Banking System, Gold Uses More Energy than Bitcoin: Galaxy Digital

Galaxy Digital has released a report on Bitcoin energy consumption mentioning that the leading cryptocurrency consumes less energy than banking systems and gold. Emphasizing that “Energy utilization is not necessarily a bad thing,” the report notes that “Humans will continue to find new technologies that require more energy that challenge the status quo. Bitcoin is yet another example.”

Banking System and Gold Consumes 2.3 Times More Energy than Bitcoin

Earlier last week, Galaxy Digital published a report titled “On Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption: A Quantitative Approach to a Subjective Question.”

Within the report included an energy consumption comparison between the banking system, gold, and bitcoin.

According to the report, the Bitcoin network consumes an estimated 113.89 TWh/yr in total. The data was derived based on miner demand, miner electricity consumption, pool electricity consumption, and node electricity consumption.

For the gold industry, the calculation was derived from the various processes involved in the production of gold including those directly emitting greenhouse gasses, those indirectly emitting them, and emissions stemming from refinement and recycling with the report estimating that the gold industry utilizes roughly 240.61 TWh/yr.

Meanwhile, the banking system uses 263.72 TWh of energy per year. The estimated data was derived from banking data centers, bank branches, ATMs, and card network data centers.

The report did describe that the energy consumption of the banking industry was harder to derive as it doesn’t directly report electricity consumption data.

With the rough categorization of sources of power consumption, it is found that the banking industry’s energy consumption is 2.3 times of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s Energy Usage Is What Makes the Network So Secured

While Galaxy Digital did accept that the Bitcoin network consumes a great deal of energy, but acknowledged that this is exactly what secures the network and makes it so robust.

“The network can benefit the energy sector by creating perfect use cases for intermittent and excess energy. And the network will only scale further if network adoption warrants it” reads the report.

Interestingly, the energy consumption of always-on devices in the U.S. is 1,375 TWh/yr, which is 12.1 times higher than Bitcoin’s consumption.