Now that Bitcoin ETFs have been approved, let's recap the colossal waste of resources in BTC mining over the past year.
During 2023, Bitcoin's proof-of-useless-work mechanism consumed almost as much electricity as the entire traditional financial sector combined.
The yearly electricity consumption of Bitcoin mining amounted to 121 TWh according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci
Per my own estimate the total electricity consumption was slightly lower at 108 TWh https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-historic-sustainability-performance/
Bank notes, bank branches, ATMs and cashless transactions consume about 129 TWh of electrical energy per year https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652623014269
The carbon footprint related to this electricity consumption exceeds 55 megatonnes of CO2. This is comparable to the amount of avoided CO2 emissions from the global fleet of electric vehicles.
On top of the previous impact, the network likely produced over 40 kilotons of electronic waste and consumed over 2,000 gigaliters of fresh water.
The carbon footprint of a single Bitcoin transaction likely exceeded 350 kilograms of CO2. This is about half the per person CO2 emissions of a flight from London to New York. This is the outcome of a single transaction, on average, consuming as much power as an average US household consumes in a month.
Additionally, every single transaction is responsible for consuming a backyard swimming pool worth of fresh water. https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-sustainability/pdf/S2949-7906(23)00004-6.pdf
@digiconomist If every transaction is that costly, why hasn't bitcoin collapsed by being *economically* unsustainable?
@kvaks the answer is because so many analyses like these kind of miss the cause and effect of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin doesn't require anywhere near that much electricity. You could run Bitcoin entirely on a car battery and a solar cell if you wanted.
But people decided for themselves that Bitcoin was so valuable that they'd bid up the price, exchanging more energy for BTC because it was simply worth that much to them.
Bitcoin hasn't collapsed by being economically unsustainable because those economic actors have found it to be economically worth those costs.
