This may sound ridiculously crazy but you read it right. Energy consumption used in Bitcoin mining has been increasing steadily since the miners add more computing power to chase new Bitcoins.
It is not easy to know how much electricity is used by the entire bitcoin network, so if we were to assume that all miners are using energy efficient hardware then one bitcoin transaction would consume 77KWh of energy. As per Digiconomist (less optimistic estimate) one bitcoin transaction consumes 215KWh of energy and that is crazy high.
Lets look at some pointers on what can be done with the energy used for 1 Bitcoin transaction:
- Power 7 US household for a day
- Boil 1872 liters of water in a kettle
- Charge 2 Tesla batteries to run a efficient fridge/freeze for an year
Bitcoin consumes so much energy since it uses Proof-of-work algorithm. But more energy efficient algorithms like Proof-of-stake have been used by many altcoins where coin owners create blocks rather than miners. Though there are some downsides to these other algorithm it does consume less energy than the Proof-of-work algorithm.
With all these climatic changes and hurricanes, do we have to burden our Mother Nature with this?
Source:
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change
http://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-energy-sri-lanka-power/