Teraminchiate.
Sometimes you find yourself embroiled in long-distance diatribes, especially when explaining how things stand you find yourself contradicting some "hairy interest". What does it mean? It means that sometimes you find yourself having to clarify where the "hairy" press tries to confuse by playing on technicalities.
In an article by Corriere, the Italian finance newspaper, this pile of information has just come out, which is cooked to make us believe that consumption for bitcoin is gigantic.
For example, a study by the IEA is cited. Which I downloaded and read, (the courier does not even mention it, they are afraid that someone will go and read), from here:
George Kamiya, Digital / Energy Analyst 
The article cites other articles as sources, one of which does not exist, and others that exist. And I'm going to see, and I find this: https://coinshares.com/assets/resources/Research/bitcoin-mining-network-june-2019-fidelity-foreword.pdf
And in the end we arrive at the data (page 7 of the report):
As you can see, in terms of draw, we are talking about 4.3GW. Which, combined in one year, will make 41TWh.
Now, as Ireland has a power draw of 25GW, we are saying that mining does not reach Irish consumption. Indeed, it stops at a quarter. What did the courier do? To make the consumption seem higher, it reported the ANNUAL consumption. Which according to the courier reaches 147.8TWh per year.
Well. But how high is 147.8 TWH / year?
well, as bitcoin mining takes place on a global scale, we can compare it, using data from the same source, with world consumption. Very well.
Let's go.
Apparently, their "alarming" 170 TWH / year problem is, on a global scale,
Global consumption (adding OECD and non-OECD): 15,492 + 11,238 = 26730 TWh
of which the 147.8 TWh of bitcoin consist of 0.005529368, that is 0.55%.
According to IEA data, therefore, the total consumption of cryptocurrency mining weighs 0.55% of the total.
How can I define the authors of the article at this point? Let's leave out the technological blunders such as:
I'm saying this because when I wrote that it was about clowns I was told that I was exaggerating: in the other article I was also kind. Because I did some spannometric accounts that hinted at this reality, in order to compare it with the others.
Now we have the number, and we can safely laugh at it: is 0.55% really this gigantic problem?
As you can read on nature.com, ( https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y ) data centers (Facebook, Minecraft, Instagram, etc.) consume a little more on a global scale ', but it is still less than 1% of the total.
The way in which the data is calculated is also interesting, because using only the consumption calculated on the number of blocks actually found, nature.com provides estimates for 2018. The source is this: https://www.mdpi.com/ 2078-1547 / 6/1/117 , https://doi.org/10.3390/challe6010117
We are therefore in the order of 1% for Information technology of which bitcoin amounted to 10%. So the impact would be even less.
So let's try to be even more useful, coming out of the controversy with the Courier, and ask ourselves: how much damage does Facebook do to the planet, which transfers the data of Europeans to the USA, instead of leaving them in Europe or Ireland?
And the network? Is that the transport of data?
Then, according to Ericsson, one of the companies with the utmost expertise in both carrier and access network data transport, the energy consumption per GB is about 2KWh. On a global scale, this is the impact.
https://www.ericsson.com/assets/local/news/2016/03/ericsson-mobility-report-nov-2015.pdf
As you can see, the vast majority of consumption comes from the cable. An amount of about 400TWh comes from the data centers, which Cuban about half of the total, and the rest comes from the network. This is the consumption of the access network (what you call the last mile, approximately, plus the stretch up to the BNG) and of the carrier network.
But we are still in the order of 1%, that is the single percentage point of the total consumed in the world.
What does that mean, in total? It means that Corriere is very good at cooking data to scare people. Their own source claims that bitcoin consumes only 147TWh, which is 0.55% of the total.
And this makes you understand how much the financiers are shitting themselves under cryptocurrencies. Or maybe not. Considering the fact that it is the newspaper of the financiers, probably cooking the data is a conditioned reflex.
The numbers of the financiers are like this.
