Bitcoin Electricity Usage: Is It Worth It?

By Stephen Perrenod on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Imagine there was a type of money or digital asset that was minted over a century or so, but could be used not only during the minting period but for many centuries to come. The energy in creating it might seem large at the time, but be a very worthwhile long term investment. That asset is Bitcoin.

A year ago I wrote about the electricity requirements of Bitcoin mining and told people that we should calm down. I noted that gold mining consumes much more power than Bitcoin mining. This is not surprising since the above-ground gold supply is worth, at $8 trillion, about 40 times as much as the present Bitcoin market cap.

Bitcoin’s Power Consumption

There are many alt coins that use other types of consensus algorithms rather than the Proof of Work used in Bitcoin mining, but these have much lower security and much less value as a result. A relatively small number of coins are mined using Proof of Work, with Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin being the most important after Bitcoin. None of these has a computational hashing rate of even 3% that of Bitcoin, however.

As of the end of May 2019, we put together a list of the top mining pools and estimated that the top 8 mined coins amounted to…