households.Įnergy consumption by country Inc. To put Bitcoin’s energy consumption in a narrower perspective, the annual electricity consumption of the cryptocurrency’s miners can power over 3 million U.S. Bitcoin can also feed 15% of Australia’s energy consumption. In the same data presented by Digiconomist, it shows that Bitcoin’s annual energy consumption worldwide could provide almost 50% of Czech Republic’s energy needs and 25% of the Netherlands’ demand. Both Serbia and Denmark generate about the same amount of energy annually. According to Digiconomist’s data on cryptocurrency mining, Bitcoins now consume over 30 Terrawatt hours (TWh) per year. If Bitcoin were a country, it would rank above Serbia and below Denmark in terms of the amount of energy it consumes annually. This has caused the total consumption of energy to grow to grand proportions over the years. BitcoinsĪs mining this cryptocurrency can provide a steady stream of income, people are willing to run energy-consuming machines. The difficulty in mining them, as well as their increasing popularity among merchants and private investors, is why the top cryptocurrencies are valuable and expensive. It takes an entire server farm to mine them, as well as massive amounts of energy to generate 1 coin or digital fund. Mining cryptocurrencies isn’t as easy as downloading files from the internet. How much energy is needed in mining cryptocurrencies? After all, the formula for breaking even in cryptocurrency mining is the digital fund’s market value minus the electricity costs of mining it. That is, the amount of energy being used to mine the cryptocurrencies.
But while the media mostly focuses on the aspect of the cryptocurrency’s prices, there’s a factor of cryptocurrency mining that is just as important as the coins’ value.
Bitcoin hit $17,000 per coin in December 2017 – it has since dropped significantly – but it is proof of the soaring popularity of the world’s first mineable digital fund. Today’s top cryptocurrencies are worth a lot of money.