One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses As Much Energy As Your House In a Week (vice.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader SlaveToTheGrind quotes Motherboard: Bitcoin's incredible price run to break over $7,000 this year has sent its overall electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency. An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year.

This averages out to a shocking 215 kilowatt-hours (KWh) of juice used by miners for each Bitcoin transaction (there are currently about 300,000 transactions per day). Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week.

Comments

Re:Bad Math

[Notabadguy]

Its worse than a bad title and summary - it assumes a speculative future state as current fact.

-It COULD be profitable for bitcoin miners to spend XYZ Terawatts of Electricity mining Bitcoins.
-Assume XYZ Terawatts of power are currently being used to mine bitcoins.
-Interchange creating something with trading something.

TRADING BITCOINS COST XYZ TERAWATTS OF POWER OMG.

Let's do that with a non-bitcoin related story.

-Actors could use their status to take unfair advantage of women.
-Bill Cosby raped like 76 women.
-Bill Cosby is an actor, and can equally theoretically represent any other actor.

HOLLYWOOD ACTORS ARE RAPING HUNDREDS OF WOMEN EACH!