As cryptocurrency mining uses more data center capacity, the DCD>Energy Smart event in Stockholm this March will gather bitcoin mining executives together with data center experts to discuss how the energy demands of bitcoin mining are affecting data center design, and how operators can seize the opportunities presented by the bitcoin wave.
To create each new coin, the bitcoin cryptocurrency system requires increasing amounts of computing power, and more electrical energy. While the world at large waits for the cryptocurrency to crash, the data center industry is is serving this runaway demand, by building a wave of data centers designed for low cost computing rather than resilience.
Different demands
“Bitcoin mining is an extremely compute-intensive activity and the need for both electrical and computing power increases over time. Whilst traditional data center builds are focused around a reliable infrastructure with minimum downtime, cryptocurrency mining requires extreme power densities”, says Andre Horta, CEO at Bitcointoyou who will speak at the event this March.
The growing capacity and power demands of Blockchain infrastructure are a challenge to many data center providers. “Already cryptocurrency miners are choosing sites where the climate is cool and electricity is cheap, such as the Nordics”, says Anne Graf, CEO at Hydro66 who will join the bitcoin debate at the event.
“But in future, blockchain infrastructure will have to become even more energy efficient, because capacity requirements are increasing and the technology itself is designed to increase the amount of power required to secure the network and create new coins”, adds Graf.
“The bitcoin system is deliberately designed to make bitcoin harder to mine, through create artificial scarcity,” says Peter Judge, editor at DCD. “The blockchain technology it uses can handle only seven transactions per second. Some call bitcoin a shared delusion; whether or not this is true, it is clear that its demands are designed to increase, making it the antithesis of an energy-efficient system. As industrialized bitcoin miners compete, the system as a whole will waste ever-increasing amounts of energy, no matter how efficient each miner tries to be.”
The event will tackle emerging energy efficiency measures inside and outside of the data center and will feature industry leaders from IBM, Bloom Energy, Fortum Värme, NTT, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, OX Wind, City of Stockholm, DigiPLEX, Hydro66, The Green Grid, Interxion, the European Commission, Baidu, Statkraft, GreenIT Amsterdam, Uptime Institute, Aligned Energy, Baselayer and many more international digital infrastructure professionals.