The mining systems of the famous digital currency “bitcoin” consume more electricity than many populous countries, such as Pakistan, according to a new UN study.
According to the study prepared by researchers at the United Nations University for water, environment and health in Hamilton, Canada, forecasts as of last July indicate that the digital bitcoin mining industry needs 135 million terawatts by 2023. According to the results of the study published in the magazine “Earths future” (the future of the earth), most of the electricity used in bitcoin mining affects the environment and climate, according to”German”.
It is noteworthy that the mining of bitcoin, a digital currency often referred to as” digital gold”, is carried out through serial data technology in which data is stored as a sequentially encrypted block across a large group of server computers. Digital currency mining devices verify each transaction and generate a data block that is added to this chain, which consumes a large amount of electricity due to the huge amount of data processed in each transaction.
The researchers, who studied the data of the “Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index”, pointed to China, the United States, Russia, China, Malaysia, Ireland, Iran, Thailand, Sweden, Norway, Singapore and Britain, as the world’s largest consumers of electricity in bitcoin mining.
According to the study, during 2020 and 2021, cryptocurrency systems consumed 173 terawatt-hours of electricity, an increase of 60 percent over consumption during 2018 and 2019, and 67 percent of the electricity consumed in cryptocurrency mining during 2020 and 2021 came from traditional sources. In turn, hydroelectricity is the most important renewable source of electricity used for cryptocurrency mining with a share of almost 16 percent of the volume of consumption.
