Many people may have heard that a lot of electricity is spent on transactions with cryptocurrencies. However, not everyone knows exactly how much. In particular, bitcoin turns out to be very voracious. Alex de Vries, an expert from the University of Amsterdam, calculated this year the cost of mining bitcoin in the amount of 2,237 gigalitres of water.

In the USA alone, 39-120 gigalitres of water could be spent on bitcoin mining in a year. A city the size of Washington or 300 thousand households consumes the same amount in the same period of time. The fall in the exchange rate of cryptocurrencies slightly reduced the ardor of miners, which led to a reduction in water and energy consumption. Now its price is on the rise again, as a result of which, already in March this year, energy consumption from mining became a record high.

Over the entire year, 141.9 TWh will be spent on bitcoin mining, which is about 30% more than in the record year 2021. That year, 1,600 gigalitres of water were spent on bitcoin, which means about 16 thousand liters per transaction. This is 6.2 times more than the cost of bank card transactions. Also, much more energy is spent on cryptocurrencies than on training and operation of neural networks, the popularity of which is now on the rise.

It would be possible to reduce energy consumption by transferring bitcoin to other mining mechanisms, which happened with Ethereum, but this is unlikely to happen. A conservative approach is considered one of the reasons for bitcoin’s stability and faith in it. Meanwhile, not all inhabitants of the planet have access to sufficient water.

ORIENT news