Since the price of Bitcoin has been tanking ever since Elon Musk decided to shock the world by saying that Bitcoin consumed too much energy for Tesla to further accept payments, all the attention of the crypto world is now on how we can make crypto more energy efficient and are there any alternatives?
What might surprise you though is that new research has suggested, that although Bitcoin does consume a fair amount of energy it is only half of what the current banking system uses. Although there are greener alternatives available on the market this should detract the arguments made that Bitcoin will be the cause of many ills for the environment.
Michael Novogratz’s cryptocurrency firm, Galaxy Digital, released a report Friday titled “On Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption: A Quantitative Approach to a Subjective Question,” providing open-source access to its methodology and calculations.
This study, compiled by Galaxy’s mining arm, estimates that Bitcoin’s annual electricity consumption to stand at 113.89 terawatts per hour. This amount is at least two times lower than the total energy consumed by the banking system. It is also more than half of the energy that is consumed by the gold industry on an annual basis.
Unlike Bitcoin, the banking industry does not directly report the energy consumed for individual transactions so this needed to be calculated manually. This was done by estimating such things as gas emission provided in the world’s Gold Council Report.
