The internet eats up less energy than you might think
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Exaggerated or not, what's aggravating is that Bitcoin is literally secured by the consumption of power through wasting it on hashing.
To process the same amount of transactions per second in a non-trustless (trustful?) system, you'd need, like, a few Raspberry Pis around the world. And the trustlessness is dodgy anyway, with a few big mining pools having over 51% of the mining, with everyone basically having to trust the developers, etc.
The stability of bitcoin is the tyranny of the installed base. Even non-mining nodes will not relay invalid blocks that break the fundamental rules.
See also: Ethereum Classic, a case study in developer-as-dictator
Inefficient perhaps, but the energy use was intentional for a value to someone not discarded for no gain.
You can't have "all waste heat" as that would require doing no work which would result in... no waste heat.
That being said Bitcoin doesn't aim for less product per entropy. That would literally mean you get more reward for doing the same work in the same time but less efficiently which isn't true. That doesn't mean everyone always uses the most efficient hashing method, just like not every car uses the same engine because it has the best efficiency, it just means the aim isn't towards making less product per entropy. The product may not be aligned with what you want (e.g. "very efficient way to trust a transaction") but that's back to calling the energy usage all "just for waste" because you don't personally value the output the same way as someone else (which is true of every use of energy).
If Bitcoin mining were aiming to consume the most energy possible, then the hashing would be done by hand on pencil and paper.
Waste heat in a computer is largely resistance, power conversion inefficiencies, and cooling. Heat generated by the actual computation is known as work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(thermodynamics) not waste heat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat. The ratio of the two describes the efficiency of a machine. Since some useful work must have been done for the computation to occur then it's impossible for 100% of the energy to have been used for waste heat.
From the opening of the Wikipedia page:
'Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment".'
Computation is in the first sentence, it's mentioned by name 8 times in the opening section - information 6 times. I'm not really sure how you came to the conclusion it doesn't mention anything about computing information. Even skimming it's hard to find a spot not mentioning it directly, by name.
> Given that computing information with a computer is just switching transistors on and off in a clever way, it makes no sense that if we are unclever, then suddenly all of the heat becomes "waste".
What you call "clever" and "unclever" are (essentially) ways of describing how entropy was changed. Another way of thinking about it is there is a very specific order to where energy needs to go and how it needs to be arranged to be "clever" and calculate something vs unclever and not have the answer to the number crunching problem.
Also note there is a difference between "energy that eventually ends up as heat" and "waste heat". All work will result in heat if you follow it long enough, some energy spent doing that will not go towards the amount of work done but will still end up as heat. The latter is known as waste heat. Waste heat is not just "heat I ended up with at the end".
According to ctrl-f, the word computation never appears on this page. The word information never appears in this context. Same with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat
> What you call "clever" and "unclever" are (essentially) ways of describing how entropy was changed. Another way of thinking about it is there is a very specific order to where energy needs to go and how it needs to be arranged to be "clever" and calculate something vs unclever and not have the answer to the number crunching problem.
None if this explains why the portion of heat in a clock cycle is different if we consider the clock cycle to be doing something clever. If some of the energy is not waste, it must have taken another form. What exactly is it? When we switch a transistor non-cleverly, presumably the energy never takes this form, and thus the actual switching of the transistor took more energy . Which makes no sense.
> All work will result in heat if you follow it long enough, some energy spent doing that will not go towards the amount of work done but will still end up as heat.
I'm not convinced this is true. It seems equivalent to the claim that all macroscopic objects moving through the universe will eventually stop, which I would ague is an assertion beyond science.
> Waste heat is not just "heat I ended up with at the end".
Fine, but we have to be able to point to where the other portion of energy ended up in the interim. Suppose I push black and white boulders up a hill. This leaves them with potential energy, which is somewhat less than the energy it took to get them there. We can agree that at some point in the distant future, the hill will decay, and the boulders end up back on the ground. Thus all the work eventually ended up as heat.
I can choose to arrange them randomly, or I can arrange them to create binary numbers. It seems as though you are claiming that if I create binary numbers with these boulders, the energy it took to do that is more than if I arrange them randomly. I want to understand how exactly it took more joules to do that, and where this extra energy is stored.
I don't value it but obviously some do, same as some don't value individual transport over mass transit but I do. It doesn't mean a car is aggravating because it solely exists to waste energy in means a car is ridiculously inefficient. Same story with crytpocurrency.
I’m beginning to detect a pattern here. Exaggerating researchers are on the rise. It feels as though researchers might be incentivized to exaggerate. The news media help them with that. Maybe we need more research in this area.
Your word "waste" implies a value judgement, and thus you have departed the realm of scientific inquiry.
The transactions-per-second energy argument is completely fallacious and often made in bad faith. It makes no sense whatsoever. Comparing Bitcoin (a settlement system) to some other credit-based payment system is not a genuine comparison.
Ignoring the Lightning Network in any discussion of Bitcoin shows a distinct lack of subject-matter awareness.
If you dig into the power grid system today, you'll find that a huge amount of power generated by the world's energy producers goes unused. The Bitcoin network uses far less energy than the amount lost during normal generation, yet I see no hand-wringing about this colossal "waste" boiling the oceans.
It's secured by a mix of things, including expertise, investment and yes, a large energy component. Far from a new thing.
It also completely ignores (as does everyone else) the 700lb gorilla in the room - the embedded energy content of all of the computing equipment, from the video camera used to film content, to the networking equipment and data centre servers, to the final device used to consume that content. Manufacturing semiconductors is an incredibly energy-intensive (as well as very resource-intensive) process, and product lifecycles are ever-shortening.
Yes, I’d love to read more about that. i wonder if anyone here has a link to some research that looks at the full-er picture.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of...
Low tech magazine has a very definite agenda but I've found their writing really informative and I think they do a good job in raising how enormous an issue this really is.
There is no difference hardware-wise. The difference is our cloud overlords have been promoting "on-demand scaling" as a proof "serverless hosting" is superior to traditional ways because it's greener and "we can shutdown machines when there's no demands". Which is arguably true, but so short-sighted it hurts to think journalists will fall into this trap.
> to the networking equipment and data centre servers
Sorry i don't have the data at hand, but some people estimated just that. Internet infrastructure as a whole was estimated to use several percent of the world's electricity. Those numbers did not count resources/energy for production of the hardware or the infrastructure, only recurring "costs".
Although eu-west-1c ran out of nodes the other day so YMMV anyway.
The difference between sophisticated (Google, Amazon, Facebook) cloud data centers and traditional corporate data centers is Extremely Large™. Traditional ones are characterized by things like big central UPS systems, redundant AC/DC power supplies in each host, remote-control PDUs, overblown air conditioners, etc. Cloud data centers are typified by non-redundant power supplies with either distributed UPS systems, or no UPS, DC-to-point-of-load, and marginal ventilation where the cold aisles are hotter than the hot aisles of traditional data centers.
> Internet infrastructure as a whole was estimated to use several percent of the world's electricity
Well, if you define "several" as "almost 2%" then yes, but mostly in traditional data centers. Moving to clouds improves this figure. It is estimated that half of global IT power consumption is in cooling and power delivery, meaning the industry as a whole has a PUE of 2.0, whereas Google, Facebook, and Amazon have PUEs of about 1.1. In other words, moving workloads to the cloud can save almost half of the power.
Vendor lock-in is the only difference.
Interestingly enough, the same is true for cars. It’s often better to just keep using an older car until it dies from a CO2 perspective (sometimes older cars emit other pollutants that makes this more complicated). Depending on the exact mix of electricity production in your area, it can sometimes be greener to use a used gasoline car than a new EV, although that is changing as energy production shifts towards renewable sources.
I think the most realistic choice here is to not upgrade phones every 1-2 years, but stretch it to 3. The recent trend of Apple to not include all the accessories in the box is probably a net good, given how many chargers almost consumers have already too.
No, increased Bitcoin usage does not increase the amount of energy needed to process transactions.
More people are mining (and thus burning more power), because it is a profitable venture if you can get best prices on hardware and lowest costs of electricity.
The least expensive electricity in the world happens to be either stolen, stranded, or hydro / geothermal.
This is fascinating, and the first I've heard -- I'm curious if anyone here knows (not just guessing) what the main factors are?
Is it economies of scale with power and cooling and construction? Is it massively higher CPU utilization because servers are on-demand? Is it custom-designed equipment? All of the above, or something else?
I'd guess that being sited in areas of cheap renewable energy would play a big part too, but if the shift described is solely "energy consumption" then I'm assuming it's treating renewables as the same amount of energy.
I know a lot of people here are anti-cloud and pro-hosting your own equipment in your own rack... but I'm now genuinely curious if there's a large environmental difference here.
Replace “electricity” with “energy” and yes, the manufacturing and distribution of physical media likely does exceed that required for digital only over a lifetime. The details vary, storing and playing files on your phone is more efficient than doing so from a magnetic drive in a desktop computer and more than streaming it over the Internet on every play.
A quick google search about market share reveals: “AWS has 32% of the market, followed by Azure at 19%, Google at 7%, Alibaba Cloud close behind“
Why is Alibaba listed first in the list in the NYT article if American data centers together have 58% market share?
The easiest way to get impressive research on power consumption is to use old per-unit consumption numbers to extrapolate power consumption based on today's usage (e.g. if transferring 1 GB of data took 1 kWh many years ago, just multiply "GB transferred today" with 1 kWh and claim that's what the Internet/zoom calls/... use)
For example: Every GB of data uses 5 kWh [in 2021 according to https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/019...], so using 122 EB/month [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic#Global_Intern...] = 1 464 000 000 000 GB/year = 1.5 PWh in 2017, which would be almost 7% of total power consumption.
That should say 2012.
Too late to edit now.
Another radically cooperative alternative is starting to emerge: fully agent centric networks, where modular and transparent app logic/functions validate and share the information that is important to a specific network of peers. Combine that with the exciting work of Mikorizal and Sensorica, which turn the model of Enterprise Resource Planning upside down (or as they describe it: “merging REA [the Resources Event Agent accounting method] with some ideas from Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) , Work Flow Management (WFM) and Constraint-Based Scheduling (CBS) systems” [2]), to create ‘Network Resource Planning’ systems and ‘Open Value Networks‘.
In other words: they are re-rooting economic networks for the digital age in a way that “enable[s the] internetworking among many different software projects for resource planning and accounting within fractal networks of people and groups.“ By focusing on protocols instead of platforms, a more balanced and horizontal web of trust and transparency can emerge.
The most exciting projects in the dWeb for me, that I mentioned above, are: http://valueflo.ws + holo-REA and holochain.
[1] https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capit...
I tend to think it's mainly the mass amount of commoditised hardware that's the problem, especially if it's thrown away and not recycled, and recently hoarded for mining.
Most of the non sustainable energy consumption happens on the consumer side where most of us are dependent on grids that are also shifting to more sustainable energy sources but still have some way to go.
> still there's people in the Netherlands complaining that datacentres use up too much of the green energy available in the Netherlands. Truly backwards way of thinking
Analyzing and critiquing the moves a massive monopoly -capitalist entity is ‘backwards‘? This sounds quite un-nuanced. Could you elaborate more what you mean? As it stands it sounds like a naive accelerationist perspective.
Companies are facing backlash, yes, for using green energy. How can a company ever go green as long as this kind of thought patterns are mainstream
It's fundamentally impossible. Capitalism is what brought this ecological madness down on it, because of its shortsighted profit incentives. The very same system cannot fix the problem, because nothing has changed.
Pointing out companies who used fossil fuels was intending to allow us as a society to realize we need to reduce consumption/production, not pretend we should shut up and live happily as long as we paint every single polluting thing with a green chemical glowing paint.
There is no such thing as green capitalism and there will never be. Consumerism, private property and competition is what destroyed this planet. Whether we go on and destroy new ones (hello Musk, Bezos and other psychopaths) or destroy the capitalist system depends on our understanding of those issues.
I've lived in the socialism on the USSR and seen what it looked like, it's day and night compared to how free countries deal with pollution. Guess what happens when raw materials are available for free, the economy is inefficient because why bother, and pollution doesn't matter because citizens can't vote anyone else into the office because there's only a single party. China happens. Rivers downstream from textile factories colored with dye-of-the-season, wire fences near cement factories opaque from dust, transport workers spilling diesel fuel into the ground for decades to hide slacking and sub-quota mileage, etc. I've seen it all with my own eyes.
When the first Western experts gained access after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they were utterly devastated at the scale of environmental pollution. They had never seen anything this bad. The solution to everything had been "dig a ditch and throw it in", and if anyone complained, arrest and beat them until they shut up, or send to a labor camp if they don't.
The main problem in the West is similar socialism for the polluters, albeit on a much smaller scale. They get to pollute for very cheap, mostly abroad in China. They should be taxed for what raw materials and their pollution actually costs instead of the current artifically low levels achieved through outsourcing to lawless shithole countries, and environmental damage from their actions would be greatly reduced.
It has more to do with free countries than free enterprise. Private businesses used to be notorious for stripping resources from the environment (e.g. strip mining, clear cutting) to keep the cost of resources low and they used to be notorious for dumping pollutants into the environment since they did not have to deal with the costs of pollution. It was public pressure that resulted in environmental regulation, and even then (as you mentioned) they try to circumvent the costs by outsourcing to jurisdictions that are more lenient.
I understand your emotion and living in Romania I see the abandoned conglomerates and am glad that period is over...however if you discount the risk of chernobilian disaster (sea of Azov etc) that the lack of media and public accountability made possible I'd wager that capitalistic societies is powers of magnitude more polluting simply because people live behind paid layers (producer->wholesalers->distributors->retailers->consumer) paying for it by living in cities, working for buisnesses serving other buisness etc) Manufactured boredom (from living in cities) ->Advertising->fashion/fads->brands-> excess packaging is also a thing and part of the problem... Then there is the fact that businesses once created to solve a problem in the most efficient way often self perpetuate and bloat with govt closing their eyes to monopolistic behaviour in the name of customer pricing
In the city I live in, you can buy food from people from the countryside, rent/property is still cheap , so if you live simply you hardly have expenses and can avoid wasting your life working away while hardly seeing your kids grow up... I understand you lived in a failed system but you shouldn't throw away the baby with the bathwater, authenticity counts, real food counts, generosity and food that is less processed or sprayed (because cost) counts
I feel having grown up in a WIERD (acronym) people there forget that the apparent sophistication is just a sheen and like the 300ml plastic bottles they constantly consume they are choking the rest of us on their garbage (ie the developed world using x times more than the rest)
I think you can see where I'm going with this...the problem with capitalism atm or the way government treats it is that it inherently needs growth, whereas the planet needs "decroissance" a french word for "ungrowth" a french politician, (Yves Cochet )I think, said something like our economy has to "ungrow" 10% per year , it's possible even without covid, but it certainly needs a whole new mindset or a drastic realisation that droughts are going to get much much worse...
It's in no way bad that the server uses clean energy, but the critique is that the government wriggled their way out, Microsoft got to boast about servers running on clean energy while the Dutch citizens were still stuck with the older CO2-intensive power source mix despite the govt's "commitment" to cleaner power.
I’m very skeptical of this. Until now this narrative has often turned out to be nothing more than corporate greenwashing, without tackling the root causes of the problem or helping shift the underlying systems. Take the example of Microsoft buying up renewable energy in Holland: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OiPoR9OvD0Y (Nederland als harde schijf | Zondag met [Arjen] Lubach)
I bring this up as renewables are currently supplemental and don't replace base load. Hydro storage isn't available/practical for all regions, nuclear has been deemed too expensive, so it's usually natural gas that slots in.
Yes, this is a problem.
Let's say the grid uses 100 imaginary units of power per year. 50% is currently produced through solar and wind.
Company A buys 50 units and company B buys 50 units a year, until company A gets a crisis of conscience and decides to go green. They manage to get a deal whereby they pay for a certificate that says that their 50 units is produced through renewables. Great.
Company B, however, has customers who care less about green stuff so they just buy energy from the grid and "their" electricity is now just produced from fossil fuels.
In this case has anything really changed? It's probably a good thing that Google is buying renewable energy: I expect it raises demand for renewables in some way and it's good politically for companies to compete for green credentials. But it doesn't seem to do that much.
I disappointingly found out that my carbon neutral tariff doesn't guarantee a purchase of renewables, it just guarantees that any energy I use that is over their wholesale bought amount of renewable energy will be carbon offset, which is complete crap.
What "renewable" energy does it run and how was it produced? What's the carbox/fossil profile of those energy sources? How long do they need to run, and in what conditions, in order to offset this initial fossil energy invested? Those are the medium-difficulty questions. And as i much as i hate Michael Moore's rhetoric, "Planet of the humans" does a pretty good job of explaining why these questions are important.
What is the ecological impact of the cloud? Why do countryside folks have to have their data run across the country just to exchange messages with their neighbors, and what's the impact of that? What's the impact of a song that you downloaded from Youtube (replicated, dedicated centralized infra) instead of Bittorrent (decentralized, already-in-use hardware)? What's the impact of streaming this same song over and over? What's the impact of online advertisement and web trackers? How many people are working in concrete offices in a city in order to maintain that hellish infrastructure? Where does all the sand and minerals come from to build all that infrastructure as well as all the electronics you find in there? Those are the hard questions and when you answer them you'll never fantasize about green capitalism ever again.
In case you're interested in such topics, and what to do about it, but can't stand for Michael Moore, i strongly recommend the "End:Civ" documentary: https://youtube.com/watch?v=L4ccAJJrrjM
You can get a lot of containers on a boat and a lot of bits down an optical fibre. The cost of the crypto on the other hand, that adds up a bit.
Also BitTorrent uses a bunch of power on a bunch of endpoint servers which are often less efficient than custom silicon. Tricky to calculate.
Also, how green are their backup power generation? Outside batteries?