After forming a base around the US$8,080 mark, the
Bitcoin (BTC) price started an upside recovery against the US Dollar. The BTC/USD pair managed to move above the US$8,200 resistance level to post intraday gains. It also broke the 23.6%
Fibonacci retracement level of the decline from the US$8,854 high to US$8,080 low. There were a few positive signs above the US$8,200 level, but the price struggled to break a major barrier at US$8,500.
Almost all the top 100 listed currencies are currently experiencing drops in value.
Ethereum (ETH) dropped below US$700 earlier today, while making a slight rally later on.
The entire crypto market has lot almost US$100 billion over the last ten days.
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Bitcoin has often been criticized for the amount of energy its networks consume, however calculations have always been fairly rough. Now, the first ever peer-reviewed research into the issue suggests the network is on track to consume 0.5% of the world's electricity by the end of this year.
According to new calculations, the bitcoin networks currently uses as much electricity as the Republic of Ireland’s annual consumption.
Economist
Alex de Vries, whose
Digiconomist blog hosts the
Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, quantified bitcoin’s energy requirements in a paper published in the scientific journal
Joule yesterday.
The electricity demands come from the computing power required to mine bitcoin – the process of generating new units of the cryptocurrency by solving complex mathematical puzzles. These puzzles and algorithms are designed to get more complicated as bitcoin’s network grows, thus requiring even greater computing power.
To limit the impact of such energy consumption, some states in the US have put restrictions in place around bitcoin mining, and de Vries hopes his paper will be used to better inform policy in this area.