The mining of bitcoin is effectively turning megawatt-hours of electricity . Miners computational activity is what secures bitcoin as a currency, approves transactions, and, in the process, creates new bitcoins for them as payment.
Bitcoin uses an absolutely stunning amount of power. From time to time the racks of processors used by miners keep expanding consuming as much electricity as a small city. The question is when will this end? If not for improvement of energy efficient mining equipments that consumes less It would already have been a crisis situation. Nevertheless, the consumption of electricity keeps growing.
In June, the world’s bitcoin miners were generating roughly 5 quintillion 256-bit cryptographic hashes every second, according to the all-things-Bitcoin website Blockchain.info. That’s a 5 with 18 zeros after it, every second which researchers suggest it’s around 500 megawatts—enough to supply roughly 325,000 homes
Because of all that calculation, the energy cost of Bitcoin is high in comparison with conventional financial transactions. According to an estimate, processing a bitcoin transaction consumes more than 5,000 times as much energy as using a Visa credit card.
This is really astonishing!!