The amount of electricity consumed by the largest cryptocurrency networks has decreased by up to 50% as the “crypto winter” continues to eat at the incomes of “miners” and financial contagion spreads further throughout the sector.
The electricity consumption of the bitcoin network has fallen by a third from its high of 11 June, down to an annualised 131 terawatt-hours a year, according to estimates from the crypto analyst Digiconomist. That still equates to the annual consumption of Argentina, with a single conventional bitcoin transaction using the same amount of electricity that a typical US household would use over 50 days.
I had to do a double take on the date to make sure this wasn’t a story from a year ago, when bitcoin difficulty actually did fall almost 50%.
Now I see the headline says “bitcoin” but the article’s “decreased by 50%” claim is actually talking about a nebulous collection of things they call “the largest cryptocurrency networks”. But, when it comes to bitcoin specifically, this article is still just factually incorrect, stating:
It only takes a moment of looking at difficulty charts on any website to see that the all-time high was actually 11 May (when the difficulty hit 31.25 T) and as of yesterday it is now down to 29.57 T, for a decrease of 5.3%.
The interesting story here is that for the last year (since last summer’s actually-almost-50% difficulty drop from 25 T to 13.6 T, which came soon after the price dropped and then rapidly turned back around along with it) the difficulty has continued to rise despite the price falling again. The fact that the difficulty climb has finally slowed (it’s gone down twice and up once since the 11 May peak) is unsurprising - what is surprising is that it didn’t do it sooner.