Buying or selling bitcoin uses 16,000 litres of clean water for every single transaction, which could exacerbate existing droughts around the world.
The majority of the water consumption comes from electricity production, such as in coal and gas plants, or throughput in hydroelectric power stations, says de Vries. He used data on the electricity mix at locations where bitcoin mining occurs to calculate the totals, but also factored in that water is also used directly in data centres to cool the powerful hardware used by miners.
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-sustainability/fulltext/S2949-7906(23)00004-6
Found here: https://blog.dshr.org/2023/12/why-worry-about-resources.html