It is not just the price of Bitcoin that increases every day. Getting a fragment of the cryptocurrency is also consuming more and more electricity. A survey by Power Compare, a UK consulting firm specializing in industry price comparisons, detailed the growth in demand for digital currency mining. It has been found that making the blockchain of the current amount of Bitcoin works consumes more energy than 159 countries.
What is Bitcoin Miner?
The estimate is that Bitcoin mining consumes a total of 29.05 TWh per year, which gives about 0.13% of global energy demand. Mining already consumes more electricity than Ireland, Croatia, Uruguay, and Ecuador. In Africa, only three countries consume more – Egypt, South Africa and Algeria (countries in gray, in the map below).
Electricity is one of the biggest costs for anyone looking to mine the cryptocurrency. As more people have become interested in Bitcoin, it is increasingly difficult to get a fragment, as the blockchain is programmed to increase the difficulty on demand. This requires more power from the machines attached to the “node” and, consequently, more energy is spent.
Getting mining using an ordinary computer is almost impossible. Today there are specific machines for this. So-called ASICs have higher computational power, as they can bring in multiple dedicated video cards. Many GPUs connected at the same time, more electricity consumption.
READ MORE ==>>> What is Bitcoin Miner? Here is everything you need to know
Already it spends more energy than 20 European countries
For comparison, in the last 30 days, when Bitcoin hit the house of $ 11,000, there was a 30% increase in the consumption of computers connected to the network. If you maintain this growth rate, in 2024 the mining activity will spend more electricity than the UK – today, it already consumes more than 20 countries in Europe. By 2020, it would consume more than all countries in the world.
Brazil is in eighth place in the ranking of those who spend the most electricity. The mining activity of the digital currency consumes the equivalent of 5.61% of Brazilian demand. According to Power Compare, if all the machines connected to Bitcoin’s blockchain were a nation, this fictitious country would occupy the 61st place in consumption.
Via TNW and Power Compare
