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Tuesday, 16 April 2013 23:15

Bitcoin production consumes a lot of electricity?

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Bitcoin is created by a computer, which by processing some mathematical algorithms does the thing called mining. This implies the processor intensive algorithms, and a website Blockchain noted that during the 24 hour mining of the Bitcoin around the world is spent 982 megawatt-hours of electricity, which would be sufficient for the energy needs of 31,000 households in the U.S. throughout the year (assuming an average spend 3.3 MWh). Some have even concluded that this results in an environmental disaster.

Although they  daily mining costs 147,000 U.S. dollars, mining can potentially create Bitcoin value of $681,000. A member of the Adam Smith Institute for Forbes said that the amount of electricity mining consumes is insignificant . According to his view in the there is 120 million households in the U.S., which would mean that mining at the moment consumes 0.025% of consumption of all U.S. households, which would be particularly small when you take into account energy consumption of companies and industries.

It's hard not to notice that this is the relativisation of consumption and that we can expect the growth of electricity consumption in mining as more people engage in this process. If you think about it, the situation around Bitcoin is a bit silly - instead of actually performing useful tasks, CPU time and electricity are spent on expensive and environmentally harmful "money printing."

[Ed - Bitcoin mining is an interesting process and theory, from what I am hearing there are many ways of doing this and they all require intense CPU and or GPU cycles. It seems that many of the people that do this mining are using GPUs for their parallel processing power, and if what we are hearing is true the GPU that is best for this is actually AMD...]

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Read 2130 times Last modified on Thursday, 25 April 2013 19:44
Damir Brodjanac

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