A new
tool counts bitcoin mining activity and cross-references users’ locations to make a heat map of energy use by all bitcoin miners.
Making a more efficient bitcoin-mining algorithm would go against the spirit of bitcoin mining.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge Judge Business School have built an interactive analysis tool to calculate the real energy cost of bitcoin cryptocurrency. Using their energy use model, the researchers found that bitcoin mining uses more energy each year than the entire country of Argentina.
That sounds like a wild stat, but energy use has always been a key part of bitcoin’s story. Let’s go back to the beginning and see how we got here.