Bitcoin, the most valued cryptocurrency, is aiming to reach $20000 next month. Bitcoin market capitalization has already crossed $250 billion. This is the reason people are mining Bitcoin heavily. For Bitcoin mining, they are using powerful machines that are consuming lots of power.
Now a new report claims that Bitcoin Mining hardware are using 31 terawatt hours of energy per year as compared with 23 terawatt-hours in Ireland and 309 terawatt-hours for the whole of the UK. Bitcoin mining is also causing electricity blackouts in some countries as well.
Also see: What is Bitcoin Mining
Every Bitcoin transaction users more power than enough to power nine homes in the US for a whole day or enough to power an American home for eight days or to fully charge a Tesla P100D 2.4 times for an estimated range of 1,373 km. Now you can assume how much energy Bitcoin is sucking from Mining and Transaction.
Also read: How to buy Bitcoin in India
Bitcoin mining machines are working mostly in China where Coal-based electricity is available at cheaper rate. It results in an extreme carbon footprint for each unique Bitcoin transaction.
Reports also suggest that Bitcoin mining will consume more power than world by 2020. This is a serious problem and People working in cryptocurrency field must understand the seriousness and should start working on a fix. There are now more energy efficient algorithms, like proof-of-stake where coin owners create blocks rather than miners. But there is a big downside of it. There are many different versions of proof-of-stake, and none of these have fully proven themselves yet. SO, more work is needed to solve this issue.
With increasing value of Bitcoin, it will be hard to mine Bitcoin and machines will have to work more. It will increase the energy consumption as well. So, there should be some measures to address this problem.
