Can one be environmentally friendly while still strongly interested in cryptography?

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Tim Swanson, a researcher and founder of Post Oak Labs, calculates the amount of electricity consumed by various cryptocurrencies and concludes that they employ more than they create.

A researcher named Tim Swanson recently published on Twitter the estimate of the amount of electricity consumed by different cryptocurrencies. It calculated the energy consumption by dividing the total hash rate of the cryptocurrency with the most common data mining hash rate used to extract cryptography to obtain the number of required mining machines.

Later, he multiplied every energy consumption of mining equipment. for 24, since the machine usually works 24 hours a day, before finally multiplying it with the number of mining devices acquired from the previous calculation.

He used this method to calculate the energy consumption of different cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin and Monero, then compared the results with data on electricity consumption of all countries in the world from Wikipedia to get a comprehensible perspective.

Here is the result of the calculation of the founder of Post Oak Labs:

– Bitcoin

With the hash rate of the current network of about 50 exahashes / second, 3.846.000 Antminer S9 are needed to produce it. Each S9 requires 1,500 watts / hour of operation, which after being multiplied by 24 (hours), 3,846,000 machines and the number of days in a year has led to 50.5 billion kWh / year. It puts BTC current consumption between Algeria (48) and Greece (47) on the world's electricity consumption in the world list.

– Bitcoin Cash

The network hash rate used in the calculation is 4.25 exahashes and the mining machine used is the same as BTC, the Antminer S9. The calculation showed a result of 4.30 billion kWh / year, which is somewhere between Cambodia (125) and Moldova (124).

– Ethereum

The Ethereum network hashish rate is estimated at 300TH / second and the machine used in the calculation is the newest and most efficient Innosilicon A10 which generates 485 megahashes / second and consumes 850 W. [19659012] The result is about 4.6 billion kWh of energy spent annually to produce ETH, which placed the cryptocurrency between Macao (122) and Afghanistan (121).

However, Swanson predicted that the actual power spent by the ETH doubled compared to its calculation from the most used mining device, the GPU being much less efficient than the A10. When the calculation used the Vega 64 GPU, the result is 8.65 billion kWh, which placed ETH between Estonia (101) and Guatemala (100).

– Litecoin

The hash rate of the LTC network is about 300TH / sec, with L3 + mining machine, the calculation has resulted in an annual of 4.2 billion kWh / year, just between Cambodia (125) and Moldova (124), which is similar to BCH.

– Monero

The hash rate of the Monero network is the smallest among others with about 475 MH / second. Using the Vega 64 machine, the calculation was found somewhere between the Seychelles (300,000,000 kWh / year) and Haiti (400,000,000 kWh / year).

To summarize, once added together, these cryptocurrencies consume an electric power equal to that of the Netherlands, with the incumbent cost related to waste and general costs. Putting as a comment, The Netherland generates $ 825 billion in the year, which is the eighteenth largest economy in the world.

In the article published on his company's website, Swanson said proof-of-work coins are not becoming more productive and efficient. "With the increase in coin prices, this encourages miners to use less resources," he added.

In addition, he said: "Can the gap between the lack of volume of transactions and the exorbitant cost per transaction be reduced? Everything is reduced to uses? At this time, the world is collectively subsidizing dozens of tiny economies led by the speculation that in aggregate they consume electricity like the eighteenth largest real economy, but they produce almost nothing tangible in return. "

He closed his article saying," You can still be interested in cryptocurrencies and at the same time recognize the costs of Opportunities that a large number of them, work-proof coins, are environmental black holes. "

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