With bitcoin’s price rocketing to over $7,000 in November of this year, its overall electricity consumption has also soared. This is because more and more people worldwide attempt to mine the digital currency using high-powered computers that need vast amounts of energy. A crytpocurrency analyst, Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices as they are now, “it would be profitable for Bitcoin to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptoraphic puzzles to ‘mine’ more Bitcoins.That is about as much as Nigera, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year”. While these figures are not exact, other commentators have made similar estimates indicating the spiralling levels of electricity being used.
