Global Bitcoin mining electricity consumption

It turns out that the number of Chinese billionaires and the electricity consumed by Bitcoin miners have been moving together like a couple who discovered they both enjoy spreadsheets and decided to never be seen apart. This is precisely the sort of correlation that makes you wonder whether the universe is playing a practical joke on statisticians, or whether statisticians are simply very good at finding jokes the universe didn't intend to tell. One suspects humanity's pattern-recognition hardware was never really meant to work this hard.

Both metrics are essentially measuring the same underlying phenomenon: the explosive growth of China's economy and its technological ambitions between 2017 and 2023. As China's wealth concentrated into billionaire fortunes, the country was simultaneously becoming the world's crypto mining epicentre, partly due to cheap electricity from state-owned plants and partly because, well, when you have several billion people and a government that doesn't mind vast industrial operations, you tend to accumulate the infrastructure for anything profitable. To put this in physical terms: the electricity consumed by Bitcoin mining in 2023 was roughly equivalent to the annual consumption of Argentina, a country of 46 million people, and it scaled up in almost perfect synchronisation with the number of ultra-wealthy individuals who could afford to invest in or operate such operations.

What we're witnessing is not causation but rather two different instruments playing the same economic melody—one in watts, one in net worth. The correlation tells us something true about how China's wealth and technological infrastructure evolved together, and almost nothing about whether owning a billion dollars makes you more interested in mining cryptocurrency. We remain, as always, enchanted by our ability to connect things that happen to move in the same direction while utterly clueless about why.