Experts Refute Claims That Bitcoin Uses as Much Energy as Ireland – Irish Tech News

Written by Michael Mortimer

A recent study by Alex de Vries, a Dutch economist working on behalf of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), has suggested the global Bitcoin network consumes as much electricity as the entirety of Ireland. Mr de Vries published the study, titled ‘Bitcoin’s Growing Energy Problem’, in the energy-focused CellPress Joule and warned that power demand among Bitcoin miners could triple by the end of this year alone.

It’s an argument that’s akin to the concerns raised by computing experts in the 1990s that half of the American energy grid would be dedicated to powering the internet alone. That theory proved to be somewhat overestimated as the Berkeley Lab ScienceBeat confirmed. Jonathan Koomey, a researcher at Berkeley Lab, also disagrees with the view of de Vries on the power demands of Bitcoin. Koomey fears that the same false alarm bells are being rung about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as a whole, with the assertion that Bitcoin energy amounts to the…