If something is happening in the midst of the growing uproar of bitcoin activity and its prices, it is the great inefficiency of carrying out a single transaction in bitcoin, and the energy consumption that today entails.
Miners are becoming the main consumers of energy in the growing bitcoin ecosystem. As each algorithmic problem becomes more and more complicated to solve, more machines work more hours to generate the next coin. In addition, these processes are encouraged by rewarding miners whose block is accepted, with even more bitcoins.
This is partly why we are also seeing an increase in investment in computing power. The more powerful the machines used to mine Bitcoin, the more coins can be assigned to the owners of the machines. Therefore, the bitcoin price works in conjunction with the interest of extracting the cryptocurrency, but not without its added problems.
As the analyst Alex de Vries of Digiconomist says, “Over the years, this has caused the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network to grow to epic proportions, as the price of the currency reached new highs”, historic highs indeed.
This means that the recent $ 7,000 barrier breached by the cryptocurrency is also responsible for the rising energy costs. The data collected from the International Energy Agency compared the energy consumed through the production of a bitcoin as approximately the equivalent of the entire country of Nigeria. With that you can get an idea.
Unfortunately, these consumption levels will only increase as the popularity of the currency increases. This is inevitable. And although it is not something inherently typical of the cryptocurrency, this issue may be the main reason to avoid that cryptocurrencies enter the conventional market definitively. The greatest concern may not depend on the volatility of the cryptocurrency, nor its ease of use, but the enormous amounts of energy it needs to function.
From the point of view of profitability, the cost of making a transaction without a trusted third party (as it is currently) is still too high. The maintenance costs of electric service have their weight and unfortunately, that is an inescapable reality.
