Virtual currency The enormous amount of power for the Bitcoin system may make it difficult to maintain the system itself

In order to benefit from the mining of the virtual currency Bitcoin (bit coin), it is essential to use a high-performance dedicated machine, and furthermore, in order to reduce the electricity cost, it is required to have a base in a cheap electricity country . It is pointed out that the situation where the energy required for mining to keep the system continues to rise while minor fighters surging like arms race competition will make it impossible to maintain the bit coin system in the future I will.

The Ridiculous Amount of Energy It Takes to Run Bitcoin - IEEE Spectrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/the-ridiculous-amount-of-energy-it-takes-to-run-bitcoin

Bit coins are used as ledgers to record all transactions (transactions) "Block chainI will make use of it. Block chains recorded on PCs scattered throughout the world are updated at the same time every transaction and adopted a mechanism to check transactions, so the safety of bit coins is guaranteed. And, by allocating newly issued bit coins to people called "minor" that provides computing resources to maintain this system, bit coin systems that do not have any specific issuing entity are maintained.

In each transaction of bit coin, a public key cryptosystem is used to check the validity of the movement of bit coins, making transaction security safe and legitimate by impossible counterfeiting. You can see how transactions with bit coins work by looking at the following articles.

Summary of things I would like to know to perfectly understand the virtual currency "Bitcoin" - GIGAZINE


By making the story simple and easy to understand, computational resources are used for decryption work, and bit coins are offered to those who succeed in solving more hash functions. For this reason, in order to overcome other minor and receive bit coin allocation by executing more calculations, minors all over the world are repeating competition every day to expand computing capacity.

However, since the amount of newly issued bit coins is determined in advance, the more hurdle the minor computing ability is, the more hurdles for getting bit coins will rise, so the " Bit coin bubble "due to the sharp rise in prices, further competition is intensifying to increase computing performance.

You can see what kind of system the top class minor is building to dig a bit coin by looking at the following article.

Infiltrate the world's largest mining plant digging Bitcoin, a virtual currency that continues to soar, to approach the horrific reality of mining sites that overwhelm 25,000 machines - GIGAZINE


Initially when bit coins were created, they were mined using PC CPUs, but the minor now began using GPUs that can make parallel operations more efficient. After that, mining tools such as FPGA for SHA-256 arithmetic for bit coin mining and hardware "ASIC" specialized for bit coin computing have evolved from one step to the next and now they are manufactured with 16 nm process rule Machines equipped with ASIC "Antminer S9" are mainstream.


Machines for mining bit coins have high computing performance, but it is indispensable to suppress electricity costs in order to financially pay mining actions, and development of a more efficient system continues It is.

The figure below depicts the efficiency of the system required for bit coin mining by age. The polygonal line is the profit (dollars) per 1 Gh / s calculated from the market price of the bit coin, and the red line shows the power cost required for each mining tool.


Briefly, in the case of a system (red line) below the line graph, it is in a state that profits will come out. Thanks to the rapid rise in the bit coin market since the beginning of 2017, it is a situation where you can make profits with the Antminer S 9 system. Of course, it can be enough to become a deficit if the rise in the bit coin market can not keep up with the performance improvement of mining machines.


The electricity required to maintain the bit coin system as of June 2017 is estimated to be about 500 megawatts, which means that it is capable of supplying power to 325,000 homes. The energy cost required to maintain financial transactions with bit coins,More than 5000 times when using VISA credit cardEstimates are also being made.

In the case of a bit coin where the new issue volume is controlled unfairly, the difficulty of producing bit coins increases with the lapse of time, so the performance competition of mining machines becomes more severe. For example. The state-of-the-art bit coin mining machine boasts 100 million times faster and 1 / 1000,000 lower power consumption performance than the CPU at the time of 2009 when bit coin was born. If we use the 2009 CPU at that time to maintain the bit coin system as of 2017, the required power is the level that exceeds the total power generated by the whole earth.

Electric power of hash calculation required because of transactions using bit coins increases, Sebastian Dietman of the Netherlands researcher predicts that the electric power required by 2020 will reach 14 gigawatts It is. Please note that this power is the same level as the domestic power consumption in the Netherlands.

As the pace of performance improvement of semiconductors including ASIC tends to become dull, there is a structural problem that if the bit coin spreads as a means of settlement, the power required for maintaining the system will increase as it spreads. It is pointed out that the possibility that the bit coin system can not be maintained in the near future from this expanding power cost.