Analyst Claims 98% of Mining Rigs Fail to Verify Transactions

Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomist, has given a damning assessment of the electricity consumed by Bitcoin (BTC) mining in an interview with British media outlet, The Telegraph.

According to de Vries, a single Bitcoin transaction expends the same quantity of electricity needed to power a British household for 59 days, 780,650 Visa transactions, or 52,043 hours of video streaming on Youtube.

The article asserts that the annual returns generated from Bitcoin mining are nearly $5.9 billion — with approximately 4 billion mining units competing for a share of the bounty worldwide. At the end of August 2019, Bitcoin miners were estimated to have generated $14 billion in profits since the technology’s inception.

De Vries asserts that 98% of mining rigs will never verify a transaction, resulting in an enormous and unproductive electricity expenditure. “They are sort of participating in a massive lottery and every 10 minutes one gets lucky and gets to produce the next…