Bitcoin is a power hungry animal that consumes more energy than some countries! At first, that looks like a horrible waste of energy but in reality that couldn’t be further from the truth. Bitcoin can be powerful enough to change how to world uses electricity.
Bitcoin has long had the track record of using a lot of energy, in 2018 it used about the same amount of energy as the country of Hungary. Objectively speaking, that is a lot of energy. So how are miners able to stay in business? And how could we possibly burn that much energy? Renewable Energy of course.
It seems like such a simple solution yet when talking with the average person they don’t think about renewable energy. Most of the time they think of their own energy costs and try and compare that to the amount of energy miners use (which isn’t an accurate way to estimate cost).
At this point in our bear market, most miners (chances are all of them) are using renewable forms of energy (solar, wind, hydro, etc…) in order to power their miners (chances are, it isn’t possible to mine Bitcoin at a profit without using renewable energy). These forms of electricity are much cheaper than traditional forms of energy that the world has been using for roughly the past 100 years (burning fossil fuels).
Compared to most buildings around the world, I think it is safe to say that they don’t use renewable energy to power themselves. So going back to the original statement, while Bitcoin does use a lot of energy, it has to be predominantly green energy. Compare that to the rest of the world, which mostly runs on energy produced from burning fossil fuels, Bitcoin is much more green.
In addition, since mining Bitcoin is a business, those miners are always looking to decrease their costs of mining. In order to do that, they need to make renewable energy more efficient/cost less. This forces businesses to invest in making our current renewable energy more efficient. If they succeed, then not only do they help their bottom line, but they help give humanity the ability to use green energy cheaper and more efficiently.
So while yes Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, I think it is not anywhere near as wasteful and harmful to our world as the rest of us are.
