Bitcoin and Ethereum miners take the cake in terms of energy consumption, reaching the consumption of some small countries such as Moldova, Mozambique or Turkmenistan.

During the last weeks and months we have seen how the popularity of cryptocurrencies has increased, reaching the extremes of completely depleting the stock of AMD RX 480/580 graphics cards, causing second-hand graphics to cost a lot of money and even increasing the graphics of NVIDIA. Logically, the increase in the number of miners and consequently, the large number of graphics cards, has also caused an unprecedented increase in consumption, according to the data, consumption would be much higher than in some countries.

According to the estimated data resulting from the mining of Ethereum and Zcash, the two currencies most mined by graphics card, the consumption worldwide is approximately between 4.54TWh and 4.69TWh, which means at an absolute level that the mining of cryptocurrencies would be in the one hundred and twenty position worldwide in electricity consumption, which, to get an idea, is the same as what Moldova consumes, which has a population of three million people.

Regarding the energy consumption of Bitcoin, we are talking that it rises to position eighty-one in the world ranking, placing it at the same level as countries such as Mozambique and Turkmenistan, which have a population of about five million inhabitants. The sum of the consumption of the two cryptocurrencies is practically equivalent to that of Syria, with seventeen million inhabitants. We also have to say that most of the energy consumption of Bitcoin is located in China, which is where the large mining farms are.

Some more data in this regard are that the mining power for Ethereum has a consumption eight times higher than that needed by the VISA credit network, but in the case of Bitcoin, it is about twenty-seven times higher. It is clear that for consumption, it is not profitable to mine Bitcoin in Europe, but Ethereum in Europe, since the performance is better and it can be mined more easily than Bitcoin. The data is interesting, we will not say otherwise, but partly it has something to do with the use of AMD charts for ETH and ZEC, although the ASICs for Bitcoin consume much more.

Source: TPU