At those levels of electricity consumption, each individual bitcoin transaction uses almost 300KWh of electricity – enough to boil around 36,000 kettles full of water. Between them, those two data centres conduct around 200m transactions a day; the bitcoin network handles fewer than 350,000. The astronomical power draw is a facet of how the bitcoin network protects itself against fraud. With no centralised authority confirming transactions, bitcoin is instead backed by “miners”, who put specialised computers to work churning through extremely power-intensive computing problems. The value of one bitcoin neared $10,000 on 27 November, as the currency continued to grow in its third significant boom in its history.

Source: The Guardian November 27, 2017 10:40 UTC