>The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge—an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually.<p>It would be interesting if the article stated which countries.<p>>And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.<p>This article :<p><a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypkp3y/bitcoin-is-still-unsustainable" rel="nofollow">https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypkp3y/bitcoin-is...</a><p>In my opinion, Vice, does a much better job of explaining this phenomenon so that the reader is able to quantify the electricity usage.<p>The author of the same article I shared above also did an article about comparing electricity consumption of a bitcoin vs a credit card transaction (<a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is-unsustainable" rel="nofollow">https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3p7e/bitcoin-is...</a>)<p>>In 2015, I wrote that bitcoin had a big sustainability problem. Back then, each bitcoin transaction represented roughly enough electricity to power 1.57 American households for a day— approximately <i>5,000 times more energy-intensive than a credit card transaction</i>