SOURCE: The Guardian
DATE: November 21, 2017
SNIP: Bitcoin’s “mining” network uses more electricity in a year than the whole of Ireland, according to statistics released as the currency broke $9,000 for the first time.
According to Digiconomist the estimated power use of the bitcoin network, which is responsible for verifying transactions made with the cryptocurrency, is 30.14TWh a year, which exceeds that of 19 other European countries. At a continual power drain of 3.4GW, it means the network consumes five times more electricity than is produced by the largest wind farm in Europe, the London Array in the outer Thames Estuary, at 630MW.
Although power consumption of other payment networks is harder to isolate, one of Visa’s two US data centres reportedly runs on about 2% of the power required by bitcoin. Between them, those two data centres conduct around 200m transactions a day; the bitcoin network handles fewer than 350,000.