Bitcoin's horrific energy footprint

[Binkie The Clown]

An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.


This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week. On a larger scale, De Vries' index shows that bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes.

(snip)

That means that, at a minimum, worldwide Bitcoin mining could power the daily needs of 821,940 average American homes.

Put another way, global Bitcoin mining represents a minimum of 77KWh of energy consumed per Bitcoin transaction. Even as an unrealistic lower boundary, this figure is high: As senior economist Teunis Brosens from Dutch bank ING wrote, it's enough to power his own home in the Netherlands for nearly two weeks.

More at: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change

[tonyt53]

1. The key word is "estimates". Without something to back it up, his opinion and nothing more.

No, I do not own any nor do I know anyone that does. However, those numbers are unrealistic.

[Blues Heron]

2. more info here, looks pretty bad

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption


Value
Bitcoin's current estimated annual electricity consumption* (TWh) 31.05
Annualized global mining revenues $9,701,548,326
Annualized estimated global mining costs $1,552,445,945
Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption Morocco
Estimated electricity used over the previous day (KWh) 85,065,531
Implied Watts per GH/s 0.298
Total Network Hashrate in PH/s (1,000,000 GH/s) 12,074
Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 261.00
Number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin 2,874,900
Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction 8.81
Bitcoin's electricity consumption as a percentage of the world's electricity consumption 0.14%

[hunter]

3. Bitcoin needs to die, but not by prosecution.

Trying to regulate it, or outlawing it, would only make it more attractive to those who believe they are getting away with something.

A horrible natural death for Bitcoin would be ideal, one that gives cryptocurrencies a bad reputation forevermore.

Monetizing specific numbers that have certain computationally difficult properties was a brilliant idea, but there's a reason the creator of this Ponzi scheme didn't want to put his name on it.