The Inflation Factor: How Rising Food and Energy Prices Impact the Economy
Ranked: The Most Popular Fast Food Brands in America
Ranked: America’s Best States to Do Business In
Visualizing Major Layoffs At U.S. Corporations
3 Reasons for the Fertilizer and Food Shortage
Visualized: The State of Central Bank Digital Currencies
The Evolution of Media: Visualizing a Data-Driven Future
33 Problems With Media in One Chart
The Top Downloaded Apps in 2022
Synthetic Biology: The $3.6 Trillion Science Changing Life as We Know It
Mapped: The Wealthiest Billionaire in Each U.S. State in 2022
Visualized: The State of Central Bank Digital Currencies
Mapped: The Salary You Need to Buy a Home in 50 U.S. Cities
Countries with the Highest Default Risk in 2022
What Does It Take To Be Wealthy in America?
Visualizing the Relationship Between Cancer and Lifespan
Explainer: What to Know About Monkeypox
Visualizing How COVID-19 Antiviral Pills and Vaccines Work at the Cellular Level
Mapped: The Most Common Illicit Drugs in the World
Visualizing The Most Widespread Blood Types in Every Country
The Inflation Factor: How Rising Food and Energy Prices Impact the Economy
Visualizing China’s Dominance in the Solar Panel Supply Chain
Visualizing 10 Years of Global EV Sales by Country
Which Countries Produce the Most Natural Gas?
Visualizing the World’s Largest Oil Producers
Ranked: The 20 Countries With the Fastest Declining Populations
Iconic Infographic Map Compares the World’s Mountains and Rivers
Mapped: A Decade of Population Growth and Decline in U.S. Counties
Mapped: The State of Global Democracy in 2022
Mapped: Solar and Wind Power by Country
Mapped: The 10 Largest Gold Mines in the World, by Production
The 50 Minerals Critical to U.S. Security
Visualizing China’s Dominance in Clean Energy Metals
The Periodic Table of Commodity Returns (2012-2021)
Visualizing the Abundance of Elements in the Earth’s Crust
Visualizing China’s Dominance in the Solar Panel Supply Chain
All the Contents of the Universe, in One Graphic
Explained: The Relationship Between Climate Change and Wildfires
Visualizing 10 Years of Global EV Sales by Country
Timeline: The Domestication of Animals
View a higher resolution version of this map.
View a higher resolution version of this map.
It takes an estimated 1,449 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy to mine a single bitcoin. That’s the same amount of energy an average U.S. household consumes in approximately 13 years.
Given the high amount of energy needed to mine bitcoin, it can be a costly venture to get into. But exact prices fluctuate, depending on the location and the cost of electricity in the area.
Where are the cheapest and most expensive places to mine this popular cryptocurrency? This graphic by 911 Metallurgist provides a snapshot of the estimated cost of mining bitcoin around the world, using pricing and relative costs from March 23, 2022.
Before diving in, it’s worth briefly explaining the basics of bitcoin mining, and why it requires so much energy.
When someone mines for bitcoin, what they’re really doing is adding and verifying a new transaction record to the blockchain—the decentralized bank ledger where bitcoin is traded and distributed.
To create this new record, crypto miners need to crack a complex equation that’s been generated by the blockchain system.
Potentially tens of thousands of miners are racing to crack the same code at any given time. Only the first person to solve the equation gets rewarded (unless you’re part of a mining pool, which is essentially a group of miners who agree to combine efforts to increase their chances of solving the equation).
The faster your computing power is, the better your chances are of winning, so solving the equation first requires powerful equipment that takes up a lot of energy.
Across the 198 countries included in the dataset, the average cost to mine bitcoin sat at $35,404.03, more than bitcoin’s value of $20,863.69 on July 15, 2022. Though it’s important to note that fluctuating energy prices, and more or less miners on the bitcoin network, constantly change the necessary energy and final cost.
Here’s a breakdown of what the cost to mine one bitcoin in each country was in March 23, 2022, along with the potential profit after accounting for mining costs:
Venezuela ranks as the number one most expensive country to mine bitcoin. It costs a whooping $246,530.74 to mine a single bitcoin in the South American country, meaning the process is far from profitable. Energy costs are so expensive in the country that miners would be out $225,667.05 for just one bitcoin.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the cheapest place to mine bitcoin is in Kuwait. It costs $1,393.95 to mine a single bitcoin in Kuwait, meaning miners could gain $19,469.74 in profits.
The Middle Eastern country has some of the cheapest electricity in the world, with one kWh costing an average of just 3 cents. For context, the average cost of one kWh in North America is 21 cents.
Despite the steep costs of bitcoin mining, many people believe it’s worth the upfront investment.
One thing that makes bitcoin particularly appealing is its finite supply—there are only 21 million coins available for mining, and as of this article’s publication, more than 19 million bitcoin have already been mined.
While the price of bitcoin (BTC) is notorious for its volatility, its value has still grown significantly over the last decade. And if cryptocurrencies become mainstream as many people believe they will, this could boost the price of bitcoin even further.
This article was published as a part of Visual Capitalist's Creator Program, which features data-driven visuals from some of our favorite Creators around the world.
Visualized: The State of Central Bank Digital Currencies
The Richest People in the World in 2022
How the Top Cryptocurrencies Performed in 2021
How Every Asset Class, Currency, and S&P 500 Sector Performed in 2021
Mapped: Top Trending Searches of 2021 in Every U.S. State
A Visual Guide to Profile Picture NFTs
Central bank digital currencies are coming, but progress varies greatly from country to country. View the infographic to learn more.
Central banks around the world are getting involved in digital currencies, but some are further ahead than others.
In this map, we used data from the Atlantic Council’s Currency Tracker to visualize the state of each central banks’ digital currency effort.
Digital currencies have been around since the 1980s, but didn’t become widely popular until the launch of Bitcoin in 2009. Today, there are thousands of digital currencies in existence, also referred to as “cryptocurrencies”.
A defining feature of cryptocurrencies is that they are based on a blockchain ledger. Blockchains can be either decentralized or centralized, but the most known cryptocurrencies today (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.) tend to be decentralized in nature. This makes transfers and payments very difficult to trace because there is no single entity with full control.
Government-issued digital currencies, on the other hand, will be controlled by a central bank and are likely to be easily trackable. They would have the same value as the local cash currency, but instead issued digitally with no physical form.
105 countries are currently exploring centralized digital currencies. Together, they represent 95% of global GDP. The table below lists the data used in the infographic.
When aggregated, we can see that the majority of countries are in the research stage.
We’ve also divided the map by region to make viewing easier.
A major benefit of government-issued digital currencies is that they can improve access for underbanked people.
This is not a huge issue in developed countries like the U.S., but many people in developing nations have no access to banks and other financial services (hence the term underbanked). As the number of internet users continues to climb, digital currencies represent a sound solution.
To learn more about this topic, visit this article from Global Finance, which lists the world’s most underbanked countries in 2021.
Just 9% of countries have launched a digital currency to date.
This includes Nigeria, which became the first African country to do so in October 2021. Half of the country’s 200 million population is believed to have no access to bank accounts.
Adoption of the eNaira (the digital version of the naira) has so far been relatively sluggish. The eNaira app has accumulated 700,000 downloads as of April 2022. That’s equal to 0.35% of the population, though not all of the downloads are users in Nigeria.
Conversely, 33.4 million Nigerians were reported to be trading or owning crypto assets, despite the Central Bank of Nigeria’s attempts to restrict usage.
America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, has not decided on whether it will implement a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
Our key focus is on whether and how a CBDC could improve on an already safe and efficient U.S. domestic payments system. – Federal Reserve
To learn more, check out the Federal Reserve’s January 2022 paper on the pros and cons of CBDCs.
Media and information delivery is transforming at an increasing pace. Here’s why the future will be more data-driven, transparent, and verifiable.
In today’s highly-connected and instantaneous world, we have access to a massive amount of information at our fingertips.
Historically, however, this hasn’t always been the case.
Time travel back just 20 years ago to 2002, and you’d notice the vast majority of people were still waiting on the daily paper or the evening news to help fill the information void.
In fact, for most of 2002, Google was trailing in search engine market share behind Yahoo! and MSN. Meanwhile, early social media incarnations (MySpace, Friendster, etc.) were just starting to come online, and all of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the iPhone did not yet exist.
Every so often, the dominant form of communication is upended by new technological developments and changing societal preferences.
These transitions seem to be happening faster over time, aligning with the accelerated progress of technology.
Each new wave of media comes with its own pros and cons.
For example, Connected Media was a huge step forward in that it enabled everyone to be a part of the conversation. On the other hand, algorithms and the sheer amount of content to sift through has created a lot of downsides as well. To name just a few problems with media today: filter bubbles, sensationalism, clickbait, and so on.
Before we dive into what we think is the next wave of media, let’s first break down the common attributes and problems with prior waves.
Before the first wave of media, amplifying a message took devotion and a lifetime.
Add in the fact that even by the year 1500, only 4% of global citizens lived in cities, and you can see how hard it would be to communicate effectively with the masses during this era.
Or, to paint a more vivid picture of what proto-media was like: information could only travel as fast as the speed of a horse.
In this first wave, new technological advancements enabled widescale communication for the first time in history.
Newspapers, books, magazines, radios, televisions, movies, and early websites all fit within this framework, enabling the owners of these assets to broadcast their message at scale.
With large amounts of infrastructure required to print books or broadcast television news programs, it took capital or connections to gain access. For this reason, large corporations and governments were usually the gatekeepers, and ordinary citizens had limited influence.
Importantly, these mediums only allowed one-way communication—meaning that they could broadcast a message, but the general public was restricted in how they could respond (i.e. a letter to the editor, or a phone call to a radio station).
Innovations like Web 2.0 and social media changed the game.
Starting in the mid-2000s, barriers to entry began to drop, and it eventually became free and easy for anyone to broadcast their opinion online. As the internet exploded with content, sorting through it became the number one problem to solve.
For better or worse, algorithms began to feed people what they loved, so they could consume even more. The ripple effect of this was that everyone competing for eyeballs suddenly found themselves optimizing content to try and “win” the algorithm game to get virality.
Viral content is often engaging and interesting, but it comes with tradeoffs. Content can be made artificially engaging by sensationalizing, using clickbait, or playing loose with the facts. It can be ultra-targeted to resonate emotionally within one particular filter bubble. It can be designed to enrage a certain group, and mobilize them towards action—even if it is extreme.
Despite the many benefits of Connected Media, we are seeing more polarization than ever before in society. Groups of people can’t relate to each other or discuss issues, because they can’t even agree on basic facts.
Perhaps most frustrating of all? Many people don’t know they are deep within their own bubble in which they are only fed information they agree with. They are unaware that other legitimate points of view exist. Everything is black and white, and grey thinking is rarer and rarer.
Between 2015 and 2025, the amount of data captured, created, and replicated globally will increase by 1,600%.
For the first time ever, a significant quantity of data is becoming “open source” and available to anyone. There have been massive advancements in how to store and verify data, and even the ownership of information can now be tracked on the blockchain. Both media and the population are becoming more data literate, and they are also becoming aware of the societal drawbacks stemming from Connected Media.
As this new wave emerges, it’s worth examining some of its attributes and connecting concepts in more detail:
The Data Media ecosystem is just beginning to emerge, but here are some early pioneers we like:
Growth in data journalism and the emergence of these pioneers helps give you a sense of the beginnings of Data Media, but we believe they are only scratching the surface of what is possible.
In a sense, it’s easier to define what Data Media isn’t.
Data Media is not partisan pundits arguing over each other on a newscast, and it’s not fake news, misinformation, or clickbait that is engineered to drive easy clicks. Data media is not an echo chamber that only reinforces existing biases. Because data is also less subjective, it’s less likely to be censored in the way we see today.
Data is not perfect, but it can help change the conversations we are having as a society to be more constructive and inclusive. We hope you agree!
Mapped: The Wealthiest Billionaire in Each U.S. State in 2022
Ranked: Top 10 Countries by Military Spending
Ranked: The Most and Least Livable Cities in 2022
Brand Loyalty is Declining for Most Luxury Automakers
Sharpen Your Thinking with These 10 Powerful Cognitive Razors
Ranked: The Top 25 Islands to Visit in 2022
Visualizing Major Layoffs At U.S. Corporations
Visualized: The Value of U.S. Imports of Goods by State