|
Critics are already pushing back against the "environmental disaster" claim. Writing in Forbes, Tim Worstall says the energy being used is "simply trivial," amounting to 0.025 percent of the total US household electricity supply. And worldwide, that percentage would be far lower. Besides, Worstall says, "at some point Bitcoin mining will stop. There is an upper limit to the number that can ever be mined; I think I’m right in saying that we’re about halfway there at present. Thus this energy consumption will not go on rising forever. At some point it will come to a dead stop in fact." (The system is self-limiting, with a max of 21 million bitcoins.)
As for the stats themselves, they're fairly speculative to begin with. The computers calculating hashes are assumed to be using 650W per gigahash—which Blockchain freely admits is an estimate that depends entirely on the efficiency of one's computation hardware. In addition, Blockchain assumes the cost of electricity to be 15 cents per kilowatt hour; here in Chicago, it's only one-third that number. Neither the amount of electricity used nor the cost of that electricity is a number worth putting a huge amount of faith in.
|