Is bitcoin energy consumption overblown?

Researchers from Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education has found out that mining a dollar worth of bitcoin consumes more energy than digging up a dollar worth of gold.

"We now have an entirely new industry that is consuming more energy per year than many countries," said Max Krause, lead author of the study. "In 2018, Bitcoin is on track to consume more energy than Denmark."

Denmark during the year 2015 used 31.4 billion kilowatt-hours in electricity. Bitcoin mining, as of July 1 this year, consumed 30.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity roughly the same as Denmark has used.

The massive amount of energy used by bitcoin miner causes green house emission as the bulk of energy consumed comes from China- the largest bitcoin miner. Most of the electricity produced in China comes from burning coal causing green house gases emission.

Although the situation is not as bleak as it seems from the media analyses. The industry’s energy consumption can flatten in future.

Why bitcoin uses so much energy?

Bitcoin depends upon a blockchain-a decentralized ledger recording all the transactions of bitcoins. Blockchain solved the problem of double spending of digital currencies. Double spending is spending the same digital token multiple times.

Bitcoin used confirmation process built into its blockchain to avoid the double spending.

Suppose you try to spend one bitcoin twice by spending it on two different addresses. The first transaction will be confirmed from both sides- the spending and receiving side as well -whereas the second transaction will go to the unconfirmed pool. This will eliminate the problem of double spending.

But before spending the coin you need to mine it. The cryptocurrency miners seek result of some sort of algorithmic puzzle. The bitcion network is designed to produce only one block per ten minutes. The miner who succeeded in solving the puzzle first would get the coin.

In order to solve the puzzle first miners puts in more and more computational power in the act of mining- i.e. solving the puzzle.

More computational power needs more energy, thereby increasing energy demand by the network.

Can the bitcoin energy consumption reduced?

As the network only produces one block per ten minutes, thereby increased computational power and energy consumption doesn’t increase the amount of bitcoin production. The network is designed to reduce the reward of solving the puzzle to half every four years.

Miners will only put in additional energy in the mining process to the point where money is to be made. If the price of bitcoin stabilizes, the mining profitability would reduce to the level where additional power usage doesn’t generate enough bitcoins to offset the electricity cost. The reduction in profits would prove to be a disincentive for miners and would lead to reduced electricity consumption.

So, Bitcoin industry can potentially reduce its energy consumption in future in order to remain profitable.

Rare Earth Metals: From America's dominance to Chinese hegemony

The recent discovery of rare earth metals in Japanese deep sea proves that rare earth metals are not that rare as their name signifies.

Today’s modern life is impossible without rare earth metals. Rare earth metals are 17 elements including 15 separately presented lanthanides as well as scandium, and yttrium.

These metals are used in manufacturing batteries, vehicles, LCDs, plasma screens, fiber optics, medical imaging, hybrid vehicles, wind turbines, microphones, speakers and other green technology devices. This group of metals is indispensable for high performance optics and lasers and key to the most powerful magnets and superconductors in the world.

Their various applications have given rise to western powers’ fear of Chinese dominance in high technology. China currently has near monopoly in Rare earth metals supply.

  "The Middle East has oil; we have rare earths ... it is of extremely important strategic significance; we must be sure to handle the rare earth issue properly and make the fullest use of our country's advantage in rare earth resources." Deng Xiaoping, a Chinese politician from the late 1970s to the late 1980s.

China is rapidly reducing export quota of rare earth in order to strategically move Chinese manufacturers up the supply chain so that they may sell valuable finished goods to the world rather than lowly raw material.

This presented America with a challenge in keeping its dominant position in high tech but also its hegemony over developed nation, who are in dying need of the elements.

The significance of the metals can be gauged from the fact that many geopolitical experts consider these metals to be the sole reason of U.S. stay in Afghanistan. United States, according to them, wants to make European powers their ally, against China, by controlling the supply of Afghanistan’s rare earth metals.

In 2010, Pentagon estimated Afghanistan’s mineral deposits to be worth 1 trillion $, once mined. The New York Times reported that White House officials are looking at Afghanistan’s mineral resources as compelling reason to extend their stay in the country.

“We live in a different world than the past, where commodity prices mattered because a monopoly allowed sometimes a single nation or a group of nations to charge an extremely high price for that material, and people are still thinking along those lines,” Michael Silver said. “That’s not the world we live in today, particularly with rare-earth metals, which is kind of what got me involved in the Afghanistan situation.” Michael Silver head White House Initiative and CEO of American Element

Critics on the other hand points to the fact that Afghanistan is a war zone moreover; mining and refining these metals from the mountain is costly. Another factor which goes against America is Afghanistan has no coast of its own and the only cost effective route for the metals is through Pakistan’s pushtun belt.

How Sugar industry can help ease Pakistan's energy crisis

Taking too much sugar may be bad for your health, but not for your country. Sugar industry can help ease the energy crisis faced by Pakistan for more than a decade.

The energy shortage is growing with ever increasing population and rising domestic consumption.  The production gap can be met by mobilizing sugar mills to produce electricity. The bagasse produced by sugar mills can be used to produce thermal energy for onsite use as well as production of electricity.

In many countries of the world sugar mills are earning more from selling electricity than they earn from selling sugar. Sugar industry is second largest, with 89 mills; agro based industry of Pakistan after textile and therefore offers tremendous potential to fill the energy gap.

A sugar mill crushing 2000 tons cane can produce 9 MW of electricity after meeting its own requirement. The total estimated power potential of Pakistan’s sugar industry is 2000MW. The cost of producing electricity is very low as the fuel (bagasse) is available at no cost. The raw material need not to be transported so considerable savings can be made on transportation head. Transportation losses can also be reduced as bagasse power plants are decentralized. Moreover, there is zero carbon dioxide emission as bagasse is a biomass. During combustion biomass re-releases carbon dioxide into the air.

Most of the sugar mills in Pakistan use bagasse to heat inefficient boilers of 26bar. The Indian sugar industry is using 50bar boilers, which uses half as much bagasse as used by 26bar boiler to produce the same megawatts of energy.

The high pressure boiler (80-100bar) available in Pakistan cost from 700 million rupees to 1 billion rupees. The high investment involves make it unfeasible for using these boilers only for 120 days, the cane crushing season. For the rest part of the year sugar industry wants to utilize coal and other biomass fuels like rice bran, corn cobs.

One more Asian billionaire every other day: UBS study finds

According to a study by UBS and PwC a billionaire in Asia is created every other day. Total billionaires in Asia are 637 as compared to 563 in U.S. The study further says that a 17% surge in billionaire wealth is supported by new billionaires born in Asia as well as an uptick in growth in materials, industrial, financial and technology sectors.

The total billionaire wealth has increased from USD 5.1 trillion to USD 6 trillion in 2016.

Billionaires from United States owns 2.8 trillion USD, an increase of .4 trillion dollars. Combined wealth of Asian billionaires grew from 1.5 trillion dollars to 2 trillion USD. Combined total wealth of 342 European billionaires was 1.3 trillion USD.

The study also mentioned that if the current trend continued, it is likely that Asian billionaires would overtake U.S. billionaires in wealth in four years. The surge in billionaires’ population in Asia can be attributed to growth in China and India, which have 318 and 100 billionaires respectively.

The report further points to increasing role of networks in raising capital outside financial markets which is no surprise, given the increasing role of Asian businesses which feels comfortable going to family rather than capital markets for funds.

Europe, the report says, in 2016 was the story of multigenerational wealth preservation. The number of billionaires in Europe was 342, by the end of the year.

The business controlled by these billionaire employees 27.7 million people, which is roughly the size of U.K. workforce.

Superconductivity breakthrough can revolutionize power generation, power distribution and electronics industry.

European researchers on Tuesday announced the development of Superconducting tapes. The statement said that the breakthrough could one day revolutionize the power transmission and power generation industries. The statement went as far as to claim that the technology is already being used in many appliances.

Eurotapes, a European research project on superconductivity has produced 600 meters superconducting tape, said the coordinator of the project, Xavier Obradors, of the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona.

Superconductivity is a phenomenon discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes. Superconductivity is the ability of any material to conduct electricity with zero loss of electric charge. Conventional conductors like copper losses up to 10% of the charge in form of heat.

All superconducting materials discovered till now show their superconductive property at low temperature.  The highest temperature known superconducting material is highly pressurized hydrogen sulfide, whose critical temperature reaches 203 K (−70 °C), the highest accepted superconducting critical temperature as of 2015. The aim is to one day find a material that can work as superconductor at room temperature.

The use of superconductor, if any discovered to work at room temperature, can revolutionize the power distribution, power generation and electric appliances. The use of the material in appliances and other electronics would help manufacture of supercomputers, much lighter and cheaper than today. The power generation can be revolutionized by manufacture of much lighter and much more efficient wind turbines. It can convert small wind turbines into an electricity generation power house.

Wind turbines are a series of wire coils attached to the rotor blade spin in the presence of strong magnetic fields, provided by stationary magnets.  Making the coils from resistance free material can boost power generation.

The power distribution can be changed altogether. Right now, if you want to send electricity from the East coast of the US to the West coast, you could lose at least 60 percent of the energy because of the resistance within the wires. Imagine the superconducting transmission lines carrying charge from Gobi desert in China to London, without any line losses.  The solar panels near the equator can be linked to transmission lines helping better and much more efficient energy mix in favor of renewable energy as at all time there will be sun shining somewhere.

The discovery can one day lead to environment friendly power generation and power consumption. The race to develop first superconducting material at room temperature is yet to yield any viable results. The team in United States has announced the production of metallic hydrogen, a possible superconductor at room temperature, through application of pressure much more than at the center of Earth.

Australian researchers earlier mentioned that wind turbines two to three times more efficient than present ones can be manufactured using superconductors and would be ready to be installed on Australian shores till 2019.

Japanese team has hinted that they have discovered that critical temperature of materials can be enhanced by soaking materials in red wine.

Superconductivity research can one day free us from dependence on fossil fuel and make Earth a better place to live in for our children.