Bitcoin has just surpassed Sweden for overall energy consumption over the past 12 months.
2 min read
The University of Cambridge has publicizes something called the “Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index”, updated every 24 hours, that serves as an average metric of the energy consumption of the Bitcoin blockchain system. You can find it here.
The annualized consumption, meaning the total energy used by the system over the past 12 months has just reached a total of 147.51 TeraWatt-hours.
This puts Bitcoin energy usage on par with the country of Sweden and just shy of the country of Ukraine. You can look the numbers yourself here.
Now, for the critical thinking part:
Over the past 12 months there was a total of only 98,32 million Bitcoin transactions. (You can check here. There were, today, a total of 826.28 million Bitcoin transactions since inception; 12 months ago the number was at 728.26 million, meaning an increase of 98.32 million transactions.)
Sweden has a population of 10.42 million people doing all sorts of things. In a broad comparison: if all 10.42 million people in Sweden sent 10 Bitcoin transactions over the past year it would have used the same amount of energy they used for their regular daily lives. It gets even crazier if you consider Ukraine, a country at war and with a population of 43.79 million people used just shy of half the same energy.
Bitcoin has a serious energy inefficiency problem.
submitted by /u/Harucifer
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