BitcoinEmissions – A project to calculate CO2 emissions of mining bitcoin

Re:BitcoinEmissions – A project to calculate CO2 emissions o... by skrause on Sunday February 15, 2015 @10:21AM (#9052813)

With more and more efficient hardware you'll just get a higher number of hashes per second and an increased difficulty. At least someone else will reinvest that saved electricity into more hardware, so you have to do the same to compete.

Just imagine everyone using this more efficient hardware to save money on electricity, not increasing the mining difficulty. Eventually you'll have the risk of a single entity (e.g. a government organization) just buying enough hardware to have more than 50% of the hashing power, taking over the whole blockchain.

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Re:BitcoinEmissions – A project to calculate CO2 emissions o... by PythonicAlpha on Sunday February 15, 2015 @11:53AM (#9053125)

I do not know exactly, how the mining difficulty is set up, but to my understanding, more and more transactions are possible with not so fast growing energy effort. And the number that is really interesting is the number of transactions per energy unit.

The second argument is something that is independent from the energy problem. The danger always exists, that some entity is taking over the blockchain.

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Re:BitcoinEmissions – A project to calculate CO2 emissions o... by ufo on Sunday February 15, 2015 @05:01PM (#9054329)

Bitcoin adds a new block to the blockchain every 10 minutes. The difficulty rate is roughly proportional to the total network hash power and is there to keep that constant speed of block generation.

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