Other experts say it’s difficult to determine how much energy the cryptocurrency consumes.
According to a recent study, Bitcoin mining consumes as many energy as Ireland. Experts estimate that Bitcoin consumes almost 2.55 gigawatts of electricity.
The study shows that the use of energy by Bitcoin has doubled in the las six months. It is predicted to triple in the next year.Bitcoin could use 7.67 gigawatts of power instead of 2.55 gigawatts initially. The value of 7.67 gigawatts compares to the energy that powers Austria.
“With the Bitcoin network processing just 200,000 transactions per day, this means that the average electricity consumed per transaction equals at least 300 kWh. This could exceed 900 kWh per transaction by the end of 2018,” writes de Vries, adding, “Bitcoin has a big problem, and it is growing fast.”
Bitcoin mining requires a large amount of computational power
The energy used to “mine” Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies is related with the power of computers to verify the transactions that create the coin.
You need more than one computer to register the transactions with Bitcoin in blockchain. It is no doubt that mining Bitcoin consumes a lot of energy. This activity consumes so much energy that experts can’t make an exactly report about the quantity of energy used.
Experts unsure
Jonathan Koomey, a professor from Stanford, declared recently:
“For two decades, people have been eager to overestimate electricity use by computing,” Koomey told NBC News. “My concern is that we simply don’t have adequate data to come to the strong conclusions that he’s coming to.”
“The worry is that those are two numbers that are picked out of the air,” Koomey continued.
“There may be some basis for them, but it’s a very unreliable way to do these kinds of calculations, and nobody who does this for a living would do it like that. It’s odd that someone would.”
De Vries says that because cryptocurrency mining doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Researchers must work on finding out what the currency’s impact is before it becomes too late.
“We’ve seen a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations, but we need more scientific discussion on where this network is headed,” de Vries said in a statement. “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.”
The energy journal Joule posted the research.