Nobody Knows How Much Energy Bitcoin Is Using (vice.com)

dmoberhaus writes: A new report published in 'Joule' today claims Bitcoin may use up to 0.5% of the world's energy by the end of this year. We often hear about how bad Bitcoin is for the environment -- it already uses the same amount of energy as the country of Ireland -- but these numbers are usually just the /minimum/ amount of energy the network must be using. The actual amount of energy used by the Bitcoin network is likely substantially higher, but getting an accurate reading on that energy level is hard. The only researcher trying to quantify Bitcoin's energy use spoke to Motherboard about opening Bitcoin's 'black box.'

Comments

Re:But how much energy is used by traditional fiat

[Actually, I do RTFA]

It costs a lot of money to maintain paper bills and coins.

A printing press does not use a lot of energy. Hell, even smelting metal for coins doesn't use anywhere near that much energy.

Visa averaged 6kJ each for 111.2 billion transactions in 2017. Compare that to Bitcoin, which at most favorable estimates (only 0.3% of world energy), averaged 3GJ each transaction. That's 500,000 times as expensive. VISA uses less than 0.3% of Bitcoin's nominal usage, and probably 0.1% of Bitcoin's total usage. Yet it processes many orders of magnitude more transactions.