Bitcoin, yes, a ton. It may or may not yet be on par with small countries, but it’s still a megashitload of electricity.
That makes sense, though, since what keeps all the coins from being mined at once is the complexity of the math involved. Every calculation has a cost in shuttling electrons around, and the number of calculations required is pretty well guaranteed to go up faster than the efficiency of electron-shuffling or the eco-friendliness of generating electricity.
I don’t know that wasting electricity is an absolutely inherent feature of cryptocurrency, but it’s pretty well baked in to Bitcoin and any computationally similar “coin.”
I tried pool mining with eth but with GPU at 9MH/s accepted shares were few and far between. Looking at monero which is what coinhive is set up to do its a net loss on a gpu due to the price of electricity and lower coin value.
But yeah with an infinite number of monkeys mining I guess the pool approach would work.
I know of several small bitcoin mining operations along the Columbia River Gorge and it’s close proximity to cheap hydroelectricity. Google itself has set up several data centers in The Dalles, OR.
Not that hydroelectric is anything remotely like a green energy source – dam building releases tons of greenhouse gases from all of the decomposing inundated biomass.
It’s not. The “mining” does need to be backed by some kind of resource. Bitcoin uses compute time, but it’s possible to use something else, like hard drive space (which wouldn’t have the power consumption issues of compute-backed coins but could drive storage prices through the roof like we’re seeing today with GPU cards).
Some cryptocurrencies have plans for proof-of-stake to negate the issue of wasted electricity. It works by having people with tokens ‘staking’ them to verify transactions. So, if you stake your tokens that a transaction is legitimate, you would lose them if it is determined you were misleading the network. Alternatively, if the network supports your claim, you earn a proportion of the tokens you staked as a fee.
This means the rich will get richer, but it’s already pretty much like that with proof-of-work mining anyway.
There’s FAR more electricity wasted on maintaining the blockchain, than on mining. Think of it this way: the vast majority of Bitcoin calculations are NOT mining hashes, that simple.
I think I read on BB that it’s now more electricity than one of the Scandinavian countries. I think it’s based on estimates as there’s not a requirement to report that you’ve tried to mine and failed, I think.
