The simple answer is yes. Crypto and Bitcoin mining are consuming a lot of energy. Before picking a side or pasing judgment, we recommend that you determine who you are listening to and what narrative you believe provides the most value, solves, or creates the most problems for future generations.
“Bitcoin Lightning, and Bitcoin, in general, are really great and very efficient technological solutions that deserve to be adopted on a large scale. This invention is brilliant enough, efficient enough, and powerful enough to get mass adoption.” Khazzak founder CalueChain
Traditional banks’ total annual energy consumption of traditional banks is around 26 TWh on running servers, 26 TWh on ATMs, and 87 TWh from an estimate of 600k+ branches worldwide. It is no surprise that traditional banks consume much energy as we can assume that 70% of the world population (adults) utilizes them.
Due to the underlying technology, bitcoin miners do use a lot of energy. The reason for this is to make sure the network is secure and transactions are final. By way of “proof-of-work,” miners must put a lot of effort into processing transactions. Once they find the right solution to the problem they need to solve, they earn bitcoin.
From a security standpoint, this also means that a potential hacker must put at least the same amount of energy into mutating transaction information in a specific transaction block. But as the blockchain adds a new block every 10 minutes, it becomes more and more costly for a potential hacker to change the blockchain. In reality, it is basically impossible and economically unviable to change information in the blockchain.
This makes Bitcoin the ultimate settlement network. Value can be securely transacted from point A to B. Both parties can be sure that after their transaction has been added to a block, the transaction is final. The high energy consumption of the whole Bitcoin network is a common topic for critics. However, it must be stated that Bitcoin uses less than half the total energy usage of the traditional banking and gold sector. Therefore, Bitcoin is much more efficient and is often seen as the future of finance.
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