Cloud Computing, Cloud Polluting?

courtesy of PayBit.pl

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto (a pseudonym) announced plans to build a new electronic currency—totally peer-to-peer and requiring no third party intermediaries—called Bitcoins. In order to get new Bitcoins, users would install programs on their computers called "Bitcoin miners" that would solve complex mathematical puzzles. By making the puzzles difficult and only solvable after some heavy computing, coins would be slowly introduced into the system over time and the coins randomly distributed to users. These mining programs would search for a sequence of data that produces a particular pattern which, when found, gives the miner a small amount of Bitcoins. Simply put, users could make Bitcoins by using their computers' processing power to solve these puzzles and generate new coins. As of 2009, the number of new Bitcoins has been designed to halve every 4 years until 2140, after which the number of Bitcoins will have reached a maximum of 21 million coins, and no more Bitcoins will be added into circulation.

This system worked well for the first few years, but since Bitcoin mining became widely practiced in 2009, the easy puzzles have been solved, and more processing power has been needed to solve the increasingly harder puzzles. Though there are other ways to obtain Bitcoins (like buying them with other currencies, or trading them for products and services, or through processing fees), mining the coins is still the only way to introduce more coins into the system. As Bitcoin mining requires increasing computing power for diminishing returns, the low-powered computers found in homes and offices are no longer up to the task of virtual mining.

courtesy of Zach Copley/Flickr

In April 2013, Mark Gimein at Bloomberg published an article calling Bitcoin mining an “environmental disaster” that consumes 982 megawatt hours a day, or enough power to run 31,000 US homes. Additionally, the value of Bitcoins is subject to massive fluctuations in the currency trading markets, threats by various governments to shut down the experiment, and hacker attacks on the Bitcoin system. Just three days before the Gimein published his article, Bitcoin values plummeted by 77% after hackers and new users put pressure on the system. A month later, US authorities seized the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, and earlier this week the IRS declared Bitcoins a taxable income. While Bitcoin has made a few people wealthy, Bitcoin miners are quite literally converting thousands of megawatt hours into virtual currency, the future of which is extremely uncertain. Just like mining for gold in the real-world, mining for virtual coins presents serious political, economic, and environmental issues.

courtesy of Jeff Kubina/Flickr

While Bitcoins may be the one of the most obvious challenges to the virtual-material divide, it may not be the most significant. In September 2012, the New York Times estimated that digital data centers worldwide use about 30 billion watts of electricity (or about the same as the output of 30 nuclear power plants), with the US responsible for about one-third of that usage. According to Google, a single search uses about 0.0003 kWh (1080 joules) of energy, which is roughly the same as turning on a 60W light bulb for 17 seconds. Another estimate found that a 140 character Tweet consumes about 90 joules, which is roughly enough energy to power that same light bulb for 1.4 seconds.

But what about when no one is actively using these services?