There is an easy way to tell how much energy is wasted by bitcoin each year: The price of bitcoin. Last I checked BTC was 64k per coin and the amount received per block was 6.5, thus the amount of electricity per block is around $416,000. Blocks are by design supposed to be generated at around 1 per 10 minutes so that is around 52,560 blocks per year. This means around $2.1 * 10 ^ 10 energy is turned into waste heat each year for bitcoin. Where I live the price for electricity is cheap, around $0.12/kWh. Thus amount of electricity per year used by BTC alone not counting the other cryptos is about 1.8 * 10 ^11 kWh, 180 TWh, 6.142×10^14 BTU, or 640 petajoules.
BTC uses around the same amount of energy as the US Steel Industry, equivalent to 1/20th the entire energy consumption of the US. That energy is super useful electricity being turned into nothing. Especially since as soon as a practical quantum computer is made, every bitcoin becomes worthless overnight. Several different groups have 1k qbit laboratory computers in the last year. Any one of those could break SHA 256 in a way to allow unlimited mining of BTC.
There is an easy way to tell how much energy is wasted by bitcoin each year: The price of bitcoin. Last I checked BTC was 64k per coin and the amount received per block was 6.5, thus the amount of electricity per block is around $416,000. Blocks are by design supposed to be generated at around 1 per 10 minutes so that is around 52,560 blocks per year. This means around $2.1 * 10 ^ 10 energy is turned into waste heat each year for bitcoin. Where I live the price for electricity is cheap, around $0.12/kWh. Thus amount of electricity per year used by BTC alone not counting the other cryptos is about 1.8 * 10 ^11 kWh, 180 TWh, 6.142×10^14 BTU, or 640 petajoules.
BTC uses around the same amount of energy as the US Steel Industry, equivalent to 1/20th the entire energy consumption of the US. That energy is super useful electricity being turned into nothing. Especially since as soon as a practical quantum computer is made, every bitcoin becomes worthless overnight. Several different groups have 1k qbit laboratory computers in the last year. Any one of those could break SHA 256 in a way to allow unlimited mining of BTC.