The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin

Stoll, Christian; Klaaßen, Lena; Gallersdörfer, Ulrich

doi:10.1016/j.joule.2019.05.012

Cited by 341 publications

(213 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(26 reference statements)

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“…This increasing amount of energy consumption is affecting the environment with increasing global warming. According to a research, the annual carbon dioxide emissions by the bitcoin network using the PoW are as high as 22.9 million metric tons, almost equivalent to the amount produced by the countries like Sri Lanka and Jordan [4]. The PoW consensus is implemented in Bitcoin, Litecoin [76], and Dogecoin [77] networks.…”

Section: Pure Proof Of Work (Pow)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Coin age = Total coins staked × Number of days those coins are held at stake (4) In the randomized block selection method [90], a forger having a specific hit value is selected for forging the next block. In order to calculate the hit value, each forger encrypts the hash of the previous block using its private key.…”

Section: Proof Of Stake (Pos)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 2017, the bitcoin mining used around 30.14 TerraWatt hours (TWh) of energy, which is equivalent to energy usage of the entire Ireland in a year [3]. According to a research, the annual carbon dioxide emissions by the bitcoin network are as high as 22.9 million metric tons, almost equivalent to the amount produced by the countries like Sri Lanka and Jordan [4].Further challenges have been placed on distributed applications by the expanding industrial market growth to serve a wide number of customers. Growing business requires trust and transparency between the customers and business providers.…”

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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A Review of Blockchain Architecture and Consensus Protocols: Use Cases, Challenges, and Solutions

Ismail¹,

Materwala²

2019

Preprint

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Over the last decade the blockchain technology has emerged to provide solutions to the complexity and privacy challenges of using distributed databases. Its adoption is motivated by cost reduction for customers. Over this time, the concept of blockchain has shifted greatly due to its potential in business growth for enterprises and the rapidly evolving applications in a collaborative smart cities ecosystem, healthcare, and governance. Many platforms, with different architectures and consensus protocols, have been introduced. Consequently, it becomes challenging for an application developer to chose the right platform. Furthermore, blockchain has misaligned with the goals for efficient green collaborative digital ecosystem. Therefore, it becomes critical to address this gap and to build new frameworks to align blockchain with those goals. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of blockchain architecture and consensus protocols, bringing a retrospective analysis and discussing the rationale of the evolution of the various architectures and protocols, as well as capturing the assumptions conducting to their development and contributions to building collaborative applications. We introduce a classification of those architectures, helping developers to chose a suitable platform for applications and providing insights for future research directions in the field in building new frameworks. blockchain architecture and consensus protocol, it becomes more and more difficult to foresee the uses and applications of blockchain, therefore compounding the difficulty in achieving the goals. In 2017, the bitcoin mining used around 30.14 TerraWatt hours (TWh) of energy, which is equivalent to energy usage of the entire Ireland in a year [3]. According to a research, the annual carbon dioxide emissions by the bitcoin network are as high as 22.9 million metric tons, almost equivalent to the amount produced by the countries like Sri Lanka and Jordan [4].Further challenges have been placed on distributed applications by the expanding industrial market growth to serve a wide number of customers. Growing business requires trust and transparency between the customers and business providers. Customers require to eliminate intermediaries to reduce transactions cost. The issues of data communication overhead with increasing number of network participants further hinders the real-time services of the developed applications. Addressing these problems of energy consumption and scalability often trades off with security, and privacy. As such, the goals of this paper are four-fold: 1) we aim to provide a temporal evolution of blockchain applications development platforms architectures and consensus protocols with a retrospective analysis to their introduction. We classify the platforms and the consensus protocols under unifying architectures, and discuss various existing and upcoming blockchain applications, 2) help developers to choose the right platform architecture for applications, 3) we evaluate the current research on the topic, blockchai...

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Section: Pure Proof Of Work (Pow)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Proof Of Stake (Pos)mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Review of Blockchain Architecture and Consensus Protocols: Use Cases, Challenges, and Solutions

Ismail¹,

Materwala²

2019

Preprint

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“…Mora et al 4 estimates that the computer processing power needed for the Bitcoin network alone could result in a global temperature rise of 2°C by 2050. Others say such estimates are inflated, possibly by as much as 75% 5 , as miners increasingly flock to sources of cheap renewable energy, like hydropower and geothermal 6,7 . Due to this uncertainty, it is perhaps too early to abandon Bitcoin, or at least the potential of its underlying technology.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Tackling climate change with blockchain

Howson

2019

Nat. Clim. Chang.

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Concern around the carbon footprint of Bitcoin is not holding back blockchain developers from leveraging the technology for action on climate change. Whilst blockchain is enabling individuals, companies and even cities to manage their carbon emissions, the social and environmental costs and benefits of doing so remain unclear. This July saw the release of the University of Cambridge's Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI), an online tool providing real-time conjectures around the electricity requirements of the Bitcoin network. The prestige afforded towards Cambridge is likely to propel the CBECI model ahead of the popular Digiconomist tool, which released its Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index in 2017. Despite the apparent advancement, the increasingly complex modelling of Bitcoin's energy requirements is yet to provide any further clarity. The CBECI analysis, for example, suggests that total power consumption, at the time of writing this, falls within a range of between 21 Twh and 146 Twh. To put that in perspective, those figures equate to somewhere between the energy consumption of Yorkshire and Poland 1. The network's energy requirements are as erratic as Bitcoin's price, depending as much on local weather events near remote Chinese hydroelectric plants, as the efficiency of energy-intensive servers that facilitate the Bitcoin blockchain 2. Bitcoin's computationally-demanding infrastructure enables digital payments to be validated via a decentralized, automated 'Proof of Work' (PoW) consensus protocol. For Bitcoin, the validation of transactions requires 'miners' using dedicated servers to solve hash puzzles in order to add valid entries to a shared database, and to secure new Bitcoins as a reward. The difficulty of these puzzles

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Green Algorithms: Quantifying the Carbon Footprint of Computation

2021

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Climate change is profoundly affecting nearly all aspects of life on earth, including human societies, economies, and health. Various human activities are responsible for significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including data centers and other sources of large‐scale computation. Although many important scientific milestones are achieved thanks to the development of high‐performance computing, the resultant environmental impact is underappreciated. In this work, a methodological framework to estimate the carbon footprint of any computational task in a standardized and reliable way is presented and metrics to contextualize GHG emissions are defined. A freely available online tool, Green Algorithms (http://www.green-algorithms.org) is developed, which enables a user to estimate and report the carbon footprint of their computation. The tool easily integrates with computational processes as it requires minimal information and does not interfere with existing code, while also accounting for a broad range of hardware configurations. Finally, the GHG emissions of algorithms used for particle physics simulations, weather forecasts, and natural language processing are quantified. Taken together, this study develops a simple generalizable framework and freely available tool to quantify the carbon footprint of nearly any computation. Combined with recommendations to minimize unnecessary CO2 emissions, the authors hope to raise awareness and facilitate greener computation.

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The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin

Cited by 341 publications

References 14 publications

A Review of Blockchain Architecture and Consensus Protocols: Use Cases, Challenges, and Solutions

A Review of Blockchain Architecture and Consensus Protocols: Use Cases, Challenges, and Solutions

Tackling climate change with blockchain

Green Algorithms: Quantifying the Carbon Footprint of Computation

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