![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmWwG5XKryGAVWieGeqh2YTiN4qYeL3RAnHFZJC9XweCDh/image.png)
How did bitcoin go today? Has he gone up? It fell apart? 2018 will be the year of truth for this Internet currency created in 2009 in a way that is still mysterious but that had its booming in 2017 when at one point for a bitcoin they needed 19 thousand dollars.
But beyond the real value and the speculation, the side that still eludes many is the energy profile of bitcoin (and of all other virtual coins created with Blockchain technology). To the extent that  the net circulating alarmist articles  claiming that the production of  bitcoin  consumes more energy than 159 countries, that a single transaction in  bitcoin  is equivalent to the energy consumption of a house for a week, and that if we go on like the  bitcoin  will consume all the world energy in 2020.

These are probably exaggerations that carry traffic to the websites that host them but that allow us to reflect on what is really behind a  bitcoin , as they are produced since there is no central bank. The  bitcoins  are produced, or extracted, from a computer solves a mathematical problem very complex. So complex that if you wanted to try it with your home computer, it would take 1367 years.

This explains why  bitcoins  consume energy. Because behind the  bitcoins  there are some factories that, like the mint of old, produce them: only once the coin was printed, now the mint is made by  server  farms , by huge expanses of computers working on the net. 

How much energy does it take for a  bitcoin ?  An estimate that circulates in the network speaks of a value that is between 100  megawatts  and 3.4  gigawatts , but it is a range so wide that everything is inside. It is like saying about a person aged between 15 and 65. In reality, the calculation is really complicated. Because the same mathematical problem try to solve it in many, there are bitcoin factories   in Russia, China, Mongolia, Bulgaria, and only those who manage to pocket the 25  bitcoins  of reward, all the others have wasted energy. For this reason one of the questions of 2018 will be: do bitcoins really   risk depleting the planet's energy?