Although there are more and more in the world who add to the praise in favor of the crypto-coins as a revolutionary system for the world economic system, it is also true that many specialists consider that their operation could sacrifice the balance of the environment, specifically With respect to global warming.
It is known that the operation of many digital coins such as Bitcoin , depends on mining operations. While the hardware that makes these operations possible grows, it also increases the difficulty in the mining activity that makes possible the constant emission of new tokens . In this sense, the difficulty also represents an increase of the energy consumption within the ecosystem of the criptocoins.
The electricity consumption of the cryptones in figures
The growing demand for graphics processors for mining activities at Ethereum is generating a shortage of GPUs. This has resulted in a progressive increase in energy consumption. According to recent data , the total electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network has grown 14.54 terawatts-hours (TWh) each year. It is estimated that this figure could increase proportionally to the growth of the community.
The amount of energy needed to process a transaction in Bitcoin is 163 kWh (kilowatt-hour), which is equivalent to the total electric consumption of an average household in the United States after about 5 and a half days. Another alarming comparison is that the net consumption is equivalent to the annual energy expenditure of countries such as Turkmenistan, whose population exceeds 5 million inhabitants and is 81% of the country's electricity consumption on a global scale.
Although Bitcoin is leading the world's energy consumption, Ethereum is not far behind. The demand for electricity for mining in this technology is equivalent to the energy consumption of Moldova, which is ranked 120th in the ranking and has 3 million inhabitants.
Each operation on Ethereum requires 49 kWh on average, which equals nearly two days of power consumption in a US home. In fact, mining activities at ETH have a consumption of 8 times more electricity than that required by the VISA credit card technology network.
The truth is that these patterns will be kept in constant change, in correspondence with the constant changes that are experienced in these networks.