The price of bitcoin has surpassed the $8,300 mark. This is roughly $200 higher than where it stood yesterday, and the currency has spiked by approximately five percent over the last 24 hours.

The prices of cryptocurrencies are exploding as the week comes to an end. Entities like Ethereum are also up, while the cryptocurrency market cap has added roughly $40 billion to its overall worth.

Interestingly, the Coindesk Consensus Conference – which took place Monday through Wednesday – ultimately failed to give bitcoin the big boost many enthusiasts were expecting. While the price of the currency is rising now, hype surrounding the event did not produce the results several were hoping for, showing that cryptocurrency remains a highly speculative market; that price boosts can occur through unexpected means, and that things remain highly unpredictable when it comes to how certain forms of crypto will behave.

One source predicted that bitcoin would sustain support at the $8,200 levels, and that further declines would stop at both $8,100 and $8,000. Thus far, this appears to be coming true. The next target in sight is $8,400 as bitcoin continues to face diminishing selling pressure. Presently, $8,300 is offering newfound resistance for bitcoin’s price, and it is hard to determine when, exactly, $8,400 could come around.

The interesting thing about bitcoin is that despite the volatile nature of the coin, it continues to remain popular amongst users, and advocates’ loyalty towards the currency has yet to falter. A new report says that bitcoin mining now uses about as much energy as the entire country of Ireland – and energy demands don’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

Ireland is a country with a healthy population – considerably larger than that of Iceland, which was the first country that outdid itself with bitcoin mining. It was reported only months ago that bitcoin mining was now using more energy in Iceland than what was necessary to power every residence within the nation’s borders. That’s a lot, to say the least…

Austria appears next in line to be outdone by bitcoin mining energy. One source explains that bitcoin mining will soon require as much electricity as the entire German-speaking nation by the end of 2018.

Between cooling fans, manufacturing hardware and growing energy costs to operate bitcoin mining rigs, the process of extracting new coins will require as many as 7.67 gigawatts of power by the time 2019 is ready to roll along. That’s roughly one two-hundredth of all the electricity used on planet Earth.

Presently, bitcoin mining requires only about 3.1 gigawatts of power. That means that by the end of 2018, this figure will have more than doubled. Cryptocurrency mining remains a popular past-time, and that popularity is likely to grow exponentially in the coming months as the final count of unmined bitcoins continues to shrink even further.

This leaves a lot of open-ended questions on the horizon, perhaps the biggest one being, “What kind of damage can bitcoin mining do to our environment?” This is an argument we’ve heard before, and will no doubt hear again as the energy required for bitcoin mining operations grows over time.