The energy consumption challenge of Bitcoin | Personal computers and the early stages of internet development were also once seen as energy-wasting.

This article is authorized and reproduced from TechFlow by DeepTech, titled "In 1999, the Internet Was Also a Waste of Electricity." The original article can be found here.

On Saturday, a video of a Bitcoin miner shutting down mining machines went viral on social media, and everyone coincidentally used the same words, "an era has ended."

At midnight on June 20, all Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency mining machines in Sichuan will be collectively shut down, marking the decentralization of Bitcoin mining in China as a reality.

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It may still be too early to make any evaluations now, as it may be subjective and premature. Let time provide the answers.

However, it suddenly reminded me of the early days of the Internet.

There is nothing new under the sun. In the early stages of personal computers and the Internet development, it was also once seen as a waste of electrical energy, posing a risk of environmental pollution.

In 1999, Forbes magazine published an article titled "Dig more coal — the PCs are coming", criticizing the increase in power consumption due to the rise of the Internet, leading to more coal being mined. Today, I share this article with you.

Original Text

In a certain place in the United States, every time you order a book online, a piece of coal is burned.

According to the current fuel economy rating: about 1 pound of coal can be used to create, package, store, and move 2 terabytes of data. The digital age is proven to be very energy-intensive. The internet may one day save us bricks, plaster, and catalog paper, but it is burning a lot of fossil fuels.

Under the hood of personal computers, the demand for "horsepower" doubles every few years. Yes, today's microprocessors are much more powerful in converting electricity into computation than their predecessors, but the total demand for digital power is growing much faster than efficiency. We are using more chips and larger chips, and processing more digital information.

Overall, chips are running hotter, fans are spinning faster, and the power consumption of our disk drives and screens is increasing. The old thermoelectric complex is generally considered to be in decline, and its impact is staggering.

In the infrastructure of the electricity grid megadollar, about half only serves two centuries-old technologies—light bulbs and electric motors. Not long ago, this meant a bleak outlook for the power industry. The number of motors and light bulbs we have is about the same as our demand. "The long-term supply curve of electricity is as flat as the horizon of Kansas," green guru Amory Lovins declared in 1984.

However, when Lovins investigated, IBM and other companies were just beginning to roll out large numbers of personal computers. Today, the global annual production is 50 billion integrated circuits and 200 billion microprocessors, each of which relies on electricity to operate. On its surface, the bit embodies electrons, and chips operate at extremely high power densities, up to one-tenth of the power density of the solar surface. Lucent, Nortel, Cisco, 3Com, Intel, AMD, Compaq, and Dell have become the new General Electrics behind the resurgence of power demand.

Your personal computer and its peripherals require about 1000 watts of power. A study by IntelliQuest shows that internet users spend an average of 12 hours online per week, which means about 1000 kilowatt-hours of electricity consumption per year.

There are already over 50 million personal computers in homes, 150 million in businesses, with an additional 36 million sold each year, and 20 million sold on the internet.

And for every wired piece of hardware on your desk, there are two or three devices lurking off the network—office hubs and servers, routers, relays, amplifiers, remote servers, and so on. Heavy iron powering Schwab or Amazon typically requires one megawatt, with over 17,000 pure internet companies (Ebay, E-Trade, etc.) currently in operation.

Each Big Company Represents the Power Load of a Small Village

Bringing the dot.com from the internet to the desktop requires more power. For example, Cisco's 7500 series router requires 1.5 kilowatts of power to maintain network heat at a routing transmission speed of 400 million bits per second, but to do so, it needs 1.5 kilowatts of power. Wireless networks attract more power because their signals are broadcast in all directions, rather than transmitted through wires or fiber optic tunnels. Digital PC networks are still in their infancy, with an estimated need for 70,000 wireless base stations in a few years, doubling in ten years. Each site burns at least a few kilowatts. The wireless handheld market (next-generation handhelds, etc.) is expected to reach 20 million units in a few years.

Individually, many of these boxes consume only a little power. Today's handheld devices can run for weeks on a few AAA batteries. Cisco's latest gigabit router 12000 series can handle 16 times the bandwidth of its predecessor, while consuming the same power. However, the total demand for computing power exceeds any efficiency improvement. According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, today's most advanced integrated circuits can contain 21 million transistors, run at 400 megahertz, with a power of 90 watts; in about ten years, it will give way to 1.8 gigahertz, with a power of 175 watts.

Even HP's Toronado and Nokia's internet phones ultimately rely on body heat to operate, but they also input and output data on the network, driving upstream power demand.

Internet traffic indeed doubles every three months. About 17 million households already have two or more personal computers. Communication chips are now moving from the desktop. Electrolux recently announced its "internet refrigerator," an embedded personal computer that replaces doodle paper and magnetic door notes. GE has an internet microwave. Software company EmWare is collaborating with Sybase, 3Com, and Micron to bring vending machines online to improve inventory and management efficiency.

Simply manufacturing all these digital boxes requires a lot of power. Manufacturing plants worth billions of dollars are filled with furnaces, pumps, dryers, and ion beams, all driven by electricity. Etching circuits on a square inch of silicon requires 9 kilowatt-hours, and the power to manufacture an entire PC (1000 kilowatt-hours) is roughly equivalent to the power needed to run for a year.

A typical wafer factory is already a 10 to 15 megawatt power monster—electrically speaking, about the size of a small steel mill. There are at least 300 such factories in the United States, and wafer factories and their suppliers currently consume nearly 1% of the U.S. electricity output.

The integration of information and power has already had a significant impact on overall demand. There are at least 100 million nodes on the internet, consuming hundreds to thousands of kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, totaling 290 billion kilowatt-hours of demand. This is roughly 8% of the total U.S. demand. When combined with the power used to build and operate standalone (non-networked) chips and computers, the total rises to about 13%. There is now reason to predict that in the next decade, half of the power grid will be powering the digital-internet economy.

The internet has a huge global impact. Intel expects a billion people worldwide to be online. This equates to $1 trillion in computer sales—and an additional $1 trillion investment in the backbone of the power supply, as the billion PCs online represent the equivalent power demand of the entire U.S. today.

But will all this new digital intelligence reduce energy demand in other ways? For example, remote offices and emails reduce consumption in other sectors of the economy. Energy demand in the transportation sector is indeed somewhat leveling off. Reductions in warehousing, as well as overall economic adjustments, are reducing the demand for gasoline, diesel, and heating fuels.

But electricity demand has not decreased, as electricity is primarily generated by coal (56%), nuclear power (20%), hydroelectric power (10%), and natural gas (10%). Computers themselves reduce heating loads in winter since the power that runs the chips ultimately dissipates as heat, but these benefits are offset by the additional cooling load that computers bring in the summer.

Therefore, despite significant improvements in lighting, cooling, and heating efficiency over the years, the total energy consumption per square foot of commercial office buildings has hardly decreased. Typical home offices are set up outside downtown offices, rather than replacing them.

Canon's new digital X-ray machine recently received approval from the FDA, which will replace millions of x-rays and tens of thousands of machines, but it could also accelerate the deployment of more X-ray machines in doctor's offices. These new devices will also consume bandwidth as they transmit high-resolution images over the network to seek a second opinion from distant experts. Overall, total power consumption continues to grow by about 3% per year, with over half of the growth attributed to the rise of microprocessors.

Another fundamental change is expected in another aspect of the power grid: quality and reliability. Traditional power grids can tolerate a single-cycle power outage for 60 cycles. For refrigerators, light bulbs, and ovens, a small hiccup in the current is just an inconvenience.

For Computers and Routers, This Could Be a Disaster

This is why companies like American Power Conversion have seen their revenue increase 70 times in ten years by selling uninterruptible power supplies for a variety of products, from desktops to network company servers to routers and enterprise data centers. Systems and electronic devices that keep power clean have also seen similar prosperity.

Active Power in Austin, Texas produces a flywheel-based power storage system that isolates and protects entire office buildings and factories from "dirty" power, with a 1.4-ton flywheel spinning at 7700 revolutions per minute.

American Superconductor in Westborough, Massachusetts uses a two-megawatt superconducting magnet weighing three-quarters of a ton to do similar work. Inevitably, more very heavy atoms will be deployed to keep our bits on their designated rounds.

Futurists have promised us an information superhighway rather than coal-laden trains, fiber optic cables rather than 600 kV power lines, yet we will get both.