Posted on Thursday, May 17 2018 @ 12:11 CEST by Thomas De MaesschalckThe high electricity consumption is one of the main problems of cryptocurrencies. The way things are trending right now, Bitcoin will consume almost as much energy as Austria by the end of this year. De Vries estimates the Bitcoin network requires 300kWh per transaction, and this could exceed 900kWh by the end of 2018. Truly massive considering a typical Belgian family consumes 3500kWh of electricity per year.
This paper has outlined various methods that are currently used in determining the current and future electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network. These methods tell us that the Bitcoin network consumes at least 2.55 GW of electricity currently, and that it could reach a consumption of 7.67 GW in the future, making it comparable with countries such as Ireland (3.1 GW) and Austria (8.2 GW).15 Additionally, economic models tell us that Bitcoin's electricity consumption will gravitate toward the latter figure. A look at Bitcoin miner production estimates suggests that this figure could already be reached in 2018. With the Bitcoin network processing just 200,000 transactions per day, this means that the average electricity consumed per transaction equals at least 300 kWh, and could exceed 900 kWh per transaction by the end of 2018. The Bitcoin development community is experimenting with solutions such as the Lightning Network to improve the throughput of the network, which may alleviate the situation. For now, however, Bitcoin has a big problem, and it is growing fast.You can read the summary of Alex de Vries' paper on Bitcoin over here. Also keep in mind that this is exclusively about Bitcoin, it doesn't address all the altcoins.
