Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic presents a back-of-the-envelope calculation in a textbook-style format. It estimates that cryptocurrency mining uses approximately 40 terawatt-hours of energy per year (E), that the worldwide average price per terawatt-hour is about $250,000,000 (P), and therefore the approximate cost of cryptocurrency mining per year (T = E*P) is around $10,000,000,000 (ten billion dollars). From this, the comic dryly concludes that "cryptocurrency geeks are really weird."

The bottom panel then shows a stick figure enthusiastically telling someone, "Hey! I figured out a way to reduce financial transaction costs to zero!" -- implying that crypto advocates boast about eliminating transaction fees while conveniently ignoring the staggering energy costs that underpin the entire system.

The Humor

The comedy lies in the absurd disconnect between how cryptocurrency enthusiasts frame their technology and what it actually costs. They proudly claim to have eliminated financial transaction fees, but the "fee" has simply been displaced into a massive, hidden energy expenditure amounting to billions of dollars per year. The comic uses a deliberately dry, mathematical presentation to make the point feel irrefutable, then delivers the punchline through the oblivious enthusiasm of the crypto advocate. It's a classic Weinersmith move: using real-world data to puncture a popular tech narrative with deadpan precision.

References

The energy consumption figure of approximately 40 terawatt-hours per year was a widely cited estimate for Bitcoin mining around the time this comic was published in November 2018, based on analyses from sources like the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index and Digiconomist.