”For the first time, it said, the energy required for coin mining had exceeded that used by Iceland's 340,000 inhabitants to power their homes.”
This was part of an article about a Bitcoin server farm theft and I found it interesting. Read more about the theft at BBC:
I find it incredible that they ended up using more energy than the rest of the country combined! I looked a little further into how Bitcoin mining works, it seems awfully complicated!
Yes, it is complicated. I think it is the decentralization that makes it so expensive to transact.
It's not the decentralisation. The issue is that as the popularity of bitcoin and other cryptos increases the complexity and thus the required computing power to mine a new coin increases. Remember there is supposed to be a fixed number of potential bit coins that it is possible to issue so that to ensure there is just a steady flow of new coins that are created the computing power /energy required to do the mining has to increase. Of course the founder of bitcoin never imagined that it would go the way it has and this the resources wasted to mine the things would become so material.
Okay. I thought it was that all network nodes had to mine, not just route traffic and store transactions, that made it so resource intensive.
I'm not an expert but I think the idea is that miners buy computing hardware notably GPU s abd set these at work to solve the problems which will release new coins. If course these have to be powered. My understanding is thst becayse electricity is such a factor the miners tend to be located where electricity can be generated relatively efficiently. But if someone is an expert it would be interesting to know exactly what is going on.
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