> Can you please elaborate on that? If that's the case then I've to read a bit more on the subject as I thought every cryptocurrency required powerful hardware

> Can you please elaborate on that? If that's the case then I've to read a bit more on the subject as I thought every cryptocurrency required powerful hardware (GPUs or ASICs) under intensive load, which of course translates in huge power demands. Definitely not the case. That's the case for Proof of Work cryptocurrencies, but the vast majority of cryptocurrencies now are not Proof of Work but Proof of Stake. The only real stragglers are Bitcoin and Ethereum. With Proof of Work, the chain's energy usage has nothing to do with load. It's literally because they couldn't figure out how to get the chain to work properly without making people burn large amounts of energy as a byproduct. Even when the chain is empty and nobody is sending transactions, that energy still needs to be constantly burned to maintain a Proof of Work cryptocurrency. Proof of Stake research (an alternative consensus mechanism that doesn't require this energy burn) wouldn't be complete and ready for production systems until many years later. > The graph showing an almost 3x factor increase in power consumption in just one year looks worrying to me, however if you say there are other environment friendly means, that makes the matter interesting. That's a graph of Bitcoin, the only top crypto that uses Proof of Work with no plans to transition away from it. So I think environmentalists should be focused on Bitcoin, not cryptocurrency in general.