Do You Know That Christmas Lights Consumes as Much Electrical Energy As Bitcoin Mining Does?

If you have been the type that follows crypto news, you must have come across this one particular news that criticized Bitcoin Mining as consuming more electricity than expected, causing global warming and stuffs like that. Some even went to the extent of saying “Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than raw material extraction.” 

Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than raw material extraction

Yeah it’s true, and there is prove to back it up. An article published 3 years ago reported that the white and coloured bright Lights that were being hung on American trees, rooftops and lawns consumes more power than an entire whole country like El Salvador or Ethiopia. Further details from the article reveals that electricity usage during the festive season in the U.S. alone accounts for 6.63 billion kilowatt hours of consumption yearly, which is far more than what other developing countries uses for a year.

El Salvador uses 5.35 billion kilowatt hours, Ethiopia consumes 5.30 billion and Tanzania 4.81 billion all in a year. Research also had it that, the festive season in the states begins from the early days of every Nov and last till Feb ending of the next year. That’s approximately 4 months only, and such amount of power is being wasted on something that doesn’t really have any economic importance.

According to @iamjosephyoung on Twitter,

Critics of Bitcoin could consider the level of energy consumption by the digital currency as excessive and unnecessary. But, critics fail to consider what mining Bitcoin actually offers; it is not merely generating more supply of BTC but processing transactions and verifying payments. Hence, if the use of energy of fiat is to be compared with Bitcoin, the resources used by the central bank, commercial banks, political factions that attempt to gain control of the printing press, ATMs, and many other factors have to be considered; and when all of the factors are combined, they are significantly larger than the resources consumed by BTC.

As funny as it is, whalepanda says

Christmas decorations are boiling the oceans and are causing global warming. At least Bitcoin is giving us hard money, what is Christmas giving us?