Bitcoin miners consumed as much as energy in 2018 as Hungary, according to Alex de Vries.
The researcher at the Netherlands’ PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) branch studied bitcoin’s global energy consumption all across the year. He found that existing hydropower projects were not sufficient in sustaining the cryptocurrency mining operations, adding that the bitcoin network demanded as much as 62.3 TWh power. The power of such scale could single-handedly serve a Hungary or a Switzerland.
In his journal, the blockchain researcher wrote that bitcoin miners were consuming 12,000 times more resources than the maximum carbon footprint of transactions processed by the banking industry. He also said that bitcoin supporters switched to renewable energy, but that didn’t correctly solve the issue, according to Newsbtc.com.
At the same time, Eric Masanet, an energy modeling scholar at Northwestern University, said that a majority of Bitcoin/global warming studies had severe fundamental flaws. He claimed that the global electric power sector was taking massive steps towards decarbonization. Masanet believed that a policy-driven decrease in fossil power supply would eventually lead the bitcoin mining rigs to rely on green electricity – and other scholars shouldn’t ignore these facts.