Bitcoin and later Ethereum, the so-called alternative virtual coins, gave rise to one of the most dynamic speculative bubbles in recent years. This is maintained on the one hand by the desire of the people forom the base of pyramid to make a profit quickly by creating something out of nothing by using readily available means and the expectations of others to get rich by collecting as many virtual coins as possible to resell in earnings, when the real money price has grown so much.
The fact that the difficulty of the virtual coinage operation is steadily increasing and there is even a limit on the total number of virtual coins that may exist simultaneously feeds the sale to the full exhaustion of the stock of devices that make it easy to get them - the graphics accelerator For PCs, power supplies, ASICs (devices that use specially designed hardware for this purpose). At the same time, the price of the virtual currency is becoming more and more difficult to generate using current assets, and it is faster than the quote of any other official currency, justifying the effort to keep up with the new hardware requirements and to support increased energy consumption.
At present, the mining activity of the major virtual coins generates an estimated electricity consumption of 14.54 TWh (Bitcoin) and 4.69 TWh (Ethereum), and the trend is rapid growth.
The Ethereum coin generates similar energy consumption to the Republic of Moldova (about 3 million inhabitants), while Bitcoin has a similar impact to Syria (17 million in 2014).
If it had the status of a country, Bitcoin would be the 81st in terms of electricity consumption (71st, if we included the Ethereum currency).