Bitcoin Shows Promise in Leading the World’s Movement Into Green Energy

There is no fooling anybody, Bitcoin uses a lot of energy… BUT is it really as bad as the media is painting it out to be? To understand Bitcoin’s consumption of energy, we first need to dive into the basics of Bitcoin and mining.

There are only a finite number of Bitcoin that will ever be produced. 21 million in total to be exact. As of today, July 7, there are a total of 18.75 million in circulation. (You can track the total here.)

Bitcoin’s are created through the process of mining. The role of each and every miner is to process every Bitcoin transaction securely. They do this by solving a computational problem which verifies each transaction and creates a new block on the network. Create a block and you will be rewarded. It is important to note that every 210,000 blocks (or roughly every 4 years) the block reward is halved.

The problem is the probability of your computer mining a new Bitcoin is 1 in 16 trillion. Those are some crazy odds. So in order to increase your chances you need to be able to increase your hash rate which is the computational power the hardware can devote while mining bitcoins.

The higher your hash rate the more likely you are to mine the next block. Though, a higher hash rate means more energy is consumed. According to…