With bitcoin price becoming ever higher 10 years after its debut, which topped US$9,900 in the first half of May, miners have been working frantically in mining, greatly boosting their power consumption. Alex de Vries, financial and blockchain expert, reports that global power consumption for bitcoin mining will top 7.67 GW in 2018, aggravating climate change problem.

Miners of bitcoin, the first virtual money created by blockchain technology, would utilize the computing function of computers to encrypt and record blockchain transactions. To reward miners, bitcoin network would generate a blockchain data, yielding 1.25 units of bitcoin. In addition to transaction fees, miners would be rewarded with bitcoin.

In an article titled "Bitcoin's growing energy problem" published in "Joule" recently, de Vries points out that power consumption of bitcoin mining now reaches 2.55 GW a year, 0.5% of global consumption, which is expected to top 7.67 GW in 2018, compared with 3.1 GW power consumption of Ireland and 8.2 GW of Austria.

200,000 bitcoin transactions take place daily, with each consuming 300 kWh of power at least, which may exceed 900 kWh by the end of 2018. With its transaction scale becoming every larger, bitcoin may account for 5% of global power consumption in the future, according to De Vries. Miners would raise the computing capability of their computers, in order to gain more rewards, boosting costs of power equipment and machinery.

The reports admits that the aforementioned figures are just rough estimates, as it is impossible to calculate precisely power consumption of bitcoin with current technology. Bitcoin network now consists of 10,000 nodes, each representing one or multiple equipment.    

Bitcoin communities have been endeavoring to reduce power consumption and raise network traffic, increasing the workload which computers can handle in a unit time. However, generally speaking, bitcoin power consumption will continue rising, until an ideal solution is found.

(Written by Daisy Chuang; First photo courtesy of Pixabay)