The ensuing evolutionary arms race, as miners desperately try for enough of an edge to turn a profit, is such that Bitcoin’s power usage is on the order of the entire power consumption of Ireland.7 This electricity is literally wasted for the sake of decentralisation; the power cost to confirm the transactions and add them to the blockchain is around $10-20 per transaction. That’s not imaginary money – those are actual dollars, or these days mostly Chinese yuan, coming from people buying the new coins and going to pay for the electricity. An ordinary centralised database could calculate an
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