These three maps explain how much power Bitcoin mining consumes globally

The difficulty of Bitcoin algorithms has been increasing over time, it changes every 2016 blocks. More and more miners entered the market, but the environment always changed towards more difficulty, and this is what made miners change CPUs to GPUs as a main tool, and some time after that, create first ASICs.

ASICs, or application-specific integrated circuits, are usually a pile of video chips connected with each other to combine computational power and mine cryptocurrency more efficiently. But the increasing difficulty led to another hardware scale increase — impressive mining farms in vast hangars with hundreds of chips combined.

Which brings us to the obvious power issue. How much power does the mining of bitcoins currently use? Researchers from Power Compare found an answer and posted it online in the form of very interesting statistics. According to the data, for example, Bitcoin mining already eats more power than twenty European countries combined. Some actual, existing states, this means, consume less power than global Bitcoin mining.

The maps are very demonstrative (source — Power Compare):

Yellow countries consume less power than global Bitcoin mining

Global Bitcoin Mining consumption compared to each country’s electricity consumption

Bitcoin mining versus Europe