The Truth About Bitcoin and Ethereum Energy Consumption
Energy consumption has once again become a hot topic especially along with the NFT craze sweeping the crypto world. Is it right to buy an NFT or send a transaction that has a huge carbon footprint? This has caught the attention of everyone including the likes of Bill Gates and Elon Musk, whose company Tesla won’t accept Bitcoin due to its environmental impact.
So is it really as bad as they say? The answer is yes, and it’s probably a lot worse than you think. It’s almost hard to believe how bad it really is.
How Bad is It?
Bitcoin consumes 152 TWh per year, which is 0.65% of the entire world’s electricity consumption. Think about that for a minute. Something that could very well be the slowest database in the world is using a very significant portion of the entire world’s electricity.
Bitcoin uses as much energy as the entire country of Poland, a country with nearly 40 million people, to power their homes, schools, factories, banks, etc.
And that’s just Bitcoin. If you add Ethereum, which consumes ~75 TWh per year, and the countless other blockchains using Proof of Work, these numbers are much worse.
Comparing numbers from tech companies that also process financial transactions plus thousands of other processes, it’s clear there is something wrong here.
For instance, Google uses 13 TWh per year. That’s right; the same Google that provides Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Workspace, Google Pay, and countless other valuable services. Not to mention, they run an entire cloud infrastructure service that countless other companies use. They process billions of operations per second while using less than 10% of Bitcoin’s energy.
A single Bitcoin transaction as simple as sending someone $10 of value could power a US household for 62.5 days. Sixty two and a half days… Let that sink in for a minute.
A single Bitcoin transaction could power a US household for 62.5 days.
A single Bitcoin transaction is estimated to emit an average of 300kg of carbon dioxide (CO2).
A single Ethereum transaction could power a US household for 6 days.
And let’s not forget that you’re actually paying these miners $10-$100 per transaction for this privilege.
A lot of people argue “well look at the banking system, they use a lot of energy too”. Yes, that’s true. But they also provide a ton of different services that Bitcoin doesn’t, they process orders of magnitude more transactions. And more importantly, they employ millions of people, and still, they probably use less energy than Bitcoin and Ethereum. It’s really an apples and oranges comparison.
Why Do People Mine Bitcoin?
You might wonder why people waste so much money and energy mining Bitcoin. It’s because for each block they mine they earn 6.25 BTC, which, today, is worth around $300,000 (It was worth $375,000 a couple of weeks ago). A new block is mined every 10 minutes.
They also get the transaction fees so every time you send a transaction, they are also getting that transaction fee which can be anywhere from $10-$100 per transaction depending on the day.
GoChain Energy Consumption
GoChain has always focused on being a green alternative to these high-energy blockchains. That is part of the reason we started it and was part of the original pitch (“1,000 greener”). The energy consumption by the existing blockchains was really bad back in 2018 when GoChain was first started and has only gotten worse.
GoChain Energy Consumption
GoChain currently has just under 20 nodes operating the network. Each server is estimated to require about 450W so the yearly energy usage for the GoChain network is:
0.000,078,84 TWh (78,840 KWh)
This is 0.00000052% of the Bitcoin network or 0.0000010512 of the Ethereum network.
GoChain plans to get up to 50 high quality nodes. Even at 50 nodes, the total consumption would be:
0.000,197,1 TWh (197,100 KWh)
A single transaction on GoChain couldn’t run a household for even a second, let alone days. In fact, it could only power an LED light for 0.03 hours or 1.8 minutes.
A single GoChain transaction could power an LED light for 1.8 minutes.
Also, since many of the nodes are run in green or carbon neutral data centers such as Google Cloud or AWS, the carbon footprint is minimal.
Supporting Sustainable Organizations
Not only does GoChain have a tiny carbon footprint and low energy consumption, it’s operated by non-profits and other organizations which care about the environment and sustainability. Conservation International, Fins Attached, Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef and Penn State University to name a few.
In Summary
In short, there are significantly greener alternatives out there, besides Bitcoin and Ethereum, that you can freely choose to use such as GoChain. And it’s not just GoChain, there are several others out there that also won’t put a dent in the environment (but they aren’t run by highly reputable organizations which have mandates to protect the environment like GoChain and its node operators).
Any business with sustainability mandates interested in deploying blockchain must ensure that they select a scalable, cost-efficient, and “green” protocol.
It’s your choice which technology you want to support, but next time you’re buying that NFT or making that DeFi trade, give it some thought. Do you want to help protect the environment? Is your technology choice consistent with your sustainability goals? In addition to protecting the environment, a truly scalable blockchain protocol will also protect your wallet with significantly lower transaction fees. Win/win.
