A better comparison would be energy utilized per user, in which case the energy requirements for Bitcoin are miles and miles ahead of what the average person produces using a computer in the same amount of time. Even a gamer, playing 4k 120fps ray traced games 12 hours a day would use a fraction of the energy of someone mining bitcoin.
Exactly, if we do a back of the napkin calculation:
Bitcoin
Users
There are 200 million bitcoin wallets, let’s be generous and say those are all owned by unique individuals.
Total energy consumption
Bitcoin used about 114 TWh in 2021[1]
Bitcoin currently uses about 150 TWh annually
Energy consumption per user
150 TWh / year
————————— = 0,75 TWh / user / year
200 million users
Banking system
Users
There are over 8 billion people on the planet today, let’s assume 4 billion of them have access to the global banking system.
Total energy consumption
The global banking system used an estimated 264 TWh in 2021[1]
If we assume the same consumption increase rate for banking, that’s about 348 TWh/year currently.
Energy consumption per user
348 TWh / year
————————— = 0,087 TWh / user / year
4.000 million users
With these numbers, bitcoin uses almost 10x the energy per user annually.
There are of course a myriad of things one can argue over whether it makes a fair comparison, none of which I feel like arguing, since this is just a really simple estimate with a lot of assumptions.
1: I used the numbers in this article uncritically, if you have better numbers you can run your own calculations.
