Another study, published last year in the journal Joule, estimated that Bitcoin networks the world over consumed about 2.55 gigawatts of electricity and would soon reach 7.67 gigawatts.

https://interestingengineering.com/huge-bitcoin-mining-farm-burns-down-in-china-destroys-10m-in-computers?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Article&utm_campaign=organic&utm_content=Oct02

Mining Cryptocurrencies Is More Energy Intensive Than Actual Mining, Researchers Say
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/mining-cryptocurrencies-energy-mining-metals

During the past two years, researchers estimate cryptocurrencies generated between 3 million and 15 million tons of carbon emissions.

The digital mining of cryptocurrencies required more energy per US dollar generated than the mining of physical metals between January 2016 and June 2018, according to a new study published in the British journal Nature Sustainability.

Digital currency and physical metals aren’t “functional substitutes,” said author Max Krause to BuzzFeed News. The primary aim of the study is to create awareness: “Just because something is digitally processed does not mean it does not consume a considerable amount of energy.”

Cryptocurrency is a form of electronic cash that’s managed by a decentralized network of computers, rather than a government or bank. Over the past two years, cryptocurrency networks have experienced a kind of frenzy, with wildly fluctuating prices that triggered a boom in giant “mines” full of computer processors, alongside bitcoin scammers and multimillion-dollar Ponzi schemes.

Krause and coauthor Thabet Tolaymat found that it takes more energy to produce $1 worth of bitcoin or the cryptocurrency Monero than $1 worth of copper or gold. Also, mining $1 of bitcoin and Monero consumed more energy (17 and 14 megajoules, or MJ, respectively), compared to Ethereum and Litecoin (both 7 MJ on average). Meanwhile, the conventional mining of $1 worth various physical metals required less energy — rare earth metals (9 MJ), precious metals (7 MJ), gold (5 MJ), and copper (4 MJ). The only exception is aluminum, which required 122 MJ.

Krause and Tolaymat also estimated that, during the 2.5-year period, the four cryptocurrency networks (bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero) generated between 3 million and 15 million tons of carbon emissions (1 metric ton is equivalent to 1.1 US tons).

The carbon footprint of any cryptocurrency depends hugely on where the coins are generated. Digital mining in China, where a significant percentage of mining occurs, created four times more CO2 than Canada, where 60% of electricity is generated by hydropower.

Bitcoin Miners Are Shifting Outside China Amid State Clampdown
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-05/bitcoin-miners-are-shifting-outside-china-amid-state-clampdown

Policy makers outlined curbs on mining this week, people say
Canada, Iceland, U.S. are among alternative destinations

As China’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies broadens to bitcoin miners, some of the industry’s biggest players are shifting operations overseas.

Bitmain, which runs China’s two largest bitcoin-mining collectives, is setting up regional headquarters in Singapore and now has mining operations in the U.S. and Canada, Wu Jihan, the company’s co-founder, said in an interview. BTC.Top, the third-biggest mining pool, is opening a facility in Canada and ViaBTC, ranked No. 4, has operations in Iceland and America, their founders said.

The moves underscore how China’s once-dominant role in the world of cryptocurrencies is shrinking as policy makers clamp down.

While the moves are unlikely to have a noticeable effect on bitcoin transaction speeds, they could reshape the cryptocurrency mining industry. Miners have until recently flocked to China because of the country’s inexpensive electricity, local chipmaking factories and cheap labor. They now have little choice but to look elsewhere.

Surfing through the web back in October, I stumbled upon an odd but genuinely fascinating contraption: a Russian cryptocurrency miner that leverages the heat it generates from stacking Ethereum to keep your room warm.

Shortly after I wrote about this unusual device, Comino – the Russian-based startup behind this invention – reached out to us and kindly offered to ship one of its miners for us to test this winter. We gladly took them up on their offer, and a couple of weeks later, the Comino was already installed at our cozy office in Amsterdam.

This week, Jon Peddie Research (JPR) released their quarterly discrete video card sales report for Q3 2017. According to JPR’s figures, the quarter was a strong one for discrete desktop GPU shipments, with vendors shipping upwards of 15 million units, reaching volumes not seen in four or five years. This high point in card shipments was fueled by positive seasonality, desktop PC gaming, and the tail end of cryptocurrency mining demand, leading to add-in board (AIB) shipments increasing 29.1% over last quarter, more than double the 14% ten-year Q2-to-Q3 average increase. In terms of discrete desktop graphics market share, NVIDIA gained around 3% compared to JPR’s revised Q2 figures, putting the balance at 27.2% for AMD and 72.8% for NVIDIA.

Bitcoin mining, our own Simon Rockman wrote last January, “is essentially a brute-force attack on the generating algorithm”.

“Bitcoin, and all the other alt-coins, is training a skillset for building password-cracking hardware that is both powerful and portable,” he wrote.

It looks like cryptocurrencies are also helping to spot some useful prime numbers, according to the folks behind Riecoin.

Mining Bitcoins with Pencil and Paper
http://hackaday.com/2014/09/29/mining-bitcoins-with-pencil-and-paper/

Right now there are thousands of computers connected to the Internet, dutifully calculating SHA-256 hashes and sending their results to other peers on the Bitcoin network. There’s a tremendous amount of computing power in this network, but [Ken] is doing it with a pencil and paper. Doing the math by hand isn’t exactly hard, but it does take an extraordinary amount of time; [Ken] can calculate about two-thirds of a hash per day.

The SHA-256 hash function used for Bitcoin isn’t really that hard to work out by hand.

Completing one round of a SHA-256 hash took [Ken] sixteen minutes and forty-five seconds. There are sixty-four steps in calculating the hash, this means a single hash would take about 18 hours to complete. Since Bitcoin uses a double SHA-256 algorithm, doing the calculations on a complete bitcoin block and submitting them to the network manually would take the better part of two days. If you’re only doing this as your daily 9-5, this is an entire weeks worth of work.

In a couple of large buildings near the Columbia River in Eastern Washington, where hydroelectricity is cheap and plentiful, Dave Carlson oversees what he says is one of the largest Bitcoin mining operations on the planet.

At any given time, Carlson’s goal is to account for seven to 10 percent of the entire world’s Bitcoin mining as measured by processing or hashing power, he said.

Carlson’s company, MegaBigPower, does the biggest portion of its mining on behalf of its primary investor, the BioInfoBank Institute in Poland. Carlson takes a cut in bitcoins and rents capacity to other people who want to mine without running their own hardware and software.

“We surface about half of our US mining power as something you can purchase as a leased hash product,” he said.