I recently created a thread that on Twitter regarding the lower-bound estimates for how much electricity the Bitcoin blockchain consumed using publicly available numbers. The first part of this post is a slightly modified version of that thread.
“We’ve seen a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations, but we need
more scientific discussion on where this network is headed. Right now,
the information available is pretty poor quality overall, so I’m hoping
that people will use this paper as a foundation for more research,” says
de Vries, who works at the Experience Center of PwC in the Netherlands
and is the founder of Digiconomist (@DigiEconomist), a blog that aims to
better inform cryptocurrency users.
His estimates, based in economics, put the minimum current usage of
the Bitcoin network at 2.55 gigawatts, which means it uses almost as
much electricity as Ireland. A single transaction uses as much
electricity as an average household in the Netherlands uses in a month.
By the end of this year, he predicts the network could be using as much
as 7.7 gigawatts–as much as Austria and half of a percent of the
world’s total consumption. “To me, half a percent is already quite
shocking. It’s an extreme difference compared to the regular financial
system, and this increasing electricity demand is definitely not going
to help us reach our climate goals,” he says. If the price of Bitcoin
continues to increase the way some experts have predicted, de Vries
believes the network could someday consume 5% of the world’s
electricity. “That would be quite bad.”
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