Bitcoin's price surge has made mining lucrative, but it uses an extraordinary amount of energy - Vox

As the value of Bitcoin reached a new high this week, we also learned that mining the cryptocurrency soaks up more energy than 159 individual countries, according to one controversial estimate.

Over at Digiconomist, a Bitcoin blog and analysis site, owner Alex DeVries reported this week that the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, an measure of the energy used to mine the digital currency every year, reached 30.59 terawatt-hours.

BitcoinEnergyConsumption.com

That’s on par with the energy use of the entire country of Morocco, more than 19 European countries, and roughly 0.7 percent of total energy demand in the United States, equal to 2.8 million US households.

A map of countries that use less electricity than Bitcoin mining Power Compare

While it doesn’t involve hard hats, drilling, and explosives, mining Bitcoin is a hugely energy-intensive process, even though the currency only exists digitally.

Digiconomist

That’s because producing the digital currency requires intense computational processing power, which requires a huge amount of electricity.

Mining Bitcoins is like finding solutions to complicated math problems that become progressively more difficult. Coins are awarded to computers that verify transactions with an algorithm that gets more complex over time. In the early days of the currency in 2009 — with few computers, few transactions, and a price of $2 per coin — this was something you could do on your home computer.

Now with a global market cap of more than $167 billion, it requires specialized hardware called Application Specific Integrated Circuit miners, and mining operations now use tens of thousands of these devices in expansive warehouses to extract more coins.

The interior of Haobtc's bitcoin mine is pictured near Kongyuxiang, Sichuan, China. Paul Ratje/The Washington Post/Getty Images

As a result, the largest mining operations are springing up in parts of the world with cheap electricity, like China. It also means Bitcoin mining is a growing contributor to climate change.

A study from the University of Cambridge earlier this year found that 58 percent of Bitcoin mining comes from China, describing “an arms race amongst miners to use the cheapest energy sources and the most efficient equipment to keep operators profitable.” Cheap power often means dirty power, and in China, miners draw on low-cost coal and hydroelectric generators. De Vries analyzed one mine in China whose carbon footprint was “simply shocking,” emitting carbon dioxide at the same rate as a Boeing 747.

However, figuring out exactly how much electricity Bitcoin mines use is tricky, since computing hardware is becoming more efficient all the time.

Marc Bevand, an investor and entrepreneur, was skeptical of De Vries’ tally of Bitcoin’s energy use and argued that the real global energy footprint of mining was likely closer to 15 terawatt-hours, which is still a huge amount of electricity, but half of the estimate on Digiconomist. The key difference between their numbers is that De Vries assumes that 60 percent of mining revenues goes toward energy costs in tabulating the total energy use. Bevand suspects it’s closer to 30 percent.

Both expect mining computers to become more energy-efficient over time.

Bitcoin is just a small part of a global surge in energy demand from computers as our lives become more digital. Bevand estimated that data centers account for 1 percent of power demand around the world, while Bitcoin mining uses 0.15 percent of global power.

But with its soaring value, there’s a huge incentive to invest more in hardware that extracts the digital currency, which will continue to drive up overall energy demand. If Bitcoin miners care about the environment a fraction as much as they care about profits, they should switch to cleaner electricity. (Some are already doing that.)

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