Driven by the debut of Coinbase on Wall Street, just a few days ago we knew a new record registered by bitcoin , whose price reached more than 64,000 dollars (around 54,000 euros at the exchange rate), with an increase of around 7 percent.
And, as we have seen throughout 2021, the success of Bitcoin has been unstoppable, revaluing by 123 percent , from $ 29,000 at which it was trading at the end of 2020, to reaching $ 60,000. for the first time in its history on March 13.
Not surprisingly, right now the bitcoin market is over a trillion dollars, and its price has multiplied by 10 in just one year. But this system requires enormous amounts of energy to be able to sustain it , to the point of finding ourselves with news, to say the least, surprising: right now it consumes more energy than most countries , including Norway or Argentina.
According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI), the total energy consumed by the bitcoin mining process could soon reach 128 TWh (terawatt-hours), which would represent 0.6 percent of the total electricity production in the world, more than the total consumption of Norway.
Just to give us a simple idea, all Google operations consumed 12.2 TWh in 2019, ten times less than cryptocurrencies. What’s more, even all the data centers in the world, regardless of those used to mine bitcoins, collectively consume around 200 TWh per year.
The problem with the consumption of bitcoins is due to its operation
The Bitcoin infrastructure consists of a network of computers that run Bitcoin’s code and store its blockchain , a chain of blocks that could be seen metaphorically as a series of blocks, each of which includes a sequence of transactions.
Nobody can fool the mechanism, since all the machines that operate on the network have the same set of both blocks and transactions, and it is possible to transparently view all the last blocks loaded with new bitcoin transactions. What’s more, any user can use these transfers in real time.
On the other hand, we also find public and private keys , which consist of a series of long strings of numbers and letters linked by the mathematical encryption method used to generate them, and which are extremely useful when tracking the balances of the bitcoins tokens.
Thus, while the public key consists of the address that is made public, to which other users can transfer bitcoins, the secret key is primarily intended to be used to allow bitcoin transactions (and must be kept confidential).
We must also mention the existence of the Bitcoin wallet , which consists of a physical or digital interface commonly used for the exchange of bitcoins, helping users to track the possession of the coins.
In this way, the extraction or mining of bitcoins consists of the generation of new blocks for the network , allowing the maintenance of a peer-to-peer network based on blockchain technology, which is continuously updated (and totally secure).
When Bitcoin made its appearance, back in 2009, the process to mine the first cryptocurrencies needed little more than a home computer, which did not have to be very advanced, modern or fast.
However, at present, it is this “extraction” of cryptocurrencies that consumes a lot of energy , since it involves carrying out large computer calculations in order to verify transactions , as it involves solving puzzles that, although they are not a part integral of the verification of money movements, it is constituted as a guarantee to guarantee that each and every one of the transactions are duly registered.
As a reward, “miners” sometimes receive small amounts of Bitcoin. And then, to increase their profits, they subsequently connect a large number of computers to the networks.
Due to the growing popularity of bitcoin, ethereum , the second most used cryptocurrency so far, is considering moving to a system that involves less energy consumption, avoiding some of the processes that tend to consume more energy.
