Citi Bike annual trips (NYC)

Scientists have long suspected a hidden connection between New Yorkers pedaling rented bicycles and the collective hum of server farms consuming more electricity than some medium-sized nations. With a correlation of 0.9741 across six years, the data is unambiguous: every time a Brooklynite wobbles across the Manhattan Bridge on a Citi Bike, somewhere in Kazakhstan a GPU gets a little warmer. Researchers are divided on the mechanism, but the leading hypothesis involves sweat.

Both Citi Bike trips and Bitcoin mining electricity consumption expanded dramatically during the same 2017-2022 window, driven by converging forces of urban mobility investment and cryptocurrency speculation cycles. New York City added hundreds of docking stations through planned expansions, pushing annual trips from roughly 14 million toward 30 million. Simultaneously, Bitcoin's price surges in 2017 and again in 2020-2021 triggered massive increases in mining infrastructure, with global consumption rising from under 10 TWh to estimates exceeding 100 TWh annually. Both trends reflect the same underlying dynamic: venture capital and institutional money flooding into things that feel futuristic, whether distributed ledgers or bike-share logistics.

When two things grow at the same time, the universe does not particularly care whether they know about each other. The data sees only the shape of the curve, indifferent to whether the mechanism is carbon emissions or saddle soreness.