The Bitcoin market currently goes past the $1 trillion mark with its prices ever ricing ten folds per year. The focus now is however shifting towards the massive power consumption that is needed in order to sustain this particular online currency.
Bill Gates on the effects of Bitcoin
An article by Bill Gates noted in an article by Entrepreneur that Bitcoin requires an alarming amount of electricity just to power up the particular online currency. The total energy consumption needed in the whole bitcoin mining process could reportedly reach 128 TWh, this year alone.
The data was provided by the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index or CBECI which is also compiled by the Cambridge University researchers. This is reportedly 0.6% of the whole world's total electricity production. This is reportedly more than the entire electricity consumption of Norway.
How much energy does bitcoin take?
According to George Kamiy in an article by Science Alert, an International Energy Agency analyst, the numbers can really appear quite large when they are compared to some medium-sized countries relying on emerging technologies just like electric vehicles which 80 TWh back in 2019. This is however still smaller when it is compared to the other end-users.
Google's entire operation reportedly consumes a whopping 12.2 TWh back in 2019 alone and all of the data now centers in the world, excluding those that reportedly mine Bitcoin, jointly consumes around a whopping 200 TWh per year. A certain economist by the name of Alex de Vries was the person responsible for putting together one of the first ever indices on the particular subject back in 2016.
Bitcoin takes a lot of electricity
According to Alex de Vries in the same article by ScienceAlert, he believed that the whole recent rise in bitcoin's prices will then intensify its use as well as drive its very own energy consumption beyond that of all of the other data centers combined. Going back to Bill Gates' deduction, he believed that Bitcoin was actually harmful to the environment.
As of the moment, it is known that Bitcoin really does take up a huge amount of the world's electricity. The amount of electricity that Bitoin takes up in general was found to be larger than a number of countries. Sometimes even a number of countries combined.
Read Article: How to Venture into Bitcoin Trading in 2021
Bitcoin damage to health and environment
Bitcoin advocates note that rapid development of renewable energy in the whole power plant sector would then mean that the currency has some sort of moderate effect on the entire environment. Researchers from the University of New Mexico say otherwise.
According to the researchers over at the University of New Mexico reportedly estimated that in 2019, before the recent price takeoff, every single dollar of value that was created by bitcoin reportedly generated 49 cents of environmental and health damage towards the United States. This finding puts Bitcoin in the negative light as the general public is still trying to discover whether or not the crypto currency is a good thing.
Related Article: Can Bitcoin Mining Be a Source of Livelihood in 2021?
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
