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In the midst of ongoing debate regarding the energy consumption of cryptocurrencies, a new study by Galaxy Digital asserts that bitcoin mining only uses half the energy that the traditional banking system does.
Galaxy Digital, the cryptocurrency firm of bitcoin enthusiast Mike Novogratz released the study on Friday, accompanied by open-source access to its calculations.
The authors estimated the energy consumption of the entire bitcoin network at 113.89 terawatts per hour — 99% of which comes from operating mining machines. To contrast, Cambridge's Centre for Alternative Finance estimated bitcoin's energy consumption at 128 terawatts per hour as of March 2021.
Based on their calculations, bitcoin's energy consumption is only half of the traditional banking system's 263.72 terawatts per hour and gold mining's 240.61 terawatts per hour.
The authors also said that many don't realize how much less energy bitcoin uses because of how limited transparency can be into gold and financial-system data.
Galaxy Digital
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