Bitcoin is consuming enough energy to power Denmark for a year

Mining the cryptocurrency ‘consumes a ridiculous amount of energy’ estimates suggest

If you’d bought Bitcoin on January 1, 2011, you would have paid just 30 cents per bitcoin. By November 29, 2017, bitcoins were trading at $11,321.39USD each.

Over the past 7 years, $100USD invested in bitcoins grew to a staggering valuation of $3,773,758.93USD. This astonishing growth has led to super charged interest in creating bitcoins around the world as ‘miners’ see the potential to make money.

Bitcoin mining activity (see infographic below) is energy intensive — but no one yet truly knows exactly how much energy is consumed by the Bitcoin community. There are, however, well-researched estimates of the energy used to create bitcoins.

Figures vary, but many articles often cite the estimate of Digiconomist – 32 terawatt hours (TWh) per year, with each Bitcoin transaction consuming 250 kilowatt hours (kWh). To put that into perspective, every mined bitcoin consumes about the same amount of power that an average home uses in nine days.

All of this energy consumption has consequences from a climate change perspective — although some say “Bitcoin’s energy use should decline in the long run.”

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