Cryptocurrency Energy Consumption

Did you know Bitcoin runs on an energy-intensive network?

Ever since its inception Bitcoin’s trust-minimizing consensus has been enabled by its proof-of-work algorithm. The machines performing the “work” are consuming huge amounts of energy while doing so. Moreover, the energy used is primarily sourced from fossil fuels. The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index was created to provide insight into these amounts, and raise awareness on the unsustainability of the proof-of-work algorithm.

Sustainability

The continuous block mining cycle incentivizes people all over the world to mine Bitcoin. As mining can provide a solid stream of revenue, people are very willing to run power-hungry machines to get a piece of it. Over the years this has caused the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network to grow to epic proportions, as the price of the currency reached new highs. The entire Bitcoin network now consumes more energy than a number of countries. If Bitcoin was a country, it would rank as shown below.

Apart from the previous comparison, it also possible to compare Bitcoin’s energy consumption to some of the world’s biggest energy consuming nations. The result is shown hereafter.

Carbon footprint

Bitcoin’s biggest problem is perhaps not even its massive energy consumption, but the fact most mining facilties in Bitcoin’s network are located in regions (primarily in China) that rely heavily on coal-based power (either directly or for the purpose of load balancing).

Cyrptocurrency is now on pace to use just over 42TWh (terawatt) of electricity in a year, placing it ahead of New Zealand and Hungary and just behind Peru.  That’s commensurate with CO2 emissions of 20 megatonnes – or roughly 1m transatlantic flights.

That fact should be a grave notion to anyone who hopes for the cryptocurrency to grow further in stature and enter widespread usage. But even more alarming is that things could get much, much worse, helping reduce energy costs.

Burning huge amounts of electricity isn’t incidental to bitcoin: instead, it’s embedded into the innermost core of the currency, as the operation known as “mining”. In simplified terms, bitcoin mining is a competition to waste the most electricity possible by doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second.

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