IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cam/camdae/1948.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Energy Consumption of Bitcoin Mining

Author

Listed:
  • Küfeoğlu, S.
  • Özkuran, M.

Abstract

After its introduction in 2008, increasing Bitcoin prices and a booming number of other cryptocurrencies lead to a growing discussion of how much energy is consumed during the production of these currencies. Being the most expensive and the most popular cryptocurrency, both the business world and the research community have started to question the energy intensity of bitcoin mining. This paper only focuses on computational power demand during the proof-of-work process rather than estimating the whole energy intensity of mining. We make use of 160 GB of bitcoin blockchain data to estimate the energy consumption and power demand of bitcoin mining. We considered the performance of 269 different hardware models (CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC). For estimations, we defined two metrics, namely; minimum consumption and maximum consumption. The targeted time span for the analysis was from 3 January 2009 to 5 June 2018. We show that the historical peak of power consumption of bitcoin mining took place during the bi-weekly period commencing on 18 December 2017 with a demand of between 1.3 and 14.8 GW. This maximum demand figure was between the installed capacities of Finland (~16 GW) and Denmark (~14 GW). We also show that, during June 2018, energy consumption of bitcoin mining from difficulty recalculation was between 15.47 and 50.24 TWh per year.

Suggested Citation

  • Küfeoğlu, S. & Özkuran, M., 2019. "Energy Consumption of Bitcoin Mining," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1948, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    • Handle: RePEc:cam:camdae:1948
    Note: sk959
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/research-files/repec/cam/pdf/cwpe1948.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Max J. Krause & Thabet Tolaymat, 2018. "Quantification of energy and carbon costs for mining cryptocurrencies," Nature Sustainability, Nature, vol. 1(11), pages 711-718, November.
    2. Adam Hayes, 2015. "A Cost of Production Model for Bitcoin," Working Papers 1505, New School for Social Research, Department of Economics.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Oluwaseun Fadeyi & Ondrej Krejcar & Petra Maresova & Kamil Kuca & Peter Brida & Ali Selamat, 2019. "Opinions on Sustainability of Smart Cities in the Context of Energy Challenges Posed by Cryptocurrency Mining," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(1), pages 1-20, December.
    2. Sondes Mbarek & Donia Trabelsi & Michel Berne, 2020. "Are virtual currencies virtuous? Ethical and environmental issues," Post-Print hal-02434877, HAL.
    3. Kateryna Kononova, Anton Dek, 2019. "Bitcoin mining electricity consumption and carbon footprint," RIVISTA DI STUDI SULLA SOSTENIBILITA', FrancoAngeli Editore, vol. 0(2), pages 73-88.
    4. Sergio Luis Náñez Alonso & Javier Jorge-Vázquez & Miguel Ángel Echarte Fernández & Ricardo Francisco Reier Forradellas, 2021. "Cryptocurrency Mining from an Economic and Environmental Perspective. Analysis of the Most and Least Sustainable Countries," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(14), pages 1-22, July.
    5. White, Reilly & Marinakis, Yorgos & Islam, Nazrul & Walsh, Steven, 2020. "Is Bitcoin a currency, a technology-based product, or something else?," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    6. Chien, FengSheng & Zhang, YunQian & Lin, ZiQi & Lin, YuChao & Sadiq, Muhammad, 2024. "An integrated perspective on fintech, green innovation and natural resource rent: Evidence from Asia," Resources Policy, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    7. Alexandre Bovet & Carlo Campajola & Jorge F. Lazo & Francesco Mottes & Iacopo Pozzana & Valerio Restocchi & Pietro Saggese & Nicol'o Vallarano & Tiziano Squartini & Claudio J. Tessone, 2018. "Network-based indicators of Bitcoin bubbles," Papers 1805.04460, arXiv.org.
    8. Arfaoui, Nadia & Naeem, Muhammad Abubakr & Boubaker, Sabri & Mirza, Nawazish & Karim, Sitara, 2023. "Interdependence of clean energy and green markets with cryptocurrencies," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    9. Joerß, Tom & Hoffmann, Stefan & Mai, Robert & Akbar, Payam, 2021. "Digitalization as solution to environmental problems? When users rely on augmented reality-recommendation agents," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 128(C), pages 510-523.
    10. Bouri, Elie & Gupta, Rangan & Tiwari, Aviral Kumar & Roubaud, David, 2017. "Does Bitcoin hedge global uncertainty? Evidence from wavelet-based quantile-in-quantile regressions," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 23(C), pages 87-95.
    11. M. Eren Akbiyik & Mert Erkul & Killian Kaempf & Vaiva Vasiliauskaite & Nino Antulov-Fantulin, 2021. "Ask "Who", Not "What": Bitcoin Volatility Forecasting with Twitter Data," Papers 2110.14317, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2022.
    12. Christoph J. Borner & Ingo Hoffmann & Jonas Krettek & Lars M. Kurzinger & Tim Schmitz, 2021. "Bitcoin: Like a Satellite or Always Hardcore? A Core-Satellite Identification in the Cryptocurrency Market," Papers 2105.12336, arXiv.org.
    13. Okorie, David Iheke & Lin, Boqiang, 2020. "Crude oil price and cryptocurrencies: Evidence of volatility connectedness and hedging strategy," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 87(C).
    14. Michael L. Polemis & Mike G. Tsionas, 2023. "The environmental consequences of blockchain technology: A Bayesian quantile cointegration analysis for Bitcoin," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(2), pages 1602-1621, April.
    15. Riska Dwi, Astuti & Nadia, Fazira, 2018. "The Effect of Cryptocurrency on Exchange Rate of China: Case Study of Bitcoin," MPRA Paper 93052, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 01 Apr 2019.
    16. Flori, Andrea, 2019. "News and subjective beliefs: A Bayesian approach to Bitcoin investments," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 336-356.
    17. Mario Arias-Oliva & Jorge de Andrés-Sánchez & Jorge Pelegrín-Borondo, 2021. "Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Factors Influencing the Use of Cryptocurrencies in Spanish Households," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(4), pages 1-19, February.
    18. Pavel Ciaian & Andrej Cupak & Pirmin Fessler & d'Artis Kancs, 2022. "Environmental-Social-Governance Preferences and the Holding of Crypto-Assets," EERI Research Paper Series EERI RP 2022/07, Economics and Econometrics Research Institute (EERI), Brussels.
    19. Klender Cortez & Martha del Pilar Rodríguez-García & Samuel Mongrut, 2020. "Exchange Market Liquidity Prediction with the K-Nearest Neighbor Approach: Crypto vs. Fiat Currencies," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(1), pages 1-15, December.
    20. Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, 2021. "Factors determining maximum energy consumption of Bitcoin miners," Papers 2107.10634, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    bitcoin; mining; blockchain; energy; consumption;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • P18 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Energy; Environment
    • Q47 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Energy Forecasting

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cam:camdae:1948. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jake Dyer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.