Bitcoin alone is estimated to consume as much energy as Denmark by 2020. While the nordic nation is mainly powered by renewables, this cannot be said about the overwhelmingly Chinese mining farms, upholding the BTC empire.
The reason behind Bitcoin’s insatiable power appetite is the so-called Proof-of-Work (PoW), the cryptographic algorithm ensuring that no one can mess with Bitcoin’s public blockchain. The algorithm works by letting miners compete over the solving of cryptographic puzzles in the pursuit of financial rewards in the form of transaction fees and freshly minted Bitcoins. In order to attack the Bitcoin network, a hacker would have to outcompete all other miners in this puzzle solving game. However, solving these puzzles is highly energy intensive, so much so that it would cost them the energy consumption of a small city just move some fake Bitcoins around.
There exists a lesser-known alternative called the distributed Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm (or dBFT).
The full article:
https://coinidol.com/the-byzantine-alternative/
