Will The Environmental Issues Surrounding Crypto Stop?
Bitcoin plunged to a record low of $28,000 last week from a record high of $65,000 in April. The Cryptocurrency took a beating after China pulled the plug on Miners, significantly reducing the BTC hash rate. Many CRYPTO sceptics have since POINTed to the ever-raging questions: how much energy does it take to produce Bitcoin？ What are the environmental implications？To get more news about
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Crypto mining seems to be complicated. But it isn‘t. Mining Bitcoin requires using computers to solve complex mathematical problems. A BTC is created as a resuLT of successfully solving a complex mathematical problem. The point of Bitcoin, according to Satoshi Nakamoto’s founding white paper, was to enable instantaneous, borderless transactions without the high fees or foreign exchange barriers that exist today.
At first, average computers could solve the algorithms, but as the puzzles got harder – a consequence of greater mining – they could not keep up. Special computers with huge processing power are required and these need a LOT of electricity – around 121 terawatts annually, equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of Argentina.
Hence the attack on Bitcoin, NFTs, and other forms of crypto. How much does a monetary system hurt the environment？
Carbon Footprint
Although mining Bitcoin does not necessitate the use of pickaxes or other mining gear, this does not imply that cryptocurrency is energy efficient. In fact, the digital currency consumes a lot of energy.
Bitcoin and NFTs both produce massive amounts of carbon emissions. A single bitcoin transaction, for example, has the same carbon impact as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of YouTube bingeing. The average NFT produces roughly 200 kg of carbon, which is the equivalent of driving 500 miles in a gasoline-powered car. According to the Digiconomist website, a single Ethereum transaction consumes more than 70.32 kWh, enough to power 1 U.S. household for 2.5 days. This is equivalent to a carbon footprint of around 34 Kg of carbon dioxide (CO2).
According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden.
Between 2018 and 2019, the amount of computing power required to mine bitcoin doubled – but where does this massive amount of electricity come from？ It might be said that we are increasingly relying on renewable energy sources; according to the University of Cambridge research, 76% of miners employed renewable energy in 2020.
As the NFT gold rush surged in the first quarter of 2021, many analysts pointed to the fact that increased interest in NFTs was exacerbating the environmental implications of mining cryptocurrencies.
“With electricity consumption of cryptocurrencies being more than several countries, the rush towards NFTs has further increased this issue,” said Devesh Mamtani, an NFT expert at Century FINANCIAL in the UAE. “This is very concerning.”
Bitcoin is no different. Over the past two years, the historic rise of Bitcoin has caused emissions to increase by over 40 million tons—equivalent to 8.9 million cars added to the road, according to a Bank of America report.
