Bitcoin is Toast

Suppose you have an average 1200 watt toaster. Using this for 10 minutes will use 0.2 kWh of energy, costing you around 2 USD cents or about 100 satoshi (assuming here an average electrical energy cost of 10 USD cents per kWh).

Keep in mind however that you aren't alone. Lets say for the sake of round numbers that one billion people also make toast every day. That's 200 million kWh of energy, for 20 million USD or 1000 BTC. Is this a lot of money? Well consider that there are currently 6.25 BTC issued every ten minutes for miners. That's 900 BTC per day that miners can throw energy at.

Pretty close isn't it? The bitcoin network uses about the same energy to secure the ledger as it would take to toast bread for a billion people every morning. The energy footprint of bitcoin is roughly China making toast every day.

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