Energy consumption in bitcoin mining

ENERGY CONSUMPTION – BITCOIN’S ACHILLES HEEL

Sailendra Prasanna Mishra

School of Management
The University of Texas at Dallas
PO Box 860688, Richardson, TX 75080-0688
sailendram@utdallas.edu

Dr. Varghese S. Jacob

School of Management
The University of Texas at Dallas
PO Box 860688, Richardson, TX 75080-0688
vjacob@utdallas.edu

Dr. Suresh Radhakrishnan

School of Management
The University of Texas at Dallas
PO Box 860688, Richardson, TX 75080-0688
sradhakr@utdallas.edu

Abstract
Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency has received wide public interest. As a decentralized transaction system,
Bitcoin relies on the mining process, which is a necessary process to validate transactions. The mining
process involves solving complex crypto-puzzles which requires significantly high computing power. This
resource-hungry process has a significant impact on the energy consumption of the system. Our study looks
at the mining process and the resources required to process large volumes of transactions. Using data from
September 2014 to November 2018, we investigate how the mining protocol impacts the computing capacity
needs of miners. We demonstrate that the complexity of the crypto-puzzle and the transaction volume
significantly increase computing resource needs which in turn raises the energy consumption. We estimate
that the energy demand from mining activities will drain 17.96 Gigawatt if the system processes 100 million
transactions per week. Our findings suggest that the mining protocol drains significant resource
requirements both from a computing hardware and energy consumption needs that the future growth of the
Bitcoin network and the use of Bitcoin as a currency could be questionable.
Keywords: Bitcoin; cryptocurrency; mining; energy; blockchain

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Energy consumption in bitcoin mining

1 Introduction
Bitcoin is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies with a market value of more than $100 billion as of
October 2018. It is a decentralized transaction system with an estimated 5.8 million users making millions
of transactions worldwide (Hileman and Rauchs, 2017). The unique aspect of this transaction system is that
the underlying blockchain technology provides an infrastructure for processing transactions with no central
agency. Unlike centralized systems such as banks, the system relies on a proof-of-work (POW) approach
termed as the mining process, which uses computing resources from people (miners) willing to use their
computing resources to validate transactions. Therefore, the miners provide the computing hardware and
storage required to operationalize the system.
Mining is the heart of the bitcoin system. The process helps maintain the decentralized power and secure
the system from potential malicious threats (Nakamoto, 2008; Eyal and Sirer, 2018). However, the existing
mining protocol encourages a hardware race among miners. The protocol increases the complexity of the
proof-of-work (POW) puzzle and the system consumes very high energy resources (Fairley, 2017; Vranken,
2017; O'Dwyer and Malone, 2014). To understand the intricacies of the mining protocol on the energy
consumption of the system, our study empirically investigates how the mining protocol affects the
computing resources for miners. Then, we use econometric models to estimate the total electricity
consumption based on the future growth of the system and the competition among miners.
Our research investigates the relationship between the mining protocol and the computing power needs of
the mining process. We explicitly look at the reported computing resources of a mining pool and the
complexity of the POW puzzle to derive the total energy demand from the process in the entire system.
Using weekly data from the mining pool and the bitcoin system from September 2014 to November 2018,
we show that the complexity of POW puzzle primarily drives the demand of computing resources for
miners. The total computing power of miners changes proportionally with the changes in the complexity of
the protocol. We also find evidence that the miners add more computing resources as the number of
transactions in the system increases. Following our findings, we develop predictive models to compute the
total electricity consumption if bitcoins were to increase further in popularity in the future and if the number
of miners in the mining process increased to meet the demand for transaction processing.
As the bitcoin system is not centralized, we could not collect data on actual electricity utilized by all miners.
Rather, we first predict the complexity involved in the protocol and then use the predicted value to estimate
the total electricity demand of the system. Alternatively, we predict the computing power of the mining
pool to operate at the existing scale and then estimate the total electricity consumption in the system. As of
September 2018, the system processes close to 2 million transactions. At this level, our computation
suggests that the system demands at least 3.05 Gigawatt of electricity. Our study further investigates
whether the electricity demand from the mining process is sustainable at scales comparable to traditional
payment systems such as Visa and PayPal. Using the predictive power of our models, we estimate that at
100 million transactions per week the system will drain at least 17.96 Gigawatts of electricity. The energy
consumption will further grow with the increase in the number of transactions and the concentration of
miners.
Our findings have many economic implications. First, we show how the mining protocol forces miners to
acquire more computing power and spend energy resources. Second, we predict that the system will demand
more energy if more users adopt bitcoins in the future. Third, even with few miners, the system can demand
high energy resources to operate. Therefore, we propose adopting alternative mining protocols to utilize
energy resources efficiently.

2 Background and Literature

Mining is the process by which transactions are verified and added to the public ledger known as the
blockchain. The mining process helps to sustain the decentralized control and introduces new coins into the

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Energy consumption in bitcoin mining

system. During the mining, process valid transactions are collected into blocks and are added to the
blockchain by linking it to the previously accepted blocks in the blockchain. The challenge in the
decentralized system is to maintain a global ledger without a central control and without there being an
inconsistent state of the ledger. The system has solved the problem in a pragmatic way by using a
cryptographic puzzle known as proof-of-work (POW). Miners, who participate in the mining process, need
to solve the crypto-puzzle. The miner, who solves the puzzle first, adds a block to the blockchain and
receives rewards. These rewards are block-reward (a fixed fee of 12.5 bitcoins as of November 2018) paid
by the system and transaction fees paid by the users to process transactions.
To get these rewards, a miner competes with other miners by solving the POW puzzle faster than others.
However, the Bitcoin system adjusts the complexity of the POW puzzle in every 2,016 blocks. The
complexity of the puzzle is denoted by a number in each block and is known as block difficulty. If new
blocks are added to the blockchain on average faster (slower) than 10 minutes, the block difficulty increases
(decreases). The high block difficulty makes the puzzle hard to solve and demands high computing
resources from the miners. If the competition in the mining intensifies, the block difficulty increases as
miners solve faster to compete with other miners. In turn, miners face high operating costs to stay
competitive. On the other hand, this feature in the protocol also makes the blockchain secure and prevent
manipulation of the blockchain (Nakamoto, 2008).
With no authority to control mining activities in the system, Bitcoin mining attracts many individual miners
and mining pools to participate in the mining process (Dierksmeier and Seele, 2018). The competition
among miners to receive mining rewards encourages miners to acquire computing resources to compete
with others (Cocco and Marchesi, 2016). They use sophisticated mining devices specially designed to solve
the POW problem. These mining devices are energy hungry and burn 0.8-2.0 kWh electricity (Taylore,
2017). Miners use hundreds of such devices in the mining process, which inflates the complexity of the
crypto-puzzles (Barkatullah and Hanke, 2015). Although the complexity of the system increased 109 times
from August 2009 to September 2017, the computing speed of these devices has not grown in the same
scale since 2009 (Taylor, 2017). Therefore, we expect that the mining in bitcoin drains a considerable
amount of electricity. Moreover, traditional payment systems such as VisaNet can easily process more than
150 million transactions per day, whereas the bitcoin system hardly processes 200 thousand transactions a
day (Croman et al., 2016). When more users adopt bitcoins, the transaction volume in the system will grow
(Venkatesh et al. 2003; Tucker, 2008; Böhme eta al., 2015; Eyal et al., 2016). This growth can raise issues
related to the scalability of the system and can demand more resources from the miners (Bonneau et al.
2015). These issues with the system motive us to investigate the total energy required to operationalize the
system at a large scale. Our study looks at the mining protocol and the utilization of the computing resources
by miners and predicts the total energy demand by the system at different transaction volumes.

3 Data and Variables

For our analysis, we gather data related to the Bitcoin system from various sources. We collect information
specific to the blockchain such as the number of transactions, the number of miners and the blockdifficulty
(or complexity) of proof-work-puzzle from Blockchain.com website. We use the exchange rate of bitcoins
in the US dollar from Yahoo Finance. Additionally, we obtain computing power used in the mining process
for a public mining pool named Slushpool. The mining pool is claimed to be the first public mining pool
started in 2010. As of November 2018, it contributes approximately 10% of the total computing power used
in the bitcoin system. We obtain the computing power for the miner from its website - slushpool.com. We
provide a description of key variables in our study in Table 1 in Appendix 1.

Our sample period is from September 2014 to November 2018. We prepare weekly time series for our key
variables and log transform these variables. As our analysis involves prediction, we prepare a holdout
sample, which includes data from 162 weeks starting from September 2014. Our test period consists of 56-
week data from October 2017 to November 2018. We report summary statistics for the holdout sample and

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Energy consumption in bitcoin mining

test sample separately in Table 2. The variable NumTransactions is the number of transactions the system
processed in a week. Complexity refers to the average block difficulty of the POW puzzle. The variable
ExchangeRate is the price of a bitcoin in US dollar. ComputingPower is the reported computing power of
the miner. The variable Miners refers to the number of mining pools or miners in the system and indicates
the competition in the system. From table 2, we can see that the mean (median) of log(Complexity) in the
holdout and the test period are 25.77 (24.27) and 28.97 (29.04) respectively. The mean (median) of
log(ComputingPower) in the holdout period is 38.66 (36.60), whereas the mean (median) in the test period
is 42.58 (42.66). The mean of log(NumTransactions) is 14.02, translating to 1.21 million of transactions
per week. We use these variables in our analysis in the following section.

4 Empirical Analysis
Our study investigates how the existing implementation of bitcoin’s mining demands high computing
resources as well as electricity consumptions by these resources. To do so, we analyze the system in two
ways. First, we look at how the complexity of the POW puzzle evolves based on the system popularity and
the competition among miners. Using the complexity, we compute the total energy used by the system.
Alternatively, we use the reported computing power of the miner to infer about the total energy used by the
system. We present our findings using both approaches in the following section.

4.1 Computing Resources

The mining process in the bitcoin system induces competition. In turn, the competition drives the complexity
up as the competition intensifies. We also discuss that the complexity in the mining protocol is a key factor
that demands computing resources from miners. To compute the future demand for energy resources by the
system, we develop a model to predict the complexity of the system based on the competition and the
popularity of the system. To do so, we propose a linear predictive model as follows:
log(Complexityt) = α0 + α1log(NumTransactionst) + α2log(Minerst) + α3log(ExchangeRatet) + εt (1)

where the dependent variable is log transformed of the complexity. The popularity of the system can be
represented by two variables - NumTransaction, the number of transactions in the system and
ExchangeRate, the price of bitcoins in US dollar. We estimate the coefficients for equation 1 using data
from the holdout sample and use these estimates to predict the complexity of the pow puzzle. From the
predicted values of the complexity, we can compute the total energy consumed in the system.
We also argue that the miners acquire computing power based on the complexity of the puzzle, the
competition among miners, and the popularity of bitcoins reflected by the number of transaction and the
exchange rate of bitcoin. We show the above relation using an econometric model and use the estimations
from the model to predict the total energy consumed by the system. Before proceeding to the prediction
part, we propose following baseline regression specification to study the relationship:
log(ComputingPowert) = β0 + β1log(Complexityt) + β2log(NumTransactionst) + β3log(Minerst)

+ β4log(ExchangeRatet) + ζt (2)

where the dependent variable log(ComputingPower) is the computing power of the selected miner. The key
variable of interest is log(Complexity), which controls the difficulty of the POW puzzle. The variable
log(Miners) reflects the competition in the system. As the miners receive mining rewards from the mining
process, log(ExchangeRate) can reflect the profitability of the mining process. We report the estimates for
equation 1 and equation 2 in Table 3 using data from the holdout sample.

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Energy consumption in bitcoin mining

The estimates in column 1 suggest that the Complexity increases as ExchangeRate and NumTransactions
increase. As the mining process becomes profitable with high values of bitcoins, the competition in the
mining process intensifies and increases the complexity of the mining protocol. In column 2, we show the
estimates for equation 2. We find the coefficient of log(Complexity) is positive and significant. The point
estimate for β1 is 1.15 (t-value =16.26), indicating a very strong relationship between the complexity and
the computing resources by the miners. The estimate for β2 is significantly positive, 0.160 (t-value = 2.27).
These results indicate that the miner increase computing powers when the complexity increases and the
system becomes popular, reflected by the number of transactions. We find that the estimates for the
coefficient α2 in equation 1 and the coefficient β3 in equation 2 are negative. The possible explanation for
such negative estimations is that the number of mining pools in the bitcoin system decreases over time
(Beikverdi and Song, 2015). Because of the competition, many small mining pools consolidate their
computing resources with other mining pools. Although the number of mining pools decreases over time,
the total computing resources for miners do not lower. Rather, the mining pools acquire more mining
hardware to solve the crypto-puzzle faster and to stay competitive.

4.2 Model Evaluation

In the prior section, we provide evidence that how the complexity in the mining protocol drives the demand
of computing resources. We also show that the computing capacity of miners changes with the number of
transactions and the competition. Technically, we can calculate total energy consumption in the system if
we know the complexity and computing power of the miner. We predict the complexity of the system and
the miner’s computing power using the model specified in equation 1 and equation 2 respectively. To
evaluate predictive performance the two models, we use the estimates for equation 1 and 2 in Table 3 and
use them to validate with test data. We quantitatively measure the performance of the models using the
mean squared error (MSE) and mean absolute error (MAE). We report the performance metrics for the two
model in Table 4. We find that the MSE and MAE using equation 1 (equation 2) are 1.00 and 0.91 (0.16
and 0.38) respectively. After evaluation, we predict the complexity of the mining protocol in different cases
using the model in equation 1 and report the predicted values in Panel A of Table 6. Similarly, we predict
the computing power of the miner and report these values in Panel C of Table 6.

4.3 Energy consumption

After predicting the complexity, we can compute the computing power of the system using the implicit
relationship between the complexity and computing power (Bitcoinwiki, 2017). When the complexity is D,
232
the implicit computing power of the system is 𝐷 × 600 hash per second (1 hash implies a single operation of
the SHA-256 hash function). For example, when the value of the complexity is 2×106, the system has an
implicit computational power of 14.3 Tera hashes per second (the system can execute 256SHA hash
function 14.3 tera times in a second). We convert the computation power to the energy consumption using
the latest mining hardware. To understand what mining hardware are available to miners, we provide few
examples of existing efficient hardware in table 5. Using the complexity of the system and the energy
consumption by hardware, we can compute the total energy consumed by the entire system. We estimate
the total energy utilized by the entire system using predicted values of the complexity in Panel B of Table
6. We find that the system will demand 9.92 Gigawatt of electricity with 20 mining pools to process 100
million transactions per week.
Moreover, we compute the total computing power of the system by predicting the computing power of the
miner, which has approximately 10% of the market share from the total mining rewards. By predicting the
computing power of the miner in different cases, we show the total energy consumed by the system in Panel
D of Table 6. We estimate the energy demand by the mining process by varying the number of transactions
and the number of miners in the system. In Panel D, we show that the bitcoin system may consume 17.96

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Energy consumption in bitcoin mining

Gigawatt of electricity to process 100 million transactions per week. Additionally, our analyses suggest that
the bitcoin system utilizes 3.05 Gigawatt as of September 2018 and the system will drain more energy when
the popularity of the system will grow further.

5 Conclusion
In this paper, we focus on the mining process of the system and the energy consumption in the process. We
study the implementation of the mining process and find that the current implementation induces
competition among miners. This competition triggers a hardware race among miners and the miners keep
on acquiring energy-hungry mining devices to stay competitive. Because of this induced competition, the
entire system consumes a huge energy resources to process transactions for its users. Ultimately, the users
of the bitcoin will bear the cost in the form of transaction fees.
Our study investigates the relationship between the computing resources by miners and the complexity of
crypto-puzzle implemented by the system. Using econometrics model, we conclude that the complexity of
the puzzle drives the computing resources for the miners. We also find that the complexity increases as the
system gets popular, more users adopt bitcoins. We develop predictive models to compute the total
electricity consumption of the system. Our predictive models highlight that the bitcoin system will have a
huge electricity requirement if more users adopt bitcoins. We estimate that the system will consume
electricity of at least 9.92 Gigawatt if the system will process 100 million transactions per week. The
existing mining process and protocol do not make the system energy-efficient in comparison to traditional
transaction systems such as Visa and PayPal. These traditional systems consume significantly low electric
power and achieve transaction latency many times larger than that of bitcoin (Kontzer, 2013). Our paper
suggests that the bitcoin system needs a better proof-of-work mechanism and an energy efficient mining
processes to reduce energy consumption. Even though we assume that computing power is growing, such
a highly inefficient system may not be a preferable channel for transactions.
The findings in our study rely on many assumptions. First, we do not directly observe the electricity
consumed by mining pools and other associated costs in the process. Hence, we use publicly available data
on the computing power of miners, which may have reporting biases. Second, our calculation assumes that
all miners use the most efficient mining devices, underestimating total energy consumptions by the system.
Third, we expect that the implementation of the mining protocol will not change in near future. However,
many mining pools are critical about the existing protocol and propose changes to the existing protocol.
The future changes to the mining protocol may require us to re-investigate the system to validate our
findings.
In the future, we will consider other costs such as bandwidth and storage associated with the mining process.
Our research-in-progress study does not address wastage related to other processes involved in the bitcoin
system such as energy expended by network devices. Moreover, the decentralized blockchain approach in
bitcoin also creates redundancy in the system involving the storage of transactions and the blockchain. Our
future research will focus on the problem of redundancy without compromising the decentralized trust.
Researchers have also proposed alternative mining mechanisms, which need to be thoroughly examined in
a practical context (Eyal et al. 2016). For example, many experts propose different mining protocols, which
expect to prevent miners with high computing power to take any advantage and avoid hardware race among
miners. We can look at these alternative implementations and propose solutions to reduce wastages in the
bitcoin system.

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Energy consumption in bitcoin mining

APPENDIX 1
Appendix 1Variable Description
log(NumTransactions) Log Transform of the number of transactions added to blockchain
log(Complexity) Log transform blockdifficulty of the POW puzzle
log(ExchangeRate) Log exchange rate of 1 bitcoin in USD
log(ComputingPower) Log transform of computing power in hash rate by Slushpool
log(Miners) Log transform of the number of unique miners/mining pools in the bitcoin system

Table 1 Variable definition

Holdout Period (N=162) Test Period (N=56) Difference

Variable Mean Sd Median Mean Sd Median Mean

log(ComputingPower) 38.56 1.26 36.60 42.58 0.58 42.66 -4.02
log(Complexity) 25.77 1.07 24.27 28.97 0.55 29.04 -3.20
log(NumTransactions) 14.01 0.49 12.10 14.29 0.22 14.24 -0.28
log(ExchangeRate) 6.40 0.88 5.37 9.01 0.29 8.92 -2.61
log(Miners) 3.04 0.16 2.64 2.82 0.13 2.77 0.22

Table 2. Descriptive statistics for holdout and test samples

(1) (2)
Dependent variable = log(Complexity) log(ComputingPower)
log(ExchangeRate) 0.909*** -0.054
(27.65) (-0.76)

log(NumTransactions) 0.722*** 0.160**

(13.15) (2.27)

log(Miners) -0.288** -0.269**

(-2.03) (-2.11)

log(Complexity) 1.150***
(16.26)

Constant 10.710*** 7.834***

(13.95) (7.68)
N 162 162
Adjusted R2 0.94 0.97
t statistics in parentheses
*
p < 0.10, ** p < 0.05, *** p < 0.01
Table 3. This table shows the estimations of equation (1) and equation (2). Column 1 shows the estimates for
equation (1) with dependent variable as the log(Complexity). Column 2 reports the estimates of equation 2 with
dependent variable as log(ComputingPower).

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Energy consumption in bitcoin mining

Test Sample
Model MSE MAE
Equation (1) 1.00 0.91
Equation (2) 0.16 0.38

Table 4. Performance metrics models with the test sample. MSE stands for mean square error. MAE stands
for mean absolute error.

Equipment Hash Power Electricity Cost

AntMiner S15 28 TH/s 1596 W $2,035
E9i BTC 13.5 TH/s 1400 W $745

Table 5. Mining hardware devices and energy rating (TH/s = Tera hash per second)

Panel A Panel C
Predicted values for log(Complexity) using the Predicted values for log(ComputingPower) using
model in equation 1 the model in equation 2

NumTransactions (in million) NumTransactions (in million)

2 10 25 50 100 2 10 25 50 100
5 28.39 29.56 30.22 30.72 31.22 5 41.93 43.53 44.44 45.12 45.81
20 27.99 29.16 29.82 30.32 30.82 20 41.10 42.70 43.60 44.29 44.98
Miners

Miners

50 27.73 28.89 29.55 30.05 30.56 50 40.55 42.15 43.05 43.74 44.43
75 27.61 28.78 29.44 29.94 30.44 75 40.31 41.90 42.81 43.50 44.18
100 27.53 28.69 29.35 29.86 30.36 100 40.13 41.73 42.64 43.32 44.01
Panel B Panel D
Predicted total energy consumption in Gigawatt Predicted total energy consumption in Gigawatt
using predicted values from Panel A using predicted values from Panel C

NumTransactions (in million) NumTransactions (in million)

2 10 25 50 100 2 10 25 50 100
5 0.88 2.80 5.43 8.96 14.78 5 0.86 4.22 10.45 20.78 41.30
20 0.59 1.88 3.64 6.01 9.92 20 0.37 1.83 4.55 9.04 17.96
Miners

Miners

50 0.45 1.44 2.80 4.62 7.62 50 0.21 1.06 2.62 5.21 10.36
75 0.40 1.28 2.49 4.11 6.78 75 0.17 0.83 2.06 4.09 8.12
100 0.37 1.18 2.29 3.78 6.24 100 0.14 0.70 1.73 3.44 6.83

Table 6. Panel A reports the predicted values for the log(Complexity) using equation 1.. Panel B shows the
estimates for total energy consumption in the system using predicted values from Panel A. Panel C reports the
predicted values for the log(ComputingPower) using equation 2 in different cases. Panel D shows the total energy
consumed by the system using predicted values from Panel C.

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Energy consumption in bitcoin mining

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