How Much Electricity Do Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin and Monero Use?

We hear a lot about blockchains consuming excessive amounts of electricity. You’ve probably heard that bitcoin uses more energy than most countries, for example.

That’s true! If you ranked bitcoin against the rest of the world in terms of energy consumption, it would be the 47th largest energy consumer in the world, according to a recent series of tweets from Tim Swanson.

for perspective, ~50.5 billion kWh / year would place the Bitcoin network at around the 47th largest on the list of countries by electricity consumption, right between Algeria and Greece:https://t.co/07tLoF8grc

— Tim Swanson (@ofnumbers) August 24, 2018

There’s no single stat that shows the energy consumption of the bitcoin network. Nobody tracks the real-time energy consumption of bitcoin.

Instead, to calculate this figure, Swanson looked at the hashrate of the bitcoin network, which is about 50,000,000 terahashes.

This is the equivalent of 3,846,000 S9s, or over 3 million S9s.

Swanson admits that not…