this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023

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Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 11 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@beehaw.org

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[–] zartcosgrove@beehaw.org 118 points 11 months ago (9 children)

i strongly urge skepticism when reading articles about the environmental impacts of bitcoin. I am not saying that bitcoin is a sensible use of resources - rather that the claims made about the environmental impacts are often overstated and based on models extrapolated to absurdity. For example, see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8 where Mora, Camilo et al suggested that "Bitcoin Emissions Alone Could Push Global Warming Above 2°C". Then read Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions by Masanet et al.

Again - the environmental impacts of cloud computing in general and bitcoin in particular are something we should be concerned about. But there are a number of researchers who have made wild claims that should be treated with a critical eye.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 11 months ago

(Checking if outbound federation is back)

Yeah, if they had said 10 gallons, I'd buy that, but a whole swimming pool of water would be worth far more than a transaction fee I'd expect.

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[–] Greg@lemmy.ca 56 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

These data centers consume water for cooling systems

How does a data center consume water? Doesn't every liter that enters as freshwater leave as slightly warmer freshwater? What am I missing here?

[–] lechatron@lemmy.today 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Some of the water is evaporated so it doesn't leave as a liquid.

[–] Greg@lemmy.ca 27 points 11 months ago (5 children)

That's unlikely in a closed heat exchange system. Maybe some additional evaporation because the water is slightly warmer. But unless I'm missing something, it seems very misleading to suggest that a Bitcoin transaction uses 16 kilolitres because of evaporation. Napkin math, it would require about 10 megawatt/hours of energy to evaporate that much water (please correct me if I'm wrong). I'm not a Bitcoin fanboy, I just don't like BS.

[–] lechatron@lemmy.today 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Some water is used in humidifiers, there are also systems that use direct evaporative cooling where the water is eveporated to cool the hot air. There are probably other ways the water is lost.

AWS’ preferred cooling strategy for its data centers is known as direct evaporative cooling. In this system, hot air is pulled from outside and pushed through water-soaked cooling pads. The water evaporates, reducing the air’s temperature, and the cool air is then sent into the server rooms.

https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/

[–] derbis@beehaw.org 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Even if so, does evaporating cause it to exit the water cycle?

[–] lechatron@lemmy.today 7 points 11 months ago

These cooling systems remove and release all of the heat produced inside a data center – from servers, IT equipment, and mechanical infrastructure – into the outside environment, through a cooling tower that uses a water evaporation process.

It goes outside and eventually becomes rain.

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[–] gus@beehaw.org 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Swamp coolers.

Fans blow over water to lower the pressure, causing evaporation to occur at room temperature.

Evaporating water absorbs heat from its surroundings without raising the water's temperature as it undergoes a phase change. It absorbs nearly 20 times more heat than it would from being heated from 50 degrees F to 100 degrees.

[–] 4am@lemm.ee 5 points 11 months ago

Aquafers do not refill as quickly as industry sucks them dry. It’s not just a Bitcoin or even a cloud computing problem, but the author is using this fact to make Bitcoin look even more ridiculous.

[–] quackers@lemmy.blahaj.zone 41 points 11 months ago

Ok thats not even remotely accurate. wtf is this clickbait shit. You can argue that bitcoin is bad for the environment but if you're gonna invent statistics at least make is plausible.

[–] Zworf@beehaw.org 30 points 11 months ago (8 children)

These calculations are a bit off IMO. They factor the total amount of mining and divide it by the number of transactions.

However, the amount of mining is not dependent on the amount of transactions.

I'm not a fan of bitcoin due to the wasteful proof of work mechanism but 'blaming' the transactions is not really fair IMO, especially because people don't really use bitcoin as a payment method anymore. It's just used by speculators now.

[–] Pulptastic@midwest.social 5 points 11 months ago

Wasteful and unsustainable.

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[–] S0L1DX@lemmy.sdf.org 24 points 11 months ago (14 children)

That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. BS clickbait

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[–] Michal@programming.dev 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

False. Mining is what uses electricity (and water) in bitcoin, not transactions. Adding more transactions does not add to the cost. Calculating consumption per transaction is misleading as the two are not related.

What does add to the cost is complexity, and complexity is calculated based on number of miners in the network in order to achieve the sweet spot of 1 block every 10 mins (if i remember correctly). If there's a lot of competition, each miner will have to use more electricity to win.

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[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 22 points 11 months ago

Because of these transactions, many countries, such as the United States, could face freshwater shortages if the currency becomes more widely adopted.

False.

Blocks get mined (secured) with the same amount of power no matter the number of transactions in each.

Interesting that an article like this would come out right as Bitcoin's value is going up and the US SEC is considering approval of several Bitcoin ETFs.

[–] Deemo@bookwormstory.social 17 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I do wonder how this compares to current payment processors (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, etc)

[–] comradegreetingcard@lemmy.ml 33 points 11 months ago (2 children)

What I found.. 1 Bitcoin transaction takes ~700 kWh of power, where as 100,000 Visa transactions use ~150 kWh.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I don't think that's really equivalent. They are averaging the energy usage of mining and usage across the number of transactions. The overwhelming majority of that energy would be on mining.

What is the equivalent of mining in terms in VISA transactions? How much energy does that use? What is the marginal cost of a Bitcoin transaction? If you're including Bitcoin mining in your per-transaction costs, shouldn't you include the entire operating costs of VISA, along with the partners they rely on like banks, mints, and even physical mines?

Bitcoin is not a 1:1 equivalent of anything in the traditional financial world, so coming up with a meaningful comparison is difficult. It's a little bit currency, a little bit transaction processing, a little bit "mining", and a little bit banking. Despite the hype, I don't think it's a full replacement for any one of those things.

[–] Overzeetop@beehaw.org 15 points 11 months ago (5 children)

You can't have a transaction without mining. Mining is the work done to solve a batch of transactions, so the exact cost of a transaction is easy to determine provided that you don't include the cost of plant (buildings and IT to run the miners, though this is usually very minor compared to the actual calculation consumption). Each block contains (typically) between 3000 and 4000 transactions and is solved every 10 minutes. As of today, it takes 2.6GWh to solve a block, given the current number of miners (137TWh/yr per https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption), which is 744kWh per transaction at 3500 transactions per block.

The cost of a Visa transaction is more difficult because there are people involved and other plant costs (buildings to house the people who work for Visa). The actual cost to process a Visa transaction, in direct transactional power usage, is trivial because a Raspberry Pi can "process" hundreds of thousands of transactions a second locally - it's literally a couple hundred bytes of login/query/reply data, and adding or subtracting from a ledger which is mirrored to distributed servers. Distributed across a server with enough transactions to keep it busy it's probably a few hundred milliseconds on 1/8 of a 50W processor - call it 0.001Wh at the server, which is the equivalent of the 700kWh per bitcoin transaction. If we say that there are 10 machines all doing the same virtual transaction on each physical transaction (incl. POS, backup, billing, etc) and we figure a 5:1 cost of total power (a/c, losses, memory, storage) then we're all the way up to 0.00005kWh (0.05 Wh, or 180 watt-seconds) per transaction. That means that the overall cost for visa to process your charge is 1.5kWh/0.00005kWh for the computers or 30,000:1 due to humans being involved in the process.

Here's the thing, though: Bitcoin gets harder (more compute intensive) as time goes on, and the rate of increase is faster than the ability to solve, on a Wh basis. IE - Bitcoin transactions will get more expensive over time unless bitcoin changes their code - and there is always resistance to that because there is a financial disincentive to reduce the work in Proof of Work systems. This is mitigated on other blockchains by using Proof of Stake, but that has other implications. Visa, otoh, is taking advantage of AI and drops in processor and storage costs to lower their per-transaction cost because there is a financial incentive to reduce processing costs as the fees charged are fixed (nominally 3% of the transaction cost) and anything left over is profit.

[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 11 months ago (5 children)

It seems I have fundamentally misunderstood how bitcoin mining works. Thanks for the correction.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this. If the marginal energy cost of a transaction is 744kWh, shouldn't the transaction fees be astronomical?

[–] gus@beehaw.org 4 points 11 months ago

The reward for mining a block is over a quarter of a million dollars these days. $250k / 4k transactions = apx $62.50 per transaction. Around $8 is from the transaction fee from the sender, the other $54 is from the block reward minted out of thin air.

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[–] sonori@beehaw.org 5 points 11 months ago

Even when you throw in the entire electrical consumption of Visa down to the last lightbulb and ATM you’re going to be dwarfed by bitcoin. Mining is inherently necessary for bitcoin to process and records transactions, but even if it wasn’t the scale of waste just kills bitcoin. Running a few office buildings to serve hundreds of millions of people just can’t compete on a per transaction cost. And comparing the energy needed of one way to send money online to another way to send money online seems fair enough to me.

For scale, in an electric suv like the Ionic 5, 708kwh is enough to drive from California to Florida, and that’s necessarily for every single transaction.

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[–] GameWarrior 14 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Well my understanding is that visa, MasterCard ECT. Are far more efficient in terms of energy and transaction time when compared to Bitcoin and Ether. Visa uses about a quarter of the power per 100,000 transactions.

So I would assume that would mean fewer data center computers to cool and therefore less water used per transaction

[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

By design.

Bitcoin has pretty much no incentive to make the transactions efficient. The load is distributed to other people (their customers), and their biggest customers have a perverse incentive to want the transactions to be as inefficient as possible in order to discourage competition.

Vista et al have to pay for their own transactions, so keeping it light is simple cost savings and totally rational.

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[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 13 points 11 months ago

As tradition I won't read the actual article and only comment on the headline - while BTC is a massive energy waste, it seems unlikely that each transaction would waste so much cooling water. Maybe each mined block, but each block should contain thousands of transactions

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 13 points 11 months ago (4 children)

700kWh per transaction? That's absurd amount of power. That's 70 EUR of energy per one transaction at current (EU) exchange price.

Is there anyone here knowledgeable enough about this issue to say whether those numbers are correct, or just an overestimate? It feels wrong.

[–] quackers@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 11 months ago

They are insanely off, yes.

[–] sushibowl@feddit.nl 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The number varies a little bit (I've seen estimates 600-1200 kWh) but this is well within an order of magnitude of being correct. It's the nature of the competitive mining network and the proof of work system: if you can spend more computing power (i.e. energy) than everyone else there are lucrative mining rewards to be had. At the same time adding more computing power to the network doesn't add more transaction processing power, because mining difficulty is constantly adjusted to keep the speed more or less constant.

This naturally leads to exorbitant power consumption per transaction. Note that most of this power is not being purchased at EU exchange prices (mining naturally moves to where electricity can be had for cheap to maximize profits).

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 10 points 11 months ago (5 children)

I just hope bitcoin will finally die. It's literally just wasting absurd amount of energy, only to allow scammers to scam billions of dollars from victims, and regular people to steal from eachother by investing into it. I mean, if the only use of bitcoin by now is for speculation and investment, then it means that any dollar you made, you literally stole from someone else who will be left with useless bitcoin once it's all over. There's no value, and with the ledger getting bigger and bigger, and bitcoin more expensive to mine, it will eventually be worthless. And we all know it, so anyone who makes thousands of dollars, there's someone who probably financially ruined himself by making a wrong and stupid investment at the wrong time.

I hate crypto so much :D.

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[–] Michal@programming.dev 8 points 11 months ago

It's incorrect. I would comparing to fuel consumption in a car based on how many times you turned. If you make more turns on your way, it would seem your car is more efficient, when in reality there's very little relation between turns and fuel usage, just like there is little relation between number of blocks mined and transactions.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 5 points 11 months ago

It's an overestimate. Right now the total cost per transaction is around 82 US dollars, which at current exchange rates is 75 Euros. That cost covers everything - electricity, rent for the building, salary for staff, taxes, depreciation of mining equipment, and whatever profit is required to keep the miners in business. I don't know what proportion of miner costs actually goes to electricity but I expect it'll likely be much less than 70 Euros.

Perhaps someone got that 700 kWh figure by doing the reverse calculation - looking at how much a transaction cost and then assuming that all goes toward electricity.

[–] Destraight@lemm.ee 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

OP, your "news" article sucks. It's just clickbait

[–] fwygon@beehaw.org 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not only is the science underlying all these findings completely non-existent, they only "guesstimate" what the water usage of what every thing that uses water is; then blindly divide that by the transaction volume per time period.

Not only is that method highly flawed; it's incorrect. Computers do more than mine crypto; and 1 transaction typically costs not even 1 tenth of a percent of most miners' overall computer resources. This is due to the fact that many miners are utilizing either a GPU or FPGA style device to power optimize and optimize the mathematics necessary to secure a transaction.

[–] JWBananas@startrek.website 7 points 11 months ago

That might have been true a decade ago. But GPUs and FPGAs have long been obsolete for mining Bitcoin.

Mining is happening on custom silicon in large-scale operations. They specifically observed several of those large-scale operations in multiple nations and extrapolated out. I don't see how that methodology is flawed.

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 12 points 11 months ago

When the alternative to prove of works (vouched by those hoarding compute resources) is prove of stake (vouched by those who can afford to park piles of money), both are suck for their own reasons.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's a necessary sacrifice to push more ponzi schemes

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[–] cwagner@beehaw.org 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not even a mention of lightning? I have no idea if it works as I’ve been hearing both yes and no for several years, but writing such an article without mentioning what at least theoretically would be the solution just seems bad.

[–] FaceDeer@kbin.social 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Last I saw Lightning was pretty much DOA, it's been around for many years and almost nobody's using it. At the time I was checking there was an order of magnitude more activity transferring Bitcoin on Ethereum using WBTC tokens than using Lightning on Bitcoin itself.

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[–] Tibert@jlai.lu 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't understand some things in the water consumption.

Why do they need to humidify the air for the datacenter?

Why is there water consumption for cooling? Aren't they recirculating water used for watercooling? Or are they using f*ing tap water then throwing it out?

Water for electricity production, kinda, yes. Could be indirectly attributed to their water consumption as they are using the electricity produced by the sources using water.

[–] Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 13 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Why do they need to humidify the air for the datacenter?

Static electricity. Humidified air dissipates static charges before they can build up enough to arc and cause damage to sensitive components.

[–] MelodiousFunk@kbin.social 8 points 11 months ago (5 children)

I worked in a "datacenter" where the humidifier function for the HVAC unit was turned off because it leaked under the floor into an adjoining office when it was trying to humidify. Management refused to fix the unit due to the cost, and saw no issue with running the room with relative humidity in the teens all winter. Madness.

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[–] fosforus@sopuli.xyz 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Ethereum transactions are claimed to use about 1-22 Wh per transaction. Not sure where the wide range comes from, but at least it's quite a lot better then Bitcoin's ~700-2000kWh per transaction. Ethereum is comparable to how much a credit card transaction is said to spend, although those figures only take into account power needed for their computer systems. Blockchain currencies replace a lot more infrastructure than just the computer systems, so I think it's reasonable to say that Eth2 is more energy efficient than credit cards.

That's not enough to make it a replacement for credit cards yet, but it's a good lowest of the low barriers to be crossed to qualify as a replacement.

In a few years, we'll probably be spending a huge amount of power for AI also, and there doesn't seem to be any Proof-of-Stake -like technology to help with that. Good times.

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[–] gatelike@feddit.de 5 points 11 months ago

ok then just use salt water. You're welcome nerds!

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