Have you ever considered how much it costs to mine actual Gold? How much energy does the current financial system consume?

With many people, mostly fiat enthusiasts, criticizing Bitcoin mining to be energy intensive, finally actually data has been collected on this and the results are pretty clear.

According to Asimov, Mining Gold actually costs $105B, which is 23 times higher than Bitcoin’s $4.5B annually. He also shared the figures for Gold recycling, paper currency & minting, the banking system and Governments.

Mining Gold is 23 times higher than mining $BTC pic.twitter.com/KdloPzNa7H — Asimov (@crypto_asimov) March 23, 2019

According to the figures, Gold consumes 475 million GJ compared to Bitcoin’s 183 million GJ annually. Bitcoin mining is energy intensive but Gold has other associated costs like security, transportation & refining that shoot up its costs.

The banking system costs $1870B which is 415 times greater than that of Bitcoin’s and consumes 2,340M GJ. These figures directly contradict the statements of people who have criticized Bitcoin to be energy intensive which is certainly not the case.

According to reports, 80% of all Bitcoin mining is on Renewable energy which makes it way more cleaner and actually good for the environment. Miners also make use of the heat that is generated from mining to good use thereby further increasing the efficiency.

Blockmanity’s Take

One of the main criticisms of Bitcoin has been that it takes up a lot of energy which is “wasted” unnecessarily, how is it unnecessary if it is the core component of the security of the network?

While it is easy to criticize Bitcoin over its energy usage because it is clearly evident, people tend to ignore that almost all other forms of currencies and commodities use more if not the same amount of energy that Bitcoin uses. But with Bitcoin, you get a non-sovereign, censorship-resistant, deflationary currency. I would say that it’s worth it.

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