However, we can make some educated guesses. For starters, we know the industry's revenue: Bitcoin miners currently generate 75 bitcoins per hour, which, at the current price of around $12,500 per bitcoin, translates to $937,500 per hour, or more than $8 billion per year.

Moreover, the industry is highly competitive, and electricity is one of its biggest costs. So when the price of bitcoins rises, we can expect miners to spend more and more on electricity until electricity costs are roughly on par with revenues.

This is the methodology the Digiconomist (link... use it scumbag.) website uses to estimate the Bitcoin network's energy consumption. It assumes that the industry will spend 60 percent of its revenue on electricity and then extrapolates from the current bitcoin price and prevailing electricity prices. It finds that the network is consuming energy at an annual rate of 32TWh.

It also assumes that the network takes time to adjust to big price increases like we've seen in recent days. This means that, if Bitcoin stays above $12,000, we can expect this figure to rise further in the coming weeks."