65

This seems unbelievable:

This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) [sic] of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day).

Source: One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week

215 kWh is an enormous amount of energy.

Even if mining bitcoins uses a lot of processor power, 215 kWh is still enormous.

Are they confusing all transactions with just mining?

Sklivvz
  • 78,578
  • 29
  • 321
  • 428
Dan Gravell
  • 531
  • 4
  • 8
  • Finally the question needs work: where does the article say that 215kWh are "required"? Or that the number is anything more than a guesstimate? – Sklivvz Nov 04 '17 at 20:24
  • 1
    433 kWh per transaction according to https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption – DavePhD Jan 19 '19 at 17:05
  • 4
    This is most definitely a widely-reported notable claim. For example, the Wall Street Journal claims 185 kWh per transaction, enough to power 6 households for an entire day. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoins-wild-ride-shows-the-truth-it-is-probably-worth-zero-1505760623 – Chan-Ho Suh Jan 20 '19 at 04:44
  • 2
    This will change over time with the mining complexity and the power efficiency of the hardware used to mine. – Eric Jan 21 '19 at 01:35
  • 1
    https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/76149/what-is-the-marginal-energy-cost-of-a-bitcoin-transaction , https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/61883/what-is-the-average-amount-of-electrical-power-required-to-complete-one-bitcoin?rq=1 – Keith McClary Jan 21 '19 at 04:45
  • "[...] 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." The article, it seems to me, is referring to a *hypothetical* scenario, though it doesn't make this very obvious. – Matthew Christopher Bartsh Aug 06 '21 at 15:41
  • @Eric, actually, it's independent of efficiency. As hardware gets more efficient, miners will deploy more of it to get their hash rates up. To a first-order approximation, cryptocurrency power consumption depends only on electricity costs and currency market prices. – Mark Nov 10 '21 at 03:47

0 Answers0