Bitcoin technology has appeared on the scene as a convenient method to send and receive money. But as people say there is no such thing as a free lunch. Bitcoin makes no exception to the rule. Bitcoin miners are using big quantities of power in the process of creating bitcoins. This means that bitcoins are not really friendly to the environment, as well. Bitcoin’s mining requires plenty of powerful computers aiming at solving the same cryptographic puzzles. The biggest problem is that bitcoin is constantly increasing in popularity and more people have started to use their computers to mine for bitcoins. Doing the math, it seems that only one bitcoin transaction uses as much energy as an average American household per week.
More people started to be interested in mining bitcoins. This means that the number of people, who are mining bitcoins is increasing at a rapid pace. To make it more accurate, it is worth to explain that the software used for mining bitcoins is designed in such a way, so that bitcoin hunters need no less than 10 minutes to solve the cryptographic puzzles. The difficulty of the puzzle depends on the number of people, who are trying to solve it. The more difficult is the puzzle, the more energy the computer software uses. What is more is that the energy consumption, which bitcoin tends to use is not fixed, but it fluctuates in accordance with the bitcoin’s price, It is interesting to note that bitcoin’s price is close to its all-time highs in value as last week reached its record-high level of $6,306.58.
How Much Power Bitcoin Uses
There is a great variety of bitcoin mining computers, using different quantity of power. The mining companies, for example, have started to use energy saving computers. But no matter what measures are taken, it is a matter of fact that running bitcoin consumes plenty of energy, which will be enough for the needs of an average American household. An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries went even further to estimate that bitcoin miners need to use Nigeria’s worth of electricity in order to register any profitability. The prediction is made on an annual base.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to make an accurate calculation on how much energy bitcoin uses in fact. The most widespread way to do the math is to explore how many sums are conducted per second to solve a cryptographic puzzle and estimate how much energy each sum does it take. These estimations are often referred to as hashes and these equate to millions. Hence, it can be concluded that the modern cryptocurrency technologies are worth a pot of money.
