At the beginning of July the “International Energy Agency” or IEA (44-years-old, Paris-based “intergovernmental” organization sponsored by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)) published on its site an article “Commentary: Bitcoin energy use — mined the gap”. It summarizes the data taken from about dozen papers / articles published on this subject in a period of 2017–2019, by different companies and individuals. Also it contains a brief analysis of methodologies used by those parties, which, imho, makes this piece worth of our brief attention.
It says: “Recent published estimates of bitcoin’s electricity consumption are wide-ranging, on the order of 20‑80 TWh annually, or about 0.1–0.3% of global electricity use.” The author concludes: “The outlook for bitcoin energy use is highly uncertain, hinging on efficiency improvements in hardware… “ and “Sensational predictions about bitcoin consuming the entire world’s electricity — and, by itself, leading our world to beyond 2°C — would appear just that … sensational.” Finally, the word of wisdom :)
Among other things author points out to the major source of the most ridiculous estimates — the so-called “Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index” popularized by the Digiconomist site, which origin and creators are unknown. This “index” has been already sharply criticized by the DLT community for its “top-down” approach taking for granted that “miners spend (on average) 60% of their revenues on electricity at a rate of 0.05 USD/kWh”.
On the other hand, “bottom-up” approach “assumes that all miners are using the most efficient mining hardware to achieve the network’s hashrates (TH/s).” Researchers employing this method estimate that the bitcoin network consumed 31 TWh in 2018. It’s (almost) in the lowest range of MIT report (“The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin”) estimates mentioned in this group at the middle of June (“As of November 2018, Bitcoin’s annual power consumption sits between 35.0 and 72.7 TWh”). Might be we start having some “silver lining” here :)
As many of you, I do not think that all of the above is an “issue” at all. However, policy-makers around the world (mostly, of course, people with very relevant professional background such as “public service” and “law”) beg to disagree. They always ready to unleash on us “Bellum omnium contra omnes” for whatever reason :)
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