How do you figure? Bitcoin uses 116 TWh of energy each year, and that number is going up. The US, probably the largest user of Christmas lights in aggregate (probably more than Europe and South America put together, with Asia and Africa having negligible Christmas light usage), used 6.63 TWh of energy on Christmas lights in 2007 when only 5% of them were LEDs, and that number is dropping as people switch to energy efficient LED lights, which use 10% as much energy as incandescent Christmas lights.
That claim seems to have originated in this article from Mawson Infrastructure Group [1]:
> According to a recent post by the Center for Global Development, Christmas lights consume a whopping 6.63 terawatt-hours in the US alone, with the global figure being substantially higher across the rest of the world. The tiny state of El Salvador, for instance, consumes 5.35 terawatts for Christmas lights, and the African nation of Tanzania stands at 4.81 terawatts. Add these figures up all over the globe and you soon discover that bitcoin isn’t the energy consumer that many environmentalists lead people to believe – at least not compared to Christmas lights.
This is the post from the Center for Global Development that Mawson is using [2]. The relevant paragraph says:
> A 2008 study from the US Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) found that decorative seasonal lights accounted for 6.6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity consumption every year in the United States. That’s just 0.2% of the country’s total electricity usage, but it could run 14 million refrigerators. It’s also more than the national electricity consumption of many developing countries, such as El Salvador, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nepal, or Cambodia.
That is followed by a chart that shows the national consumption of El Salvador, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Nepal, and Cambodia, and the decorative holiday light consumption of the US.
Mawson misunderstood that chart. The 5.35 tWh for El Salvador and 4.81 tWh for Tanzania that Mawson cites as for Christmas lights are those country's total consumption.
In other words, what Mawson has shown is that the electricity used for Christmas lights in the US plus the electricity used for everything in the rest of the world (including Bitcoin!) is more than the electricity used for Bitcoin.
Let's see if we can figure out the right numbers. First, just for the US. Most figures I have found are for cryptocurrency in general not just Bitcoin, but I believe that Bitcoin is by far the biggest proof of work cryptocurrency so we probably won't be far off to attribute almost all of it to Bitcoin. Adjust all the following by whatever you think the ratio of Bitcoin to total cryptocurrencies is.
Annual US electricity use is about 4 x 10^12 kWh per year [3].
US Bitcoin electricity use is 0.9 - 1.7% of US electricity use [4]. Going with the bottom of the range that is 3.6 x 10^10 kWh per year.
The CGD number of holiday lighting, 6.63 x 10^9 kWh per year, were from 2008. Assuming that the proportion of electricity that goes to holiday lighting is about the same, that would be about 5% more now.
That puts US Bitcoin electricity use at least 5x higher than US Christmas light electricity use, and possibly up to 10x.
For the whole world, total electricity consumption is around 2.3 x 10^13 kWh per year [5].
The US is estimated to host about 1/3 of the crypto operations [4], so the global Bitcoin energy use should be about 3x that of the US or about 1.1 x 10^11 kWh per year, which is about 0.5% of world electricity use.
I haven't found anything on Christmas lights around the world. In the US, Christmas lights are around 0.2% of the total. If we assume that is the case for the rest of world that would give crypto uses 2.5 - 5x the Christmas light usage.
Also note that the Christmas light data for the US was from 2008. I'd expect Christmas lights nowadays to be much more likely to be LEDs, which would use less power.