Bitcoin Network Power Consumption Drops As Hash Rate Has Been Weakening In Recent Weeks

The power requirements of the bitcoin network temporarily drop as the price drops. (photo: doc. pixabay)

JAKARTA - The overall power consumption of the Bitcoin (BTC) network recorded a drastic drop after following a two-week decline in the mining hash rate, reducing travel power to mine BTC blocks to 199,225 exahashes per second (EH/s).

According to data shared by the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance, the Bitcoin network recorded its lowest power demand in 2022 of 10.65 gigawatts (GW). While at its peak, the BTC network demanded 16.09 GW of power.

On June 16, a report from Cointelegraph highlighted how the banking sector uses 56 times more energy than the Bitcoin ecosystem. Publisher Michel Khazzaka, an IT engineer, cryptographer and consultant, said in an exclusive interview about it.

“Bitcoin Lightning and Bitcoin, in general, are very powerful and highly efficient technological solutions that deserve to be adopted on a large scale. This invention is brilliant enough, efficient enough and powerful enough to be mass-adopted,” said Khazzaka as quoted by Cointelegraph.

The sudden reduction in Bitcoin power demand can be attributed to the falling hash rate. The mining hash rate serves as a key security metric, the computational power required by a BTC miner to successfully mine a block.

Bitcoin mining difficulty hit an all-time high of 231,428 EH/s on June 13, which was followed by a drop of more than -13.9% over two weeks.

The latest breakdown of the hash rate distribution shows F2Pool and AntPool as the largest known miners, mining 81 and 80 blocks respectively over the past four days.

A group of researchers, under federal funding, designed a class of stablecoins dubbed Electricity Stablecoins (E-Stablecoins) that would transmit energy as a form of information.

As Cointelegraph explains, E-Stablecoins will be minted via input of one kilowatt-hour of electricity, plus a fee, which can then be used for transactions in the same way as any stablecoin.