The world of cryptocurrencies has grown a lot in recent years. This electronic money is a way of making financial investments with which you can earn a lot of money in a short time, although you can also lose it. In fact, anyone can buy cryptocurrencies and start trading with them. Some of the most popular are Bitcoin or Ethereum, but there are hundreds of different currencies. However, cryptocurrency mining produces enormous energy consumption, expending more energy than some cities.
But how is this possible?
How much electricity is consumed?
The data is clear: spending or trading Bitcoin for a year uses about 91 terawatt hours of electricity per year, an amount higher than the electricity used in Finland in the same period, a country that has five and a half million dollars. population.
For its part, Google consumes a lot of energy and produces CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. All the searches made on the platform cause 2% of the energy consumed in the world to be used in a year. With each search, 0.2 degrees of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere.
Google is responsible for processing, storing and downloading information, which represents a large energy consumption each year, approximately 1,000 megawatts.
This shows the enormous amounts of electricity that cryptocurrencies use. Its origin comes from a group of people who wanted to create an electronic form of payment similar to cash and with which there would be no intermediaries such as a bank or a third party.
In 2009 with a simple computer you could mine a Bitcoin, but today, you need a room full of specialized machines that consume a lot of energy. Managing these currencies without a central authority requires a great deal of computing power.
Any type of transaction with Bitcoin must be validated by the Bitcoin network . This is done for the seller to make sure that the money he receives is real. It is in this whole process when much of the electrical energy is consumed.
That is why the more computers there are in operation, the more operations can be done with cryptocurrencies. Also, these computers need to be fast, which makes them consume more power.
In its first days of life you could without any problem mine a Bitcoin from your own home, something that right now is already impossible. Little has had to improve the mining systems since more speed and power were required.
Cryptocurrency mining is huge electricity consumption
In addition to the computers themselves, large space and cooling systems are also required to prevent mining equipment from overheating.
Cryptocurrency operations have become so consolidated that now only seven mining pools have almost 80% of all computing power on the network.
China was initially one of the countries where Bitcoin was mined the most, but since it started taking energy measures, its share in mining has dropped by 75%. On the other hand, the US has increased its participation in cryptocurrency mining by 16%.
Using so many products that use electricity leads to electronic waste in the long run . In fact, calculations say that Bitcoin has generated more e-waste than many countries.
Some miners have tried to use renewable energy sources to mine cryptocurrencies and thus have a less impact on the environment, but it seems a very complicated mission to achieve it. Bitcoin mining is connected to fossil fuels, power grids, and emissions.
Therefore, cryptocurrency mining consumes much more energy than Google.
