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.
Christopher Malmo
If you needed yet another reason to stay away from Bitcoin, here it is: its enormous energy consumption is hurting the environment. By comparison, the entire VISA network uses 55 times less energy that all Bitcoin operations, while executing 1000 times more transactions in the same timeframe. In the long run, Bitcoin is clearly unsustainable without a major redesign of the underlying technology to make it far more energy efficient.
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