Indeed, Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity.
I don't think most of the Bitcoin investors realise how much electricity the Bitcoin network is using to confirm blocks.
In a future where we respect the environment and take great care of our planet, where is heading Bitcoin? Its high consumption of electicity and colossal emission of CO2 doesn't look very good. Will Bitcoin be able to adapt ?
Bitcoin had opened the pandora box in 2009 when Satoshi Nakamoto created the blockchain and built Bitcoin on it.
It's important to understand the blockchain is the technology that allowed the creation of Bitcoin, a simple coin you can send or receive.
The blockchain can do much more but not if you design it the same way it has been built in 2009.
Bitcoin has become very expensive to use, slow and not able to scale. We have seen the turmoil of the last forks. The world needs new blockchain technology that will allow people to interact with each other without middlemen, instantaneously and with no or minimal cost. They need to be able to manage tens of thousands of operations per seconds as the whole world will use them.
That's why we see emerging alternatives to the classic "Proof Of Work".
DPOS (delegated proof of stake) is one example. It's fast (thousands of Tx /sec), economical and scalable. You can find these blockchains behind projects such as BitShares, Steem or Peerplays. Operations are maid within 3 sec, decentralisation is optimal, transactions cost pennies or nothing at all, they can already manage Visa and MasterCard transactions processing levels. With these blockchains, we see emerging the first products ready for the worldwide usage.
This reflexion has been inspired by this article on MotherBoard:
Bitcoin's incredible price run to break over $7,000 this year has sent its overall electricity consumption soaring, as people worldwide bring more energy-hungry computers online to mine the digital currency.
An index from cryptocurrency analyst Alex de Vries, aka Digiconomist, estimates that with prices the way they are now, it would be profitable for Bitcoin miners to burn through over 24 terawatt-hours of electricity annually as they compete to solve increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles to "mine" more Bitcoins. That's about as much as Nigeria, a country of 186 million people, uses in a year ... (read the full article)
