[Flashpoint]

Found this to be interesting regarding how Bitcoin is "mined".

So that’s where the egalitarian thing breaks down. In the beginning, cryptocurrency enthusiasts could run mining software on their home computers. That evolved. First people realized that graphics processing units were better at those hash computations than plain old CPUs. They used more power and required more elaborate cooling, but still. And then people started customizing Field Programmable Gate Array chips, bought off the shelf and then customized for mining. These days, the preferred hardware is Application-Specific Integrated Circuits, made to order in Bitcoin-specific configurations and installed in specialized data centers.

Not only does that centralize bitcoin mining, but it also screws up energy usage. The most advanced bitcoin miners now expend 0.3 watts per billion hash calculations, or “gigahashes.” Flip that math around and you get 300 Gh per second per kilowatt. So the sketch is basically 13,600 petahashes per second with 234 kWh consumed by every transaction, giving you 32.71 terawatt-hours consumed by the Bitcoin network—or 0.15 percent of the total world consumption of electricity.

https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-global-warming/