Note: a 7-day moving average is applied to reduce the effect of short-term hashrate volatility. The model begins on July 18th 2010 due to a lack of available price data for the prior period.

Note: monthly consumption figures are the sum of daily consumption figures calculated by assuming constant power usage over 24 hours at the daily best-guess estimate of Bitcoin’s network power demand. The cumulative consumption is the sum of monthly totals since the start of the model on July 18th 2010. A separate analysis that ignores profitability considerations suggests that the cumulative consumption for the period between January 2009 and July 2010 has only amounted to 4.74 megawatt-hours (MWh), or 0.00000474 TWh – a mere rounding error. It is therefore safe to assume that the cumulative consumption figure listed above provides a robust estimate of Bitcoin’s total consumption since its inception in 2009.

Note: efficiency refers to the amount of electricity (in Joules) required to perform a given amount of computational work (one terahash) per second. Hence, the higher the value, the lower the efficiency.