Replying to Avatar Leo Wandersleb

Roughly a doubling every 2 years with 5TW in 2020 gives you ... 200k/5=40k ... 2^15=32k ... So by that extrapolation we would need Kardashev Scale I by about 2050 to 2055.
Avatar
mutatrum 1y ago

Thanks, and as i thought, that's a lot earlier than most if not all predictions mentioned on the Wikipedia page. Most say 100 to 200 years from now.

Now I have to look for world energy production. To be continued.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Avatar
Leo Wandersleb 1y ago

But I was just taking your numbers and assumed exponential growth.

It's important to understand that mining will inevitably expend as many resources as it earns in bitcoin and that latter is maybe easier to argue about.

So ask the mining rewards over the past years. Those were dominated by the block rewards initially and only in very few occasions did fees surpass the block rewards. This down-wards trend in BTC earned through mining per year will probably stop after 2 or 3 more halfins from now.

The value mined per year then will mainly depend on the value per BTC. If that reaches a top well before 2050, mining will also top out then. There is no infinite, exponentially growing security budget for Bitcoin so my math above is certain to not reflect reality for longer time frames.