Each Bitcoin Transaction Uses As Much Energy As Your House In A Week

While Bitcoin bulls will probably never have it so good as they have in 2017, we wonder whether many of them have stopped to think about the environmental downside of this roaring bull market. After all, back in the dot.com boom, people had ideas about potential internet businesses, issued pieces of paper representing ownership and watched their prices go parabolic parabolic. All it took was a Powerpoint presentation, some computer programming expertise and a ‘research’ report, courtesy of Mary Meeker, Henry Blodgett et al.
The environmental downside we’re referring to in Bitcoin is, of course, is energy.
We alluded to this in a constructive way here when we noted that a new Bitcoin mining hub is developing in Iceland, where the natural temperature dramatically reduces the cost of cooling computing hardware.
The primary energy requirement, however, goes into the computing power to ‘mine’ the Bitcoins. The Bitcoin mining industry can consume 24 terawatt hours of electricity and still be profitable – the Motherboard website provides some context…
Bitcoin’s incredible price run to break over $7,000 this year has sent its overall electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency. 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… De Vries also estimates that the worldwide Bitcoin mining industry is now using enough electricity to power 2.26 million American homes.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Nov 5, 2017.