even point between rewards and cost. No one cares about environment.

As you have said there are also other energy sources that could power up the bitcoin network. And for sure there are scientist out there that is doing the very best to solve similar problems in energy sources. I am also hoping and imagining things on how we could accumulate energy that could last up for centuries and not destroying any part of the world using it.

If a single transaction cost to the world the same amount of energy that could power a home for 22 days, then we are doing something terribly wrong. And the solution is just as ethereum did it, change from PoW to PoS, that way holders would mine the coins and not those miners.

If btc moves to PoS we would reduce the carbon pootprint in a exponential manner.

What if there is a law that needs to be passed for miners to return something to the environment, like for every bitcoin that they can mine, they need to plant 100 three. That 100 three is so easy for the market value of 1BTC in return to them. Since they are consuming lots of natural resources in return for digital technology that is also helpful, we need something to balance the condition, and for me, that is through planting trees.

BigBoom3599 & all others who think Bitcoin mining is destroying the planet Earth please read the following posts carefully and with understanding!



So roughly 0.2% of the total generated electricity is used on Bitcoin mining, and more then 50% of that comes from renewable energy sources. By what is o_e_l_e_o posted only cable boxes, TVs, DVD players, and other devices in standby mode consume more energy in one year than all bitcoin mining. And this is only in USA, what about rest of the world?

It is all in perspective. You cannot really compare things like the way that user is trying to. I am not sure how many kw the bank users everyday but I am sure it is a lot.
The internet apparently uses 70billion kw per year https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2016/06/28/how-much-electricity-does-it-take-to-run-the-internet/#3490838f1fff
Bitcoin users 5million+/hour so it is 45 billion a year

So basically 60% of the power it takes to run the internet is the same as it takes to mine bitcoin.

100 million TH in the bitcoin network and a Richsun Bitmain Antminer S17-56TH/s that users 2500w on full load at 56TH
So that is 2 million miners x 2.5kw= 5million/hour

Quite crazy. I wonder how the bank compares.

that's a good point, but we shouldn't only be considering current consumption. bitcoin's electricity consumption may significantly increase over time---and it definitely will if the price keeps increasing. televisions and DVD players have already completely penetrated society, so their associated electricity consumption is already near the upper bounds.

in another 10-20 years, i doubt we'll be comparing bitcoin to christmas lights or cable boxes. the question then becomes, what is an unreasonable amount of consumption? we shouldn't be content to say, "it's still small right now, let's not worry about it".

and i don't mean to fearmonger. i just don't see any useful extrapolations into the future, and i think that's necessary for any honest discussion of this issue. i don't want people to get the impression that bitcoin will always use less electricity than television devices in standby. that's definitely not true.

Current consumption is something that is the result of the first 10 years of Bitcoin, so although it is impossible to predict how much electricity will be needed on an annual basis after another 10 years, can we say that consumption will reach about 1% of total world consumption? Whether it is a lot or a little depends on how you look at it, and who makes the judgments about it. Some already blame Bitcoin mining for global warming and pumping numbers trying to portray Bitcoin in a negative light.

I may be wrong, but a good part of the world still lives pretty much isolated on technology today (no Internet, TVs, washing machine, microwave...) and I am sure that in the future they will contribute to even greater consumption of electricity. The fact is that all electrical devices in the world consume double-digit more electricity in standby mode than it is spent on mining in one year. Added to this is the fact that the largest mining farms are located near hydroelectric power plants, and that the electricity they use is largely surplus.