It seems like people have been obsessed with cryptocurrencies. While loading up on them like crazy, they seem to have forgotten that everything has a price. When it comes to mining cryptocurrencies, this is all about the growing deficit of electricity. The thing is that all those mining farms consume tons of energy. Maintaining that cryptocurrency infrastructure is rather energy-consuming as well since all of that requires really powerful and capacious hardware, which consumes big amounts of electricity.
On top of that, once every 2 weeks all of those coins need to be hashed to back the complexity of creating a block inside the blockchain. This is expressed by the number of zeros at the beginning of the hash. The more of them there are, the safer the encryption. The cryptocurrency algorithm adds those zeros each 10 minutes for the new block. The more complicated the hashing process, the bigger effort is required to create a new block.
The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index indicates that mining currently consumes 29,05 Terawatt-hour annually. It seems like a small figure – just 0,13% of the global energy consumption. However, if we take isolated countries, the mining energy consumption is bigger than the one in 159 countries around the globe! If the Bitcoin mining community were a country, they would be number 61 out of more than 200 countries of the world.
International experts give us some other impressive figures to think about:
Today's Bitcoin mining expenses exceed 1,5 billion dollars a year. For the sake of comparison, the annual earnings form mining Bitcoin is 7,2 billion dollars. So, miningisstillaveryprofitablebusiness.
Bitcoin mining consumes more than 12 states of the United States.;
If the pace at which Bitcoin mining has been growing for years will persist, the parity between the mining electricity consumption and the consumption of electricity for industrial needs, infrastructure and households will be reached by the UK and the USA in October 2018 and July 2019 respectively. The same figure for the entire world is expected to be reached by February 2020.
