Bitcoin Mining Consumes 1% of Global Energy, Report Reveals T | Beyond the Moon

Bitcoin Mining Consumes 1% of Global Energy, Report Reveals

The US Senate committee on Energy and Natural Resources issued a document stating that mining consumes about 1% of global energy. On public blockchains, mining embroils the computation of a massive amount of mathematical calculations known as hashes. On a normal day, Bitcoin miners collectively compute over 50 billion gigahashes per second.

A lot of cryptocurrency miners will enter this market in large numbers since it is gainful to mine, then, if in future it becomes less profitable, they will automatically drop out by themselves. Generally, cryptocurrency generation is to some extent a zero-sum game, since the total revenue earned per given time unit by a particular digital asset - let’s say Bitcoin - is fixed. For instance, Bitcoin, it is almost 12 - 13 BTCs per 10 minutes (600 seconds).

Besides these revenues, cryptocurrency miners can’t avoid certain costs such as those of electricity, hardware, participation fees, and other outlays of functioning data centers. Power costs are a considerable fraction of total costs, that is to say, the focal variable in the calculation which governs the power consumption of digital currency mining at balance is nothing else but the exchange rate existing between the digital currency and fiat currency like dollars.

Last year, Ethereum developers, announced a plan of switching Ether to a more effective mining-free model. Nevertheless, other cryptocurrency developers and the ecosystem behind Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, have intensely repelled big changes to its design.