Following the previous round of sharp decline, the price of Bitcoin ushered in a sustained surge. Previously, economist Alex de Vries mentioned in Joule that the soaring price of Bitcoin may increase energy consumption and lead to further global chip shortages.
Alex de Vries believes that Bitcoin "mining" can be understood as the process of harvesting cryptocurrency by solving complex mathematical equations. As long as it is a networked computer, you can participate in "mining", but the success depends on the computing power of the equipment and the cost of electricity. As everyone is optimistic about the Bitcoin market, more and more people join "mining". It is estimated that starting from January 11, 2021, the number of times that all "mining" equipment solves this equation per second adds up to more than 150 million to the fifth power, which will greatly consume electricity and other energy.
Previous statistics have shown that "mining" has accounted for 0.13% of global electricity consumption. 80% of the total expenditures of cryptocurrency miners around the world are spent on electricity costs. Alex de Vries believes that based on the Bitcoin market in January, the entire Bitcoin network may consume up to 184 TWh (1 TWh ≈ 1 billion kWh) of energy each year, which is equivalent to the total energy consumption of all data centers in the world. quantity. At the same time, the energy consumed by "mining" also produced 90.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, which is a huge energy consumption.
01 Would exacerbate the chip shortage
Experts also mentioned this time that "mining" may intensify the shortage of chips. In the current imbalance between the supply and demand of chips in the automotive and consumer electronics markets, this view has attracted widespread attention from all walks of life.
Why does "mining" cause chip shortages to increase? According to data, "mining" is a process that consumes computing resources to process transactions, ensure network security, and keep everyone's information synchronized on the network. This process can be understood as a Bitcoin data center. The difference lies in its completely decentralized design. "Miners" operate in countries around the world, and no one can control the network. This process is called "mining" because it is similar to gold mining, because it is also a temporary mechanism for issuing new bitcoins.
Anyone can run software on specialized hardware and become a "miner", so more and more people join this team, and the corresponding competition is fierce. Therefore, the computing power performance of the equipment has become a guarantee for "miners" to find effective blocks ahead of others. Graphics chip GPU is the most concerned product in the current mining market. In February of this year, Nvidia announced the launch of a processor CMP (cryptocurrency mining processor) dedicated to mining, with the purpose of preventing "miners" from competing with general consumers for the new GPU.
Because "mining" equipment needs to operate at high load for a long time, and its lifespan is generally short, graphics card chips have become one of the most consumed products by "miners". As more people increase their investment in "mining", this will further aggravate the current global chip shortage, and even eventually lead to major shortages and price hikes of products such as automobiles, computers, and mobile phones.
02 The new technology behind it is worth paying attention to
Of course, we do not encourage everyone to enter the Bitcoin market, but the new technology behind the cryptocurrency is worthy of attention. That is the blockchain technology. In the past, the first reaction of many people was that Bitcoin is the blockchain, no. Blockchain is not equal to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just a way of presenting the blockchain, but it does not mean that the blockchain can only be applied to Bitcoin. In the early stages of blockchain development, due to its own property of transferring value, it has attracted a lot of enthusiasm for illegal fund-raising, pyramid schemes and even fraud through ICO (Initial Coin Offering).
In fact, the blockchain is a decentralized distributed ledger database. The so-called decentralization means that unlike traditional methods, there is no center in the blockchain, and it can even be said that everyone is a center; the distributed ledger database recording method not only stores the ledger data in each node, but also each node will Synchronously share the data of the entire ledger. It's like the three people of A, B and C have a ledger, and the income of the three is handed over to A to keep the account. In case A in the middle automatically uses the account funds, B and C don't know that this is the case. With the use of blockchain technology, the three people of A, B, and C have to keep accounts, everyone can see the general ledger, and none of the three of A, B, and C can modify the contents of the ledger privately. Therefore, the blockchain has the characteristics of security, non-tampering, accessibility, and no third parties.
At present, there are three Chinese blockchain companies in the global unicorn list, namely Bitmain, Canaan Creative and eBang International. All of the three are mining machine giants.
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