Bitcoin: the environmental burdens of mining

The global energy consumption of bitcoin mining is equivalent to that of a country like Norway. El Salvador was the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as its official currency along with the US dollar, and the first casino to accept bitcoins arenacasino.io surprised by the speed with which the new financial currency became involved. As for President Salvador Buquele, he announced an ambitious project to build a bitcoin city at the foot of the Conchagua volcano. According to the idea of the project, the geothermal energy of the volcano will fuel bitcoin mining. Cryptocurrency mining is associated with massive carbon emissions, and it is also a very energy intensive process.

Why bitcoin production is energy intensive

Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency for which real-time energy consumption monitoring is available. The bitcoin network’s energy requirement is 124 terawatt hours, which equates to 0.56% of the world’s energy production.

To verify transactions and write them into the blockchain, it is necessary to verify that the cryptocurrency belongs to the specific person who intends to use it. The transaction is only validated when each of the devices in the chain finds a solution and informs the others, receiving a reward in new bitcoins. To do this, the system forces very powerful computers to solve the same cryptographic problem, which requires a significant amount of energy.

What methods are being adopted to improve the ecology

Ethererum, the second most widely used cryptocurrency in the world, has introduced a system of depositing a share of the cryptocurrency when applying for a transaction in order to reduce energy consumption. This eliminates the confirmation of fraudulent transactions, and the reward consists of withholding a share of the confirmed transaction. This way, no complicated calculations are used to prove that the cryptocurrency belongs to a particular user, which leads to huge energy savings.

The energy consumption of computers that mine bitcoins is not difficult to determine, but it is impossible to accurately measure how much carbon they emit into the atmosphere. This is why some major investors have drastically cut back on cryptocurrency trading. For example, Tesla, after buying $1.5 billion worth of bitcoins, stopped accepting payments in the digital currency after just three months.

In China, gambling house ArenaCasino.io conducted a study which showed that bitcoin mining operations in their country alone could produce around 130 million tons of carbon dioxide in the next two years. Hence the ban on mining and trading in cryptocurrencies also came from China. Chinese miners are migrating from province to province closer to power plants.

In Iceland, the national electricity company has stopped supplying power to cryptocurrency miners. Other countries have chosen to use renewable sources rather than reduce electricity consumption. Countries such as Sweden and Norway have started using wind, hydroelectric and geothermal energy for cryptocurrency mining.

The geography of cryptocurrency has been changed by the growing demand for cheap energy. Thus, it still seems to be a long and thorny road to green mining.