The Climate Change Attack Upon Bitcoin By James Reed
Bitcoin, one of the main cryptocurrencies, is totally decentralised, and thus a major threat to the establishment financial system. It enables people to do pretty much an off-system mode of financial living. This has caused the elites heart burn, but now they are fighting back, big time, with things in their handy dandy toolkit, such as climate change. Of course, Bill Gates is there to throw his hat into the ring.
“Powerful computers 'mining' for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin are driving global warming as data shows they use vastly more electricity than all the internet tech giants combined.
Bitcoin passed the $60,000 mark for the first time on Saturday, but its rocketing value again raises questions over the vast energy resources required to run machines that mine for the cryptocurrency, that some - including billionaire Warren Buffet - even consider to be worthless.
On March 2, Bitcoin's estimated energy consumption reached its highest ever rate, hitting a staggering 130.90 terawatt hours (TWh) annualised. The following week on March 9, billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates highlighted the negative impact mining Bitcoin has on the environment.
'Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind,' Gates said, speaking to the The New York Times. 'It's not a great climate thing', he added.
The cryptocurrency is 'mined' by high-powered computers that continuously solve computational maths puzzles, the complexity of which means the processors require huge amounts of energy. While the machines use electricity, fossil fuel is a major category in electricity generation.
In a post on Medium, computational artist Memo Atken explained that 'endless arrays of computers are sitting around in giant data-centre like mining farms around the world, doing nothing but generating random numbers all day every day, in the hopes of rewarding their owners.'
Despite the amount of time, effort and energy resources that goes into mining Bitcoin, some remain sceptical of its value, with Warren Buffet in 2020 blasting the currency, calling it 'rat poison squared'.
'Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don't produce anything. They don't reproduce, they can't mail you a check, they can't do anything, and what you hope is that somebody else comes along and pays you more money for them later on, but then that person's got the problem. In terms of value: zero,' he said in February last year, according to CNBC.
As Bitcoin's value has increased, so has its demand, with more people setting up Bitcoin miners in the hope that they will strike gold with the digital currency, potentially making thousands of pounds.
However, studies have shown that the annual carbon emissions from the electricity generated to mine and process the cryptocurrency is equal to the amount emitted by whole countries, including New Zealand and Argentina, with the upper-bound estimate being higher than that of even the UK.
Bitcoin mining's energy consumption also eclipses that of the world's major tech companies that provide entertainment services, including the streaming giant Netflix as well as Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google combined - all of which also require huge amounts of energy to run their services.
By comparison, Google - the largest energy consumer of the tech giants - used 10 TWh in 2019. On March 13, Bitcoin was using 130.9 TWh (annualised). The UK's electricity consumption is slightly more than 300 TWh a year.
Alex de Vries, founder of the Digiconomist blog, pointed out that Bitcoin's power consumption is closely linked to price, with both increasing in the first months of 2021.
'The record-breaking surge in Bitcoin price at the start of 2021 could result in the network consuming as much energy as all data centres globally, with an associated carbon footprint matching London's', he wrote.
Data from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) shows that the energy consumed by Bitcoin increased to its highest ever levels towards the end of last year, with the rates continuing to rise into 2021.”
This is a big problem for Bitcoin, but other forms of cryptocurrency do not involve mining algorithms, or doing complex mathematical tricks and cartwheels. The energy use problem must be addressed, and Bitcoin will probably go down on this ground. I am not an expert, in fact am pretty ignorant as far as this goes, But, perhaps Ethereum can escape this problem, but if not, I am sure that the climate change problem has a tech fix.
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