Tuesday, November 10, 2020 4:17:33 PM
The bitcoin network in 2020 consumes 120 gigawatts (GW) per second. This converts to about 63 terawatt-hours (TWh) per year.
One Gighash Per Second = One Watt
One Terahash Per Second = One Kilowatt
One Petahash Per Second = One Megawatt
One Exahash Per Second = One Gigawatt
This staggering amount of power is the equivalent of 156 million horses (1.3 million horses per GW) or 49,440 wind turbines (412 turbines per GW) generating power at peak production per second.2?
Regardless of the number of miners, it still takes 10 minutes to mine one Bitcoin. At 600 seconds (10 minutes), all else being equal it will take 72,000 GW (or 72 Terawatts) of power to mine a Bitcoin using the average power usage provided by ASIC miners.
One watt per gigahash per second is fairly efficient, so it's likely that this is a conservative estimate since a large number of residential miners use more power. Media outlets and bloggers have produced various estimates of the electrical energy used in bitcoin mining, so the accuracy of reported power use is sketchy, at best.
Bitcoin Mining Costs Vary by Region
To perform a cost calculation to understand how much power it would take you to create a bitcoin, you'd first need to know electricity costs where you live and the amount of power you would consume. More efficient mining equipment means less power consumption, and less power consumption means lower power bills. The lower the price of electricity, the less cost there is to miners—thus increasing the value of the Bitcoin to miners in lower-cost areas (after accounting for all the costs associated with setup).
Bitcoin's exchange rate has fluctuated wildly throughout its history—but as long as it's price stays above the cost to produce a coin, doing the work in an area where energy costs are very low is important to make the practice worthwhile.
The Real Cost of Mining Bitcoin
The price placed on bitcoin in terms of energy consumption, and thus environmental impact, depends on how useful it's going to be to society. The problem with estimating bitcoin’s energy consumption and then judging it is that it will change over time.
The hash rate on the network—that is, the computing power that people are spending on it—has grown drastically over time and tends to fluctuate with bitcoin’s price. This then begs the question—if bitcoin continues to rise in popularity and price, how much more power will be consumed, and will it ultimately be worth the environmental cost?
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