THE ELECTRICITY NEEDED FOR A SINGLE BITCOIN TRANSACTION COULD POWER A HOUSE FOR A MONTH

Bitcoin trading use a lots of electricity as a measure to make verifying trades expensive, thus making fraudulent transactions costly and deterrant to those who would seek to hack the currency.
According to a paper from Dutch bank ING, Bitcoin trades use so much energy that the electricity used could power a house for nearly a month,

ING senior economist Teunis Brosens wrote “By making verifying transactions a costly business, the integrity and genuinity of the block can be preserved as far as benevolent nodes control a major share of computing power,”

“Together, they will dominate the verification (mining) process. To make the mining (verification) costly, the algorithm requires a lot of processing power and therefore electricity.”

Comparing the energy used for a bitcoin transaction to running his home, Brosens says: “200kWh...This number needs some context...That is enough to run over 200 washing cycles. In fact, enough to run my entire home in four weeks, which consumes about 45 kWh eacg week costing €39 of electricity.”

Not only does Bitcoin use a large amount of electricity to complete mining, it uses an almost exponentially bigger quantity than more traditional forms of electronic payment.

“Bitcoin’s energy costs compared to payment systems that have the capability of working with trusted counterparties. E.g. Visa takes 0.01kWh (10Wh) per transaction which is about 20000 times less energy,”