How cryptocurrency mining is destroying the environment

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Bitcoins don't actually appear out of thin air.

A new interesting thread has appeared on Twitter. In it, programmer Stephen Deal talks about the unexpected side of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for many: their impact on the environment.

Let's discuss the environmental cost of bitcoin. Because despite all the push for sustainable and green investment in the tech sector, there's a giant smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Silicon Valley which a lot of investors would prefer you remain quiet about. ? (1/)

That alone is sufficiently awful on its own merits, but on top of this the environmental damages of bitcoin are enough to make even Greta Thunberg weep at the pointless waste of it all. (3 /)

The underlying technology of bitcoin is based on the notion of "mining", a technical term for a process that keeps the network running and processing transactions. (4/)

I won't cover the details of the algorithm, suffice it to say the premise of bitcoin mining is to prove how much power you can waste, and the more power you can waste, the more tokens you can probabilistically secure in exchange for your energy waste. (5/)

And so people have set up entire warehouses of computer hardware dedicated to run 24/7 consuming power and performing the trial computations required by the protocol. Globally this consumes * nation state * levels of energy to keep it all running. (6 /)

Bitcoin mining is essentially a fucked up version of Candy Crush where you solve puzzles for coins, except the coins go to buy darknet fentanyl, launder money for warlords and provide gambling for hedge fund managers. (7 /)

And the scale of this waste has some scary numbers attached to it. A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment. (eight/)

The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several * million * US households.

Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste. It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost. (ten/)

In addition to the energy waste and CO2 emitted, the mining process itself requires constant replacement of hardware and produces a steady stream of waste from broken and exhausted computer parts. All of which are full of toxins and rare earth metals. (eleven/)

The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482, 456 people living at the German standard. (12/)

Try to imagine a future where paying for your morning coffee involved smashing an iPhone and burning enough fossil fuels to run your entire household for 60 days. That's the environmental cost of the "revolutionary" technology behind #Bitcoin in a nutshell. (13/)

Climate change is not some abstract threat happening elsewhere, it is very real, and is happening everywhere we chose to invest in unsustainable and wasteful technology.

The absurd waste of bitcoin is a simultaneously both an environmental and a moral disaster. (15/)

Stephen, this is really bad, how can I help change this?

* Don’t buy bitcoins.

* Tell friends not to buy bitcoins.

* Consider ethics of holding dirty companies ($ MSTR, $ SI, $ SQ, $ PYPL, Coinbase) in your portfolio.

*… And products (funds, ETFs, etc) with crypto exposure.

/ fin

• Don't buy bitcoins.
• Advise your friends not to buy bitcoins.
• Consider how ethical it is to keep dirty stocks in your portfolio.
• … and products like foundations that include cryptocurrencies.