Is bitcoin energy consumption overblown?

Researchers from Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education has found out that mining a dollar worth of bitcoin consumes more energy than digging up a dollar worth of gold.

"We now have an entirely new industry that is consuming more energy per year than many countries," said Max Krause, lead author of the study. "In 2018, Bitcoin is on track to consume more energy than Denmark."

Denmark during the year 2015 used 31.4 billion kilowatt-hours in electricity. Bitcoin mining, as of July 1 this year, consumed 30.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity roughly the same as Denmark has used.

The massive amount of energy used by bitcoin miner causes green house emission as the bulk of energy consumed comes from China- the largest bitcoin miner. Most of the electricity produced in China comes from burning coal causing green house gases emission.

Although the situation is not as bleak as it seems from the media analyses. The industry’s energy consumption can flatten in future.

Why bitcoin uses so much energy?

Bitcoin depends upon a blockchain-a decentralized ledger recording all the transactions of bitcoins. Blockchain solved the problem of double spending of digital currencies. Double spending is spending the same digital token multiple times.

Bitcoin used confirmation process built into its blockchain to avoid the double spending.

Suppose you try to spend one bitcoin twice by spending it on two different addresses. The first transaction will be confirmed from both sides- the spending and receiving side as well -whereas the second transaction will go to the unconfirmed pool. This will eliminate the problem of double spending.

But before spending the coin you need to mine it. The cryptocurrency miners seek result of some sort of algorithmic puzzle. The bitcion network is designed to produce only one block per ten minutes. The miner who succeeded in solving the puzzle first would get the coin.

In order to solve the puzzle first miners puts in more and more computational power in the act of mining- i.e. solving the puzzle.

More computational power needs more energy, thereby increasing energy demand by the network.

Can the bitcoin energy consumption reduced?

As the network only produces one block per ten minutes, thereby increased computational power and energy consumption doesn’t increase the amount of bitcoin production. The network is designed to reduce the reward of solving the puzzle to half every four years.

Miners will only put in additional energy in the mining process to the point where money is to be made. If the price of bitcoin stabilizes, the mining profitability would reduce to the level where additional power usage doesn’t generate enough bitcoins to offset the electricity cost. The reduction in profits would prove to be a disincentive for miners and would lead to reduced electricity consumption.

So, Bitcoin industry can potentially reduce its energy consumption in future in order to remain profitable.