Crypto Club Prez has different views to the person with a PhD You can buy a Tesla with it, and you can evade the feds with it, but recent reports from Cambridge University show that bitcoin mining consumes more power than the entire country Argentina, and accounts for nearly 1% of global power consumption. Actual, physical mining accounts for 4–7% of power consumption. Bitcoin mining currently consumes 142.59 Terra-Watt hours of electricity annually. This is more power than is consumed by the entire country of Sweden, or enough energy to power all the Satisfyer Pro 2’s in the New Zealand for 32 years. Only 26 countries in the world consume more power than bitcoin mining annually. Dr Olivier Jutel, a lecturer at Otago University who specialises in researching bitcoin and blockchain technology was horrified by this, calling it an “environmental, moral, and ethical disaster”. Campbell Miller, President of the Otago University Cryptocurrency Club pointed out the fact that our current financial institutions are very resource heavy anyway, and that bitcoin mining is just more obvious in its environmental impact. “Gold ... scars the earth, it pillages the earth, there's just craters left. Bitcoin is just the free market deciding that this how much energy we should use to compute and solidify the bitcoin network.”