How Much Energy Does It Take to Grow Weed vs. Mining Bitcoin?

It’s no secret that mining cryptocurrency—a largely automated process that uses powerful computers to find a specific hash value that verifies the next block of transactions—uses up a lot of electricity… Like, a lot a lot.

Now cryptocurrency miners are gobbling up the cheapest electricity they can find, which is concerning to municipalities worried about electricity rates rising for everybody due to the activity of a few nerds. The city of Plattsburgh in New York State recently opted to temporarily ban new Bitcoin mines while it conducts research on energy usage, and in Washington State power authorities are following electricity spikes only to find apartments full of humming servers mining digital money.

The latter report led to some jokers on social media gabbing about how, if growing marijuana were completely legal, police might raid a house expecting to find an unregistered Bitcoin mine and instead find a bunch of…