Economic estimation of Bitcoin mining’s climate damages demonstrates closer resemblance to digital crude than digital gold

Bitcoin’s global electricity usage

Using network hash rate data from January 2016 through December 2021 and data on mining equipment power consumption and efficiency^5,30, Fig. 1 presents global electricity usage of mining BTC and prices per coin. On the basis of these estimates, in 2020 BTC mining used 75.4 TWh yr⁻¹ of electricity, which is more energy than used by Austria (69.9 TWh yr⁻¹ in 2020) or Portugal (48.4 TWh yr⁻¹ in 2020)³¹. There is a general upward time trend in BTC…