¿How much energy does the Bitcoin ecosystem consume?

This simple question may seem to have an easy answer, and no. Nothing is further from reality. The truth is that estimating the total energy consumption that Bitcoin is absorbing is a difficult task. A task that has already been put to work some crypto-enthusiasts, aware that the energy issue can assume the Achilles heel of the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.

But it is necessary to go a little beyond the purported rigor of some consumption figures that really may not have just foundation. The reality is that the "Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index" of Digiconomist is based on premises that imply really little accuracy in the figures of energy consumption that they publish.

One of the fundamental premises is to assume (surprisingly) that, on average, Bitcoin miners spend 60% of their income on operational costs, and that, of those costs, every 5 cents of expenditure implies a consumption of 1kWh of electricity . What is the empirical basis to be able to affirm that these assumptions are correct? The crux of the matter is that the rigorous justifications that support this assumption are conspicuous by their absence, so these figures should not be automatically adopted as an axiom.

So, this analysis will be limited simply to the maximum rigor that the available estimates predict: the minimum reference, the approximate order of magnitude, and its future projection.

As a mere preamble to the more detailed analysis that follows, it must be said that the Bitcoin ecosystem consumes a lot of energy, a "lot" for which it has become clear that it does not make sense to provide figures with millimeter accuracy, but a "lot" that is guaranteed in its order of magnitude due to the fact that there are markets like the GPUs (Graphical Processor Unit) that have literally been taken over by the demand of the criptomineros.

Your computer has a CPU (or Central Processor Unit), which is neither more nor less the central processor of your computer. But many years ago, due to the consumption of computing capacity that videogames began to assume, the hardware manufacturers produced specific plates for graphic operations, which were GPUs, with a processor and a specific purpose architecture. These GPUs have turned out to be a cheaper and more efficient option for mining cryptocurrencies.

And to such an extent this has been so, that the demand for these hardware plates has grown exponentially as the power and number of criptomineros farms, and even the manufacturers have released specific models for cryptocurrency mining. As a result of all this, the price of GPUs has multiplied by a lot, but there are also countries where it is practically impossible to buy GPUs from those dedicated to mining: all are monopolized by the insatiable miners.

For example, this happened recently in Russia, having reached the point that the bank Sberbank had to go out to publicly apologize for having monopolized almost all the GPUs available in the Russian market. And such amount of GPUs hoarded in the market, with the consumption that all of them suppose in an aggregate form plus that of the corresponding servers that house them, can only be the preamble of the detailed analysis of the following lines.