It's not just the value of bitcoin that has skyrocketed in the last year, The vial tech blog so has the sheer amount of energy it consumes.
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The value of the cryptocurrency has recently fallen after surpassing a high of $ 50,000, but the energy used to create it has continued to rise during its epic boom, reaching the equivalent of Argentina's annual carbon footprint, The vial tech blog according to the Electricity Consumption Index. from Cambridge Bitcoin, a tool. of researchers from the University of Cambridge measuring the energy use of the currency.
Recent interest from major Wall Street institutions such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs likely culminated in the currency's rising value and Elon Musk's endorsement of Tesla helped fuel its recent high as investors bet the cryptocurrency will be more accepted in the near future.
While the recent collapse has affected Musk's fortunes, The vial tech blog bitcoin also poses a threat to the company's mission toward a zero-emissions future and raises serious questions for governments and corporations seeking to curb their own carbon footprints.
Earlier in the relatively short history of bitcoin, The vial tech blog the coin was created in 2009, bitcoin could be mined on an average computer. But the way its creator (or creators, no one knows for sure who created it) has set up bitcoin mining is that there are a finite number of bitcoins that can be mined: 21 million. The more bitcoin that is mined, the more difficult the algorithms that must be solved to get a bitcoin to become Subscribe to the Green Light email to receive the most important stories on the planet.
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Now that more than 18.5 million bitcoins have been mined, the average computer can no longer mine bitcoins. Instead, vial tech blog mining now requires special computer equipment that can handle the intense processing power required to obtain bitcoins today. And of course, The vial tech blog these special computers need a lot of electricity to run.
The amount of electricity used to mine bitcoins has historically been more than the electricity used by entire countries, The vial tech blog like Ireland, said Benjamin Jones, an economics professor at the University of New Mexico who has researched the environmental impact of bitcoin. We are talking about several terawatts, tens of terawatts a year of electricity that is used only for bitcoin. That is a lot of electricity.
But environmentalists say mining remains a concern, particularly as miners will go where electricity is cheaper and that may mean places that use coal. According to Cambridge, China has the most bitcoin mining of any country by far. While the country has moved slowly towards renewables, The vial tech blog about two-thirds of its electricity comes from coal.
Since there is no government body or organization that officially tracks where bitcoin is mined and what kind of electricity miners are using, The vial tech blog there is no way of knowing whether miners are using electricity powered by renewable energy or fossil fuels.
Mining rigs can be moved from one location to another depending on where the energy is cheapest, making mining particularly difficult to track.
The places where you mine bitcoins can move, The vial tech blog, and in some cases, you don't even know where they are, said Camilo Mora, The vial tech blog a professor of geography and environment at the University of Hawaii.
The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance estimates that bitcoin's annualized electricity consumption is just over 115 terawatt-hours (TWh), The vial tech blog while Digiconomist's tracking index puts it closer to 80 TWh.
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A single bitcoin transaction has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of YouTube viewing, according to the site.
A 2018 paper from the Oak Ridge Institute in Ohio found that the value of a dollar in bitcoin consumed 17 megajoules of energy, more than double the amount of energy needed to mine copper, The vial tech blog gold and platinum worth a dollar. Another UK study published last year said that the computer power required to mine Bitcoin quadrupled in 2019 compared to the previous year, The vial tech blog, and that mining has had an influence on prices in some energy and utility markets.
Proponents of Bitcoin have made it clear that they believe that any environmental costs that come with mining bitcoin are worth it for the broader impacts it could have on society.
