This short four minute video answers these questions:

  1. What is Bitcoin mining?
  2. Why is Bitcoin mining so energy intensive?
  3. How much electricity does Bitcoin mining consume?
  4. Should governments regulate Bitcoin mining?

.

.


3 Comments

George · December 19, 2017 at 9:26 am

Computers, in general, do not consume much energy. But, on the other hand, they were never meant to be working at 100% of their power 24/7. And that’s why Bitcoin mining is considered somewhat of an energy intensive task. It actually consumes a relative small amount of energy, but it does so all the time.

    Ian Matthews · December 21, 2017 at 11:40 am

    HI George;

    I have not done any Bitcoin or cryptocurrency mining myself but one of my customers has a VERY large number of GPU’s (which is primarily what is used for mining, although they do not do any mining) and I can say from experience that they use a huge amount of power and require serious fans that use power and serious Air Conditioning units which use substantial power.

    Running 24×7 for days or months certainly pounds up the electricity use too.

    If you have done any Bitcoin mining, we would love to hear about your experience and real world numbers.

    Thanks for the comment George 🙂

      George · December 26, 2017 at 9:20 am

      Hello Ian.

      I had tried mining myself, but a few years ago, it wasn’t necessary to have multiple GPUs for effective mining. In fact, my Core i5 CPU could somehow handle it. If only I knew that the price of Bitcoin would skyrocket that much.

      So, yeah! A computer with multiple, powerful GPUs, is not the kind of computer which I had in mind. Mining used to be effective with one GPU or even one powerful CPU.

Leave a Reply to George Cancel reply

Avatar placeholder

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *