Producing bitcoins requires as much electricity each year as the total consumption of countries like Greece and Australia. This was reported by the US government agency US Energy Information Administration.
In the United States, Bitcoin mining equates to the annual energy consumption of three to six million households. In the country, up to 2.3 percent of electricity consumption is used to produce Bitcoin. Miners are mainly active in Texas, Georgia and New York.
In mining, companies use supercomputers to monitor transactions and keep the network running.
Until May 2021, China was a major player in this matter, but that country banned the process. There have been concerns about the energy use and financial risks of cryptocurrency. Much of the production was moved to the United States.
Worldwide, energy consumption in mining amounts to about 0.2 to 0.9 percent of the total. This means that demand fluctuates somewhere between the consumption of countries like Greece and Australia.
