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mutatrum 1y ago

As of January 2024, bitcoin mining is using 0.0094% of an Earth sized Kardashev Scale I civilisation.

This is up from 0.00164% in January 2019.

Next step is to extrapolate the data to see when bitcoin forces humanity into a Scale I civilisation.

Hashrate: 523 Exahash/s [1]

Efficiency: 36 J/Terahash [2]

Kardashev Scale I for Earth: 2*10^17 watts [3]

Sources:

1: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-btc-sma14.html#alltime

2: https://coinmetrics.io/special-insights/bitcoin-nonce-analysis/ (Guessed the efficiency for 2024)

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Type_I

Would appreciate if someone can verify the calculation.

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Thethird0cnzo 1y ago

Very interesting!

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nicnym 1y ago

the way forward is more energy, be aware about how backward the anti-energy climate cultists are.

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mutatrum 1y ago

One other data point I want to add is global energy production, I'm wondering how these lines will intersect.

And yes, more energy is always preferable to less energy. They conflate energy efficiency with energy starvation.

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nicnym 1y ago

Climate adherents want starvation and the suicide of humanity. Try to prove that wrong

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Leo Wandersleb 1y ago

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.

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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.

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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.