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Disclaimer

I am not a financial advisor

This is meant to be educational and informative only

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I have been hearing a lot about the cost of bitcoin both energy and materials. This got me wondering what the monetary and energy costs were for making fiat currency. I did some digging and found that there seems to be no clear 1 to 1 when comparing the two. I am not a mathematical wizard, so trying to make all this into some sense is beyond me but I will share what I have found. 

I first started to look into the cost of making fiat currencies. For the USD the budget for making money is $1,095 billion, where in 2020 it was $877 billion. USD is made out of a combination of cotton and linen which takes up land, uses water, pesticides, fertilizer and energy. Creating fiat currency takes roughly 3540 tons of ink, 7,100 tons of cotton and 2,300 tons of linen.  It takes approximately 1.4 billon liters of water per year to make the paper and 0.35 billion liters per year to print. The process of money making creates approximately 6 million pounds of waste ink and pulp and 3.2 million tons of CO2. This process also consumes approx. 97,850 MW/h of energy for printing and again for making the pulp. 

Coins take about 39.6 million GJ of energy to make and produces approximately 6.7 million tons of CO2.

When I was trying to look up information on specifics of bitcoin mining costs it seemed a lot less direct (not that the fiat currency information was all super direct.) For Bitcoin takes around 135.12 TW/h per year to mine and creates about 64.18 Mt of CO2 and 5.88 kt of electronic waste. It costs around $7k to $11k to mine 1 BTC. Now 1 BTC is worth much more than 1 USD or one of any fiat denomination. 

Push comes to shove it almost seems to me like bitcoin is not as bad when compared to currency for production especially if the material waste is being recycled and if miners are using more and more renewable energy. 

I also have listed below for random information the black market usage 

With this information I just wanted to add that it is much easier to track bitcoin transactions than cash so it seems that it would be much less likely for bitcoin to be used for illicit transactions. The blockchain ledger is open for anyone to see. There are also programs that keep getting improved on to track transactions of bitcoin. Also, making counterfeit fiat currency happens all the time where as, as far as I know, I'm almost positive that it is impossible, or very nearly so, to counterfeit bitcoin as well as most other trusted altcoins. 

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have a great day.