> Creating Bitcoins is a side effect of processing transactions. I don't think that's a particularly useful characterisation of the situation. It makes it seem

> Creating Bitcoins is a side effect of processing transactions. I don't think that's a particularly useful characterisation of the situation. It makes it seem like some kind of "processing" on the transactions is where the real computationally expensive work occurs, with a side-effect of creating bitcoins. In reality, mining is pure mathematical busywork. A miner spends time trying to find a valid block (a valid hash with enough zeros at the start, as determined by the current difficulty level). This is a mathematical task unrelated to any "processing" of transactions, and is independent of the number of transactions or their complexity. While the miner is performing this busywork (trying hash after hash waiting for a valid one to come up) a number of transactions are occurring and are flying around the network. The miner is noticing these and caching them up. Eventually, if the miner should "find" a valid block, he publishes it to the network, and crams into it all his cached up transactions. So creating bitcoins isn't really a side-effect of processing transactions, per se. Rather, both the approval of transactions and the creation of bitcoins are side-effects of running a mathematical algorithm (mining). As such I probably wouldn't usually describe transactions as being "processed" at all (which would tend to imply computation related to the transactions themselves), but that they get "included" into a mined block. >I don't know how many transactions are currently processed when one Bitcoin is generated https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block That graph shows the number of transactions per block over time. You could then divide by the block reward to find transactions-mined-per-bitcoin-generated figure. >Power consumption per transaction will probably always stay pretty low. Because one way or another the users of Bitcoin have to pay for them. And they won't use it, if it is expensive. Well the mining "difficulty" level (which essentially dictates how much power is needed on average to find a block) is controlled by rules programmed into the bitcoin system, in such a way that the higher the total mining power contributing to the network, the higher the difficulty (adjusted every 2016 blocks, so that the entire mining network on average discovers a block every 10 minutes). Here is a graph of how difficulty has evolved over time, as the aggregate mining power has ebbed and flowed https://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty https://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty