There Is Nothing Virtual About Bitcoin’s Energy Appetite - The New York Times

From a *coin entropy reality check; tangentially, see Here’s why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy (Ars Technica)

"In the virtual currency world this creation process is called “mining.” There is no physical digging, since Bitcoins are purely digital. But the computer power needed to create each digital token consumes at least as much electricity as the average American household burns through in two years, according to figures from Morgan Stanley and Alex de Vries, an economist who tracks energy use in the industry.

The total network of computers plugged into the Bitcoin network consumes as much energy each day as some medium-size countries — which country depends on whose estimates you believe. And the network supporting Ethereum, the second-most valuable virtual currency, gobbles up another country’s worth of electricity each day."

There Is Nothing Virtual About Bitcoin’s Energy Appetite - The New York Times