Hello Steamians
As Bitcoin prices was increasing at a very high rate it gone viral among the world and now it flames a lot of discussion whether or not it's a bullble waiting to burst.
As Bitcoin is mineable but at the cost of consuming high power and a lot of electricity.
According to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, as of Monday November 20th, 2017 Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption stands at 29.05TWh.
That is equivalent to the 0.13% of the total global electricity consumption. It means now Bitcoin mining is used more electricity than 159 individual countries. Here a map showing the countries in orange colour than that of which Bitcoin used more electricity.
It is a fact that if all the Bitcoin Miners were a country than they would occupies 61st rank across the globe in terms of electricity consumption.
Some more facts relating the Bitcoin Miners and electricity consumption....
If Bitcoin mining is increasing at this rate, then it will consume all world's electricity by February 2020.
Estimated annualised global mining revenues: $7.2 billion USD (£5.4 billion).
The estimated global mining costs: $1.5 billion USD (£1.1 billion).
In the past month alone, Bitcoin mining electricity consumption is estimated to have increased by 29.98%.
Growth of electricity consumption in Bitcoin Mining
Since Bitcoin is currently consumes only 0.13% of the global electricity consumption output, but it is increasing abruptly. It is increased by 29.98% only in the past month, but countries didn't add any additional electricity generation project.
Graph shows the increase in electricity consumption in Bitcoin Mining over the time from 2017 to 2020 in future at the current rate of usage or mining.
Costing of Mining of Bitcoin
The BECI estimated that the total annual cost for Bitcoin Mining is nearly $1.5 million.
By a fact, the US average retail price per kilowatthour is 10.41 cents, which means using 28.05 TWh would cost $3.02 billion.
To know how Bitcoin Mining consumes electricity, one organisation IEEE explains as:
"Mining power is high and getting higher, thanks to a computational arms race. Recall that the required number of zeros at the beginning of a hash is tweaked biweekly to adjust the difficulty of creating a block—and more zeros means more difficulty.
The Bitcoin algorithm adds these zeros in order to keep the rate at which blocks are added constant, at one new block every 10 minutes. The idea is to compensate for the mining hardware becoming more and more powerful.
When the hashing is harder, it takes more computations to create a block and thus more effort to earn new bitcoins, which are then added to circulation."
Should we mine more Bitcoins or we don't on behalf of global electricity consumption?
Please share your views on this question.....
Thanks
Ashish Bansal
@ashishhh