Bitcoin Users Are Hurting the Environment More Than Every Donald Trump Supporter Driving a Giant SUV

You think I'm exaggerating but turns out I'm probably not, as Vice reports:

That problem is carbon emissions. De Vries has come up with some estimates by diving into data made available on a coal-powered Bitcoin mine in Mongolia. He concluded that this single mine is responsible for 8,000 to 13,000 kg CO2 emissions per Bitcoin it mines, and 24,000 - 40,000 kg of CO2 per hour.

As Twitter user Matthias Bartosik noted in some similar estimates, the average European car emits 0.1181 kg of CO2 per kilometer driven. So for every hour the Mongolian Bitcoin mine operates, it's responsible for (at least) the CO2 equivalent of over 203,000 car kilometers travelled.  

...Since the average American household consumes 901 KWh per month, each Bitcoin transfer represents enough energy to run a comfortable house, and everything in it, for nearly a week. On a larger scale, De Vries' index shows that bitcoin miners worldwide could be using enough electricity to at any given time to power about 2.26 million American homes.

For the planet's sake, it's a good thing that Bitcoin usage in absolute terms is tiny and not growing, but that hasn't stopped the fervent Bitcoin mining and transactions among Bitcoin users who are hoping their numbers grow so they can cash out during the currency's artificially inflated bidding price. Another problem, as Vice's Christopher Malmo notes, is that high energy consumption is intrinsic to Bitcoin:

As goes the Bitcoin price, so goes its electricity consumption, and therefore its overall carbon emissions. I asked de Vries whether it was possible for Bitcoin to scale its way out of this problem. "Blockchain is inefficient tech by design, as we create trust by building a system based on distrust. If you only trust yourself and a set of rules (the software), then you have to validate everything that happens against these rules yourself. That is the life of a blockchain node," he said via direct message.

So if Bitcoin evangelists get their wish, and it really does become the currency for the world's economy, more and more of the world's energy resources will be devoted to "mining" for virtual currency while the skies above us still darken and the seas continue rising ever faster around our feet.

Comments

[Joey1058]

Good thing the US has been mandated to switch to low power LEDs and fluorescent coils. We'd really be screwed and vilified as power mongers! (SMH)

[Elon Musk]

The problem is how the energy is created.

[Mac]

Mongolian coal burning plants are notoriously dirty, especially compared to the types in use in the first world. I would be amazed if there were more than three people in all of Mongolia actively mining Bitcoin.

[Patchouli Woollahra]

Another issue is how Bitcoin mining drives up the prices of non-premium GPUs. There is a premium added to the RRP that NVidia and AMD have long listed for most of their cards as cryptominers buy these things up for the sole purpose of producing basically NOTHING. The only reason it doesn't affect their top-line offerings as much is because those things have already been priced very uneconomically ITFP.

This is one of the things that is delaying a future where a 3d card in a non slim or small-factor computer is a given.

[Richard]

There is a solar powered bitcoin mining company. www.c0in.us