Smoking rate among US adults

Bitcoin mining drawing more electricity each year, Americans drawing fewer cigarettes from packs each year. The negative correlation has the cleanness of a parable: one form of voluntary energy expenditure replaces another, and somewhere a Texas county hosts the substation that used to host the convenience store.

Global Bitcoin mining electricity use grew from a few terawatt-hours in 2017 to over 100 by 2022, larger than the annual consumption of many mid-sized countries, as ASIC efficiency improved more slowly than the network's hashrate. The US adult smoking rate fell from about 14 to 11 percent in the same window, the long tail of a decades-long decline driven by taxation, smoking bans, and generational shift. Two graphs answering the same question — what does a country burn — and arriving at very different answers in the same six years.

The country burns less in lungs and more in chips. The total energy is, broadly, conserved.