Research Says Bitcoin Uses More Energy than Switzerland

Bitcoin Mining Tops Switzerland’s Power Usage

It’s hardly any secret that in many locations around the world, there are factories devoted simply to the process of making Bitcoin. Rooms as large as your local Supermarket. All with banks and banks of graphics cards working at (nearly) full tilt to mine that delicious cryptocurrency. Mining is, without a doubt, a huge business on an industrial scale!

As you might expect, such a process clearly requires a lot of power. A factor that recently made the Iranian government shutdown two factories and seize 1,000 of their machines because they were pulling around 7% of the entire countries power output.

Following new research from the University of Cambridge, however, a new tool has been launched to estimate the overall power consumption that Bitcoin mining creates.

How Much Energy Does It Use?

Well, the short version is, rather a lot more than you probably expected. Although estimates are regularly updated, one of their most recent showed that the power consumption for Bitcoin mining alone topped that of the entire usage of countries such as Switzerland or the Czech Republic. These are, incidentally, countries with about 9-10 million people living in them. Based on the popularity, however, I can’t pretend to be entirely surprised.

This, in global terms, represents about 0.25% of the entire worlds energy usage. You can check out the power estimate tool via the link here!

Not Likely To Get Better

The team behind the research tool have said that they haven’t created this to make any form of statement or conclusion. They’re happy to leave those up to the people viewing the information. With Bitcoin recently topping over $10,000 again, however, don’t expect this to get any better in the future.

What do you think? Do you mine Bitcoin? Are you surprised at the figures? In addition, could this cause a power problem in the future? – Let us know in the comments!