Bitcoin Doesn’t Use Enough Energy
Controversial? Maybe, maybe not.
Bitcoin energy usage is often attacked by the media, environmental activists, politicians, traditional finance and competitors with an agenda.
But why does it get so commonly attacked?
If we put agendas aside, the most obvious reason is how transparent Bitcoin is – one of the selling points of Bitcoin becomes an attack vector. Mining power and subsequent energy usage is easily calculated due to the transparent nature of Bitcoin, unlike any other industry around the world – this speaks more about other industries to me.
I don’t see this as a negative, but actually as a positive. The energy attacks on Bitcoin will continue to force it towards renewable energy sources, as it already has done, with the industry boasting renewable energy at 58.5% usage. Ask yourself: what other industries can boast running that level of renewable energy globally?
This process just continues to strengthen and improve Bitcoin.
More transactions does not equal more energy usage!
A common misconception that I’d like to clear up is that transactions and energy usage metrics are completely independent of each other.
It’s often incorrectly reported that for Bitcoin to scale, it would have to scale at a 1:1 rate with energy consumption. This is not true. To help understand this, we could create “BlueBitcoin”, an exact clone of Bitcoin, and be the only miner on the whole network , with just our laptop, so using just the amount of energy to power a laptop. This would still result in the same amount of transactions per second as Bitcoin. Energy usage is a security metric, not a speed or transaction count metric.
So how do other industries compare?
Bitcoin energy usage at the time of writing is 137 TWh, let’s see how others compare.
Global Air Conditioning? 2,199 TWh. 16 times more energy is used to keep people cool!
Fridges, just in the US? 104 TWh. Very close to Bitcoin’s global energy usage.
Electricity lost during transmission in just the US? 206 TWh. More energy is lost during transmission in the US alone than the whole world’s Bitcoin energy usage.
Tumble Dryers in the US? 108 TWh. Sticking to the ethos of Bitcoin, I’ll be transparent. I struggled to find an up-to-date number for tumble dryers, but this is a great example of how transparent Bitcoin is in comparison to other energy consuming products.
But Bitcoin just wastes energy!
People shouting this are incredibly hypocritical – they use cars, computers, mobile phones, tumble dryers, TVs, play video games… the list goes on. All these things could be seen as a waste of energy – I don’t play video games, so I could see and argue video games are a complete waste of energy. Should we ban video games because of its energy consumption?
The crazy part is Bitcoin solves a real world problem and brings potential freedom to billions of people in their everyday lives.
Bitcoin solves separating money from state in a completely global, decentralized, immutable and trustless manner.
Growing up in the UK I took money, financial infrastructure and financial freedom for granted, as do most in privileged parts of the world. But most of the world doesn’t live with that privilege, Bitcoin gives them the opportunity to level the playing field.
These are some of the main reasons which led me to start CoinCorner, to help Bitcoin adoption on not only a local level, but a global level.
So why more energy?
The energy usage metric of Bitcoin actually relates more closely to the security of the network. Keeping it simple to even attempt an attack that may be successful on Bitcoin you would need 51% of the mining power. So you not only need the mining machines, you would need 70 TWh of electricity for a sustained period of time (and for those math geeks, yes adding 70 TWh onto the current mining power would mean they wouldn’t quite have 51%, but let’s keep things simple).
This is larger than a lot of countries around the world, meaning even state backed attack opportunities are diminishing, making Bitcoin more powerful by the day.
However there are still 40 countries consuming more than 70 TWh, which in theory keep open a theoretical option for a state backed attack on Bitcoin, hence the more energy usage the more secure Bitcoin can become from states and their centralised intervention.
The question you need to ask yourself is: is the future of global financial freedom for billions worth the energy consumed?
Sources:
https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index/comparisons
https://blog.coincorner.com/comparing-bitcoin-lightning-energy-usage-to-the-real-world-2d64c62b1783
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