Bitcoin’s Shocking Energy Consumption — Haley Zaremba
When it comes to thinking about which economic sectors and industry niches that consume the most energy, cryptocurrencies may not immediately come to mind. But for some of these crypto companies, their energy and carbon footprints are not just considerable, they’re massive. The most famous example, Bitcoin, has an annual energy footprint slightly larger than the entire nation of Switzerland. The company’s current energy consumption can be tracked here.
Last year, the University of Cambridge created an online tool that allows users to compare the boggling energy consumption of Bitcoin to other entities. At the time that this platform debuted, the tool estimated that “Bitcoin is using around seven gigawatts of electricity, equal to 0.21% of the world's supply,” according to a BBC report. This shocking figure translates to “as much power as would be generated by seven Dungeness nuclear power plants at once.”...
7 comments:
A few years back, a guy I know had a rig setup for bitcoin mining. He calculated out how much power it uses, how much heat it gives off, and how much less he can heat his house in winter and how much money he actually makes off the thing.
He thinks cryptocurrency will take over. My bet is it'll never be anything more than it already is.
There is no hope for the human locust.
You’ll never hear the bit coin religious people talk about the massive energy problem it brings. The answer to that is always “in the future...”.
Talk about bloat ware.
Is why I run Windows 7 and Linux Mint...
Funny enough, my current box is Linux Mint. It has Windows 7 too, but I only use it about once a year. I use an xp vm more. Windows 7 was pretty good, I had to use it on my dev box at my previous job, no real complaints.
Maybe I'm getting old and don't like change, but I couldn't stand that ui Ubuntu changed to so I had to switch to mint. An OS needs to be clean, simple and out of my way.
With Linux, you can customize it the way you want. I used to have Lubuntu but now I have a comparably light OS under Mint.
Windows 7 may be the last hurrah for MS. It's hit or miss with those guys.
Post a Comment