According to Galaxy Digital's calculations, the energy consumption of gold is twice of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin declined by 15,000 points, after Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, refused to accept the leading digital asset as a payment for goods and announced its reasons.
In turn, the financial company Galaxy Digital released a report in which it drew a parallel between the energy consumption of bitcoin and the gold industry, as well as in the traditional banking system.
It turned out that the cost of energy consumption in gold is way above the cost for bitcoin. But in comparison, the traditional banking system consumes more energy than Bitcoin or gold.
The report admitted that the cost of electricity for the traditional banking system, as well as the cost of the gold mining industry, is not easy to calculate compared to Bitcoin's calculation.
It is worth noting that 19 times more energy is lost in the transmission than is consumed by bitcoin miners. In fact, Bitcoin's annual electricity consumption is currently around 113.89 TWh (terawatt-hours). To put this number in perspective, the report indicates that the annual global energy supply is about 166,071 TWh.
Meanwhile, the total annual energy consumption in the gold mining industry is about 240.61 TWh. Galaxy Digital Mining said that it was not easy to get this number.
Based on the report, it only had to consider direct greenhouse gas emissions (sphere 1), indirect electricity emissions (sphere 2), and any emissions associated with gold refining and processing for comparison with Bitcoin's electricity consumption. Annual greenhouse gas emissions from these segments amounted to 100,408,508 tCO2. After converting the greenhouse gas emissions to kWh/year, the IEA's global carbon intensity factor of 0.92 lbCO2/kWh16 was used. Given these data, it can be concluded that the gold mining industry uses approximately 240.61 TWh/year.
Moreover, the energy consumption of the banking sector was the most difficult to calculate. It was reported that the annual consumption is about 263.72 TWh. This is at least twice as much as Bitcoin.
This indicator includes four areas of energy consumption: ATMs, card network data centers, bank branches, and conventional data centers.
The Galaxy Digital report comes after bitcoin suffered a massive sell-off late last week that continued over the weekend and into Monday. Initially, the decline was caused by Musk's decision to suspend the use of Bitcoins to purchase Tesla cars.
According to Naeem Aslam, Ava Trade's Chief Market Analyst, the prices of cryptocurrency are stabilizing today as investors see the current sell-off as an opportunity to re-enter purchases at better prices. It is clear that Bitcoin was too high, so a correction was bound to happen sooner or later.
At the same time, the StopElon founding community claimed that Elon Musk was notorious for irresponsibly manipulating the cryptocurrency market with his Twitter account. In this case, they created $ STOPELON, which is a new cryptocurrency.
