According to an article published by Business Insider, Dutch bank ING recently published a study suggesting that bitcoin mining consumes too much electricity. The report claims that a single bitcoin transaction consumes as much electricity as a house in a whole month, and compares it to the amount of electricity traditional electronic payment methods consume per transaction.
In the piece, ING senior economist Teunis Brosens explains that bitcoin’s power usage is so high because it is necessary to make transaction verification a costly business, in order to make fraudulent transactions costly to those who seek to misuse bitcoin, adding that verifying transactions takes “a lot of processing power and thus electricity.”
Brosens went on to compare the consumption to that of his home in the Netherlands. He stated:
“This number needs some context. 200kWh is enough to run over 200 washing cycles. In fact, it’s enough to run my entire home over four weeks, which consumes about 45 kWh per week costing €39 of electricity (at current Dutch consumer prices).”
According to ING’s study, bitcoin consumes an exponentially larger amount of electricity than traditional electronic payment methods such as Visa. Per a chart published on Business Insider, Visa takes about 0.01 kWh (10 Wh) per transaction, while bitcoin takes 200 kWh.
Read more:
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/dutch-bank-suggests-bitcoin-mining-consumes-much-electricity/
