How bad is personal GPU mining with NiceHash?
One of the biggest negative aspects of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is their environmental impact. To progress and update the blockchain, most coins use mining, which requires massive amounts of computing power and energy.
I have been doing some small-scale personal mining with my graphics card recently and I always felt guilty about the carbon emissions it is producing. So I tried to calculate the impact of my mining and how bad it is for the environment.
For the past few weeks, I have been using NiceHash to sell my GPU’s hashing power when I’m not using it for anything else. To avoid damaging the card too much and to keep the fans quieter, I have set the power limit of my Nvidia GTX 1060 6 GB to 65 W instead of its maximum of 120 W. Because the card draws about 10 W in idle, this means it is consuming 55 W from mining that it wouldn’t be consuming otherwise.
I am assuming about 12 hours of mining per day, which is probably about where my average has been for the last few days. This means, if I were to mine for one year, I would use about 240 kWh of electricity.
With the current electricity mix in Germany, which is about 45% renewables, the production of one kilowatt-hour produces 401 grams of CO2. This means, my mining would produce 97 kg of CO2 in one year. With the German carbon offsetting price of 25 € per ton, this means I would need to pay 2.42 € to offset my carbon emissions.
So, if I were to mine for one year, I would produce 97 kg of CO2. With the per capita CO2 emission in Germany of 9.44 tons per year, this would be around 1% of my emissions. Although my real emissions are certainly below the average. I don’t own a car, I don’t eat meat, I haven’t flown anywhere in years, and I try to be aware of my carbon footprint — hence this article.
With the current value of the cryptocurrency market, even small-scale mining with a mid-tier consumer graphics card is very profitable. At the moment, I can earn about four times the electricity cost, and that’s with the very high electricity prices in Germany. I don’t have a lot of money and the simple fact is that mining Bitcoin is literally free profit at the moment. The only downside is the environmental impact.
This brings me to the reason why I can justify mining for the time being. Today, the daytime temperature is 9° C and 3° C at night, which is still cold enough for the heating to be on. Pretty much all the power that goes into a graphics card is converted into heat, and that heat is moved with heat pipes and fans out of the computer case where it has the additional benefit of heating up the room. This means I can turn down my normal heating ever so slightly so it produces fewer carbon emissions (although 55 W isn’t a lot when it comes to heating up a room. For comparison: A resting human radiates about 100 W of heat and you are certainly not enough to heat up a room in the winter). So in the colder months, instead of seeing it as mining cryptocurrencies and wasting energy in the process, I see it as an additional heating source with the side benefit of earning some money.
However, in a few weeks, when summer is fully here and the heating is turned off, the problem reverses. I don’t have air conditioning (most German houses don’t have AC), so every extra watt of heat energy that enters a room stays there and makes it unbearably hot. Also, cooling a graphics card becomes more difficult and less efficient when the room temperature is higher. Therefore, I am going to stop mining soon when summer temperatures are here.
Globally, Bitcoin consumes more energy than Argentina. If it was a country, this would put it in the top 30 of energy users. The proof of work system that Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies use to continue their blockchains is inherently inefficient. All miners try to guess an extremely difficult cryptographic result and consume a lot of energy in the process. Therefore, the proof of work system can never be sustainable, and coins that depend on it will probably lose their value in the mid to long term.
Another method to update the blockchain is proof of stake. Here, the stakeholders (entities with a lot of currency) are rewarded based on their shares, removing the pointless guessing game. This makes it much more energy-efficient than proof of work. Some cryptocurrencies already use proof of stake and Ethereum, the second-largest currency, has started the process of moving to proof of stake as well.
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Source: https://medium.com/climate-conscious/the-environmental-impact-of-small-scale-crypto-mining-4aa4cad2f13d?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency
