According to a study, Bitcoin uses as much water as all of Britain's bathrooms.

Financial economist Alex de Vries, who runs the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, estimated that roughly 1.6 trillion litres of water each year is required to cool the computers used to support the cryptocurrency’s network.

Separate research from 2018 found that 1.6 trillion litres is how much bath water the British public sends down the plughole every year – enough to fill roughly 660,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

According to the most recent estimate, which was released on Wednesday in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, one bitcoin transaction can require as much water as a swimming pool in your backyard.

“Many parts of the world are experiencing droughts, and fresh water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource,” said Mr de Vries.

“If we continue to use this valuable resource for making useless computations, I think that reality is really painful.”

The intricate calculations needed to mint new bitcoin units and validate network transactions are referred to as "useless computations." If miners moved their operations underwater, they could drastically cut down on the amount of water needed to cool the necessary machinery. Microsoft, for example, already places some of its data centers beneath the ocean to keep them cool.

Earlier this month, China announced that it had begun building the world’s largest underwater data centre in order to reduce electricity and water costs.

Bitcoin has previously been criticised for its electricity consumption, with Mr de Vries’s Energy Consumption Index estimating that the cryptocurrency’s network uses roughly as much electricity as the country of Poland.

Bitcoin advocates have refuted accusations relating to bitcoin’s electricity consumption, claiming that miners are increasingly turning to renewable energy sources as the costs of wind and solar drop.

A recently published study suggests bitcoin mining could actually help speed up the transition to renewable energy, as solar and wind energy installations could earn hundreds of millions of dollars mining bitcoin during periods of excess electricity generation.

”These rewards can act as an incentive for miners to adopt clean energy sources, which can lead to combined positive effects on climate change mitigation, improved renewable power capacity, and additional profits during pre-commercial operation of wind and solar farms,” said Apoorv Lal, a doctoral student at Cornell University who was involved in the research.