Bitcoin Mining’s Vast Energy Use Slips Under the Radar
Environmental impact is enormous
By: Tim Daiss
Bitcoin “mining,” the little-understood process of creating new digital coins by solving extremely complicated math problems that verify cryptocurrency transactions, has become so astonishingly energy-intensive that their vast energy farms are beginning to generate significant environmental problems, according to critical reports published recently. For example, the annual consumption of electricity to mine Bitcoins, the first decentralized cryptocurrency and one of the most sought-after in the US alone, is enough to charge every electric vehicle in the country 22 times, according to a report by the trading and information platform BestBrokers. It’s enough to charge 11.2 billion iPhones every day for a year. It’s also enough to power more than five million US households for over a year, or power Google for nearly two-and-a-half years.
Worse yet, an October 24, 2023, United Nations report “Bitcoin: Carbon is Not the Only Harmful By-product” found that carbon from mining Bitcoin has created even more environmental problems. The report likens the surge in the crypto market to the gold rush in the US in the mid-19th century. It adds “…this exciting market has a hidden dark side. Mining cryptocurrencies can have major environmental impacts on climate, water, and land. The GHG emissions of cryptocurrency mining alone could be sufficient to push global warming beyond the Paris Agreement's goal of holding anthropogenic climate warming below 2˚ Celsius.”
Following the recent halving of the block reward for miners from 6.25 to 3.125 Bitcoins, the electricity required to produce just one Bitcoin doubled to a staggering 854,403.71 kilowatt hours. That is only one cybercurrency, and their popularity, despite a long list of spectacular scandals that have wiped billions of dollars off the books of gullible bitcoin speculators, is on the rise…