{"id":3612,"date":"2017-03-10T16:32:09","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T15:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/?p=3612"},"modified":"2017-03-10T16:34:40","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T15:34:40","slug":"the-sustainability-problem-of-digital-currencies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/2017\/03\/the-sustainability-problem-of-digital-currencies.html","title":{"rendered":"The Sustainability Problem of Digital Currencies"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Bitcoin is back in the spotlight these days thanks to some wild price movements and central bank meetings. The decentralized currency has recently been trading over its all-time high of $1200 on some exchanges. But the higher the price goes, the more it exacerbates bitcoin’s dark side: shocking levels of electricity consumption.<\/p>\n

In 2015, I wrote that bitcoin had a big sustainability problem. Back then, each bitcoin transaction represented roughly enough electricity to power 1.57 American households for a day\u2014 approximately 5,000 times more energy-intensive than a credit card transaction. Since it’s been two years, it’s time for an update.<\/p>\n

Updated calculations with optimistic assumptions show that in a best-case hypothetical, each bitcoin transaction is backed by approximately 90 percent of an American household’s daily average electricity consumption. So even though that’s still about 3,994 times as energy-intensive as a credit card transaction, things could be getting better since 2015.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it’s more likely that things are getting worse. A new index has recently modeled potential energy costs per transaction as high as 94 kWh, or enough electricity to power 3.17 households for a day. To put it another way, that’s almost enough energy to fully charge the battery of a Tesla Model S P100D, the world’s quickest production car, and drive it over 300 miles.<\/p>\n

Read more: A Single Bitcoin Transaction Takes Thousands of Times More Energy Than a Credit Card Swipe<\/a>, Christopher Malmo. Thanks to Renaud d’Avout d’Auerstaedt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bitcoin is back in the spotlight these days thanks to some wild price movements and central bank meetings. The decentralized currency has recently been trading over its all-time high of $1200 on some exchanges. But the higher the price goes, the more it exacerbates bitcoin’s dark side: shocking levels of electricity consumption. In 2015, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58,269,124,138,315],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3612"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3612"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3615,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3612\/revisions\/3615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}