[omh]

> It's not even using more energy than Christmas lights or wash dryers

I can't come up with any reasonable measure by which Christmas lights use more energy than Bitcoin mining. The reports that suggest this seem to extrapolate US figures across the world, which looks unrealistic. And they're old enough that they don't account for the switch to LEDs.

Even if a billion households had 50 strings of LED lights each and kept them lit 24/7 for all of December, they'd still use less energy than the annual usage of Bitcoin.

[Olreich]

The 2008 paper released by the DOE pegged lights at 6.63TWH per year across all segments in the US. That's 0.02% of electricity usage in the US at the time, which extrapolated is still only 44 TWH in 2008. With 100% LED lights, the usage would be 0.663TWH according to the 2008 DOE paper. I'd assume we aren't quite there, but even so, much more than 2-3 TWH on holiday lights nowadays would be shocking.

> Even if a billion households had 50 strings of LED lights each and kept them lit 24/7 for all of December, they'd still use less energy than the annual usage of Bitcoin.

On the final math, at 5 watts per strand, you'd wind up with 182.5 TWH. Bitcoin at 150TWH-250TWH puts it into the ballpark. Nice.