chepicap.com
The head of a BTC mining project has shared some interesting figures regarding the future development of Bitcoin, in terms of energy consumption. In a tweet, Steve Barbour claimed that BTC will have to be worth over $1.5 million for it to consume all the world's wasted natural gas energy.
Barbour is part of Upstream Data, a company which specializes in using natural gas and oil as part of BTC mining operations.
He claims that the amount of mining power on the Bitcoin network determines to a large degree the price that BTC is traded for, as miners always need to be able to offset their energy costs in order to turn a profit with their operations.
For Bitcoin mining to economically consume all of the world's wasted (vented and flared) natural gas, the price has to be over $1,500,000. https://t.co/f6ttoHXifj
— Steve Barbour ⛏ (@SGBarbour) April 30, 2019
Barbour assumes that this dynamic is more or less likely to continue into the future, and he brings up the facts about wasted natural gas to show the potential that the BTC network has to grow as energy efficiency increases. As natural gas power plants get more efficient in future, the energy that currently goes to waste could be used up by Bitcoin as the network grows.
1) >140 BCM nat gas vented and flared annually (World Bank data) ~165,000 megawatt
— Steve Barbour ⛏ (@SGBarbour) April 30, 2019
2) x25% = 41,250 megawatt (power plant efficiency). Current mining load approx 2,400 to 5,000 megawatts range.
3) Assume future flare mining equals 25% of network hashrate / hashload
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Projecting current figures about energy efficiency and mining costs into the future, Barbour believes that the top crypto could have a huge amount of price growth in store, increasing in value by as much as 300 times. As well as being a huge profit opportunity for traders, he also points out that investing more in BTC could be a good way to boost energy efficiency. This point could go some way towards defending BTC against those who have claimed that its growth will be hugely detrimental to the environment.
So, people, if you want Bitcoin to conserve all of the waste in oil and gas production then buy more, spend more, trade more and hodl more Bitcoin!
— Steve Barbour ⛏ (@SGBarbour) April 30, 2019
One observer did point out that Barbour's calculations may have been off, as the price of this unused natural gas would eventually rise as demand for it also increased. The miner agreed that this was likely, and conceded that the future BTC price might not be all that easy to predict.
Given the availability of energy substitutes the consequence is that to fully deplete one source would require full depletion of all others.
— Eric Voskuil (@evoskuil) May 1, 2019
This is not knowable because it depends on individual preference schedules for buyers and sellers. It’s basically predicting price.
— Eric Voskuil (@evoskuil) May 2, 2019