To say that Bitcoin uses a large amount of electricity per transaction is a pretty big understatement.

According to a report out of ING, the electricity used to process a single transaction could potentially power a small home for almost a month.

A month!

Yes you read that right.

Is this surprising?

Perhaps the actual comparison of powering a house vs. a single transaction might be, but the fact that Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity shouldn't be.

Bitcoin was designed to use a ton of electricity on purpose.

It's electricity consumption goes hand in hand with it being so secure.

By making sure that verifying transactions is an exhaustive and costly business, it ensures that the network integrity is preserved.

Well at least as long as the majority of the computing power is being controlled by benevolent nodes, but that is another topic entirely.

Basically, by Bitcoin using a lot of electricity to verify transactions, it makes fraudulent transactions costly and helps detour those who would seek to misuse the currency.

To further put things into perspective...

According to senior economist out at ING, Teunis Brosens, a Bitcoin transaction uses roughly 200kWh.

To put that into perspective, 200kWh could run about 200 wash cycles out in the Netherlands (where Brosens lives).

To further put that into perspective, Brosens went on to say that his house uses approximately 45kWh each week in electricity consumption, which means that 200kWh is enough to power his house for over 4 weeks!

Now that is pretty amazing when you think about it!

Bitcoin stands alone.

Most of the popular cryptocurrencies use a vast amount of electricity to perform transactions, but as was discussed above, that is by design.

If it were to sacrifice some security of the network it could use less electricity to process transactions, but it would be less secure.

Something to keep in mind though is that not only does Bitcoin use a large amount of electricity to complete transactions, it uses exponentially more than traditional forms of electronic payment.

What kind of traditional electronic forms of payment am I talking about?

Well Visa for example, uses about .01 kWh per transaction.

Take a look at this chart below for a side by side comparison:

As you can see Bitcoin uses about 20,000 times more electricity than Visa to perform a transaction.

Not only that but Bitcoin also uses over 5x as much electricity per transaction as Ether.

Something many of Bitcoin's critics point to as a reason that Bitcoin will never scale.

Several other cryptocurrencies have experimented with vastly less electricity consumption per transaction. Which seems like it will be a must going forward if any currency is to catch on as a primary method of transaction.

Stay informed my friends.

Sources:

http://www.businessinsider.com/electricity-required-for-single-bitcoin-trade-could-power-a-house-for-a-month-2017-10

Image Sources:

http://www.history.com/topics/inventions/thomas-edison