Just one Bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of electricity as a British household for nearly two months, new figures have shown. 

The amount of energy needed to run the cryptocurrency has soared to record annual highs of terawatt hours the same as the entire electrical consumption of Chile.

The carbon footprint of a single transaction is the same as , Visa transactions or spending 52, hours watching YouTube, according to calculations by Alex de Vries, a blockchain specialist, at PWC.

“People react with disbelief, but the figures are true,” said Mr de Vries who founded the Digiconomist blog to highlight the impact.

The huge energy footprint of the currency was noted several years ago, but when the Bitcoin bubble burst in , sending prices tumbling  from a high of almost $20, (£15,) at the end of to below $4, (£3,), consumption also crashed and has only recently started soaring again.

The problem lies in the practice of Bitcoin ‘mining’. Crypto-currencies work through blockchain, a technology that creates a communal ledger of transactions that is held by everyone, rather being kept in a centralised database, such as a bank server.

A blockchain ledger cannot be altered without everyone knowing, so it prevents fraud, but to keep it accurate, and to make sure the virtual currency is only spent once, users can offer to verify the transactions, for which they are paid in Bitcoin, a process called ‘mining’. 

Available revenue for verification currently stands around £ billion a year making it a lucrative industry. But the ‘mining’ process is incredibly energy-intensive, involving huge rigs of custom-built computers which endlessly calculate numbers in the hope of finding a specific one that allows it to confirm the deals, and create a new ‘block’ in the blockchain. 

There are around four million computer rigs worldwide constantly crunching numbers, yet astonishingly 98 per cent of them will never get the number first, and so will never verify the transactions, despite the huge electricity outlay.

Mr de Vries added: “They are sort of participating in a massive lottery and every 10 minutes one gets lucky and gets to produce the next block.

“The shocking thing is the average lifetime of a bitcoin mining machine is one and a half years, because we have a new generation of machines which are better at doing these calculations. 

“That means it’s impossible for 98 per cent of the devices during their lifetime to make the calculation that actually results in a reward. So the rest are just running pointlessly for a few years, using up energy, and producing heat, and then they will just get trashed because they can’t be repurposed. It's insane."

Each Bitcoin transaction uses around kWh of electricity, the equivalent of 59 days of electricity for an average British household.

The massive computer rigs are also creating a mountain of e-waste, most of which ends up in landfill because it is so tricky to recycle. Calculations show that annually the Bitcoin mining produces kilotons of e-waste, the same amount as produced by the country of Luxembourg.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain companies say that many people trading with Bitcoin are aware of the problem and are taking steps to offset the carbon footprint of their transactions. 

The company Mattereum is establishing a blockchain to record the provenance of items, such as fine wines, memorabilia or carbon offsetting certificates, so that its authenticity cannot be questioned. They believe that such an approach is environmentally friendly and can help tackle climate change by reducing waste.

Anton Shelupanov, Managing Director at Mattereum,  said: “Technology is improving too with new protocols which are much faster and more energy efficient than first generation blockchains. 

“There are also new ideas: for example transporting mining equipment between cold locations where it's winter so that it can be used for heating dwellings. 

“Miners should be using electricity from companies which guarantee that it comes from renewables.”

However charities have warned that many companies set up in countries where coal-fired power is cheap, rather than sourcing their electricity from renewables. 

Andrew Hatton, Chief Technical Officer, at Greenpeace, said: “Bitcoin’s profligate wasting of energy is made into an even more serious problem by many bitcoin ‘mining’ facilities being located in regions with a lot of coal-fired power. 

“This is not just a problem with blockchain technologies but also a wider challenge for the future of the internet as it grows and becomes more complex. 

“It’s vital that the emissions savings the internet can facilitate in areas like transport aren’t frittered away by powering the information economy with Victorian fuels.”