EDINBURGH — Bitcoin’s popularity has a downside: It’s an energy glutton that could hurt Earth’s climate, a study has found. The new research, publicised by The Washington Post, finds that bitcoin’s greenhouse gas emissions are already comparable to those of a midsize country. But critics aren’t so sure. The Washington post interviews cryptocurrency experts on the likelihood that bitcoin-mining is really a major contributor to the pollution that is eroding the ozone layer and shrouding the earth in an unhealthy haze. – Jackie Cameron
By Thulasizwe Sithole
Bitcoin may already be driving greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those of a midsize country, and a study released Monday said the cryptocurrency could catapult the planet to dangerous levels of warming if it continues its rapid growth. This is according to The Washington Post, which highlights criticism that the research might not be credible.
At least one critic cautioned that the new research “makes much too coarse and even wrong assumptions” — demonstrating that even as the cryptocurrency, worth about $6,400 per coin, grows in visibility, estimating precisely how it is affecting the environment remains hotly debated, says the US media organisation.
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Nevertheless, say its writers Chris Mooney and Steven Mufson, there’s no doubt bitcoin is notorious for its high energy use — the consequence of miners having to compute highly difficult problems to make a “blockchain” of transactions and win new bitcoin. This, in turn, requires high-powered, energy-hungry equipment.
“These miners are well known for flocking to places with cheap electricity so that they can get a better return on mining. Sometimes, that means setting up near hydroelectric dams, in which case mining would not produce any greenhouse gas emissions. But in other cases, miners tap into electricity grids powered largely by coal plants,” explain the journalists.
“Because bitcoin is a currency not maintained by banks but by a network of individuals, it relies on a technology called blockchain that is decentralised and depends on a vast number of users, called miners, to compute a record of transactions. The computer users who do the laborious calculations are paid in bitcoin, which encourages yet more computing. No single entity manages the entire system, which eats tremendous amounts of energy from computers constantly solving problems to build the blockchain.”
The problem, says The Washington Post, is that as the price of bitcoin rises, there is more incentive to mine — after all, there’s a better chance of making a good return. But the way bitcoin is set up, when this happens, the problems that must be solved also become more computationally difficult, requiring still more machinery and, thus, more energy use.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, seeks both to compute the current energy use of bitcoin mining and what it could be in the future if the technology continues to grow. And it finds not only country-size present-day emissions but also potentially planet-size affects from further growth, notes The Washington Post.
“That to me was the mind-blowing thing about this,” Camilo Mora, a researcher at the University of Hawaii who published the work with his students, is quoted as saying.
“Mora computed present-day greenhouse gas emissions tied to bitcoin by analysing the energy efficiency of the hardware that mining uses and the countries in which the mining groups are based — mostly China, but also the United States and several other nations.
“The result of the calculation was that bitcoin, today, probably releases about 69 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions — comparable with the emissions of a country like Austria, which has a population of nearly 9 million people,” says The Washington Post.
Experts question whether the estimated amount of CO2 produced by bitcoin mining is right, though there seems to be general agreement that bitcoin uses a lot of energy.
