They say it takes money to make money; in order to make a profit off Bitcoin mining, you have to buy mining equipment and pay your electricity bill first. As more miners join the Bitcoin network[1], some individuals[2] fear that the amount of electricity consumed by mining will have a negative impact on the environment. Others[3] believe that the benefits of Bitcoin mining outweigh the cost it takes to produce the digital currency.
Bitcoin mining and energy consumption
New Bitcoin are produced through a process called mining[4], where computers expend energy and computational resources to solve a difficult math problem[5] that verifies a recent block of Bitcoin transactions. The miner who solves the math problem adds the block to the blockchain[6] and receives newly minted Bitcoin. The difficulty of the math problem depends on how much computational power the network has in summation. As the Bitcoin network attracts more miners, the mining difficulty increases, and usually, the amount of energy a mining rig consumes increases too.
The Bitcoin network currently consumes[7] about 2.55 gigawatts (GW) of electricity per year; to put that into perspective, the entire country of Ireland has an average electricity consumption of 3.1 GW[8], and Austria has an average electricity consumption of 8.2 GW per year. Over the past year, the estimated amount of TwH[9] that the Bitcoin network consumes per year increased 413.37 percent. When compared to countries like the Czech Republic, the Bitcoin network uses 102.3 percent of the entire electricity consumed by the country per year.
Data consultant and blockchain specialist Alex De Vries believes that the amount of energy Bitcoin mining consumes is problematic. In
