As millions of ‘data miners’ the world over rush to extract wealth from cyber currencies, the wealth comes at a potentially high price – the water it takes to generate each invisible unit.
A recent back-of-an-envelope calculation – a single transaction burns as much electricity as a household consumes in a week – suggests bitcoin’s escalating demand for water is rapidly becoming problematic.
At Bitcoin’s current rate of expansion and if countries add no new generating capacity, bitcoin mining could exceed electricity consumption in the UK by the end of 2018 and overtake US electricity consumption by 2019.
Read more about the water footprint of energy production.