The current price of Bitcoin sits around $6,500. It's been almost a year since the cryptocurrency flirted with the $20,000 threshold, and no one denies the crash was monumental, but mining continues without interruption. More and more voices are asking about the environmental cost of mining Bitcoin, and a recent study published in Nature puts it in perspective: Mining a dollar's worth of Bitcoin requires more energy than mining a dollar's worth of gold or platinum.
Cryptocurrency mining has ceased to be a collective game and becomes the privilege of a handful of “entrepreneurs” who now concentrate all the firepower. Even alternative coins have not escaped this, and generally their difficulty levels are beyond what the average user can solve with graphics cards. Anyone wanting to enter the particular universe of cryptocurrencies would probably be better off investing in tokens rather than hardware, but someone has to do the dirty work of mining.
The Energy Impact of Mining Bitcoin
The problem is that mining demands more and more: components, cooling, infrastructure, and above all energy. Bitcoin’s case is special not only for its popularity but because it represents more than 50 percent of everything that is “crypto” today. A recent study published by researchers at Oak Ridge Institute in Nature gives us a much more solid point of comparison when evaluating the energy impact of mining Bitcoin. The process of obtaining the equivalent of one US dollar in Bitcoin (approx. 0.00015 BTC) consumes between 17 and 19 megajoules. In contrast, mining a dollar of gold consumes an average of 5 megajoules, and platinum sits at 7 megajoules. The rest of the cryptocurrencies don’t do much better: 9 MJ per dollar of Ethereum, 15 MJ per dollar of Litecoin, and 11 MJ for a dollar of Monero.
In November of last year, it was calculated that the annual electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network was higher than that of Ireland. Another study put its carbon dioxide emissions at the same level as a million transatlantic flights. While some activities require an enormous amount of energy (aluminum needs 110 MJ/USD), the fact that a virtual currency consumes more per dollar extracted than the most coveted metal in the world sends an important message, and not necessarily a good one. We won’t deny it: we all look at Bitcoin with a bit of frustration for not having gotten on board in time. Max even shared an excellent article with his personal experience. But perhaps the monster has become too big, and the most likely thing is that it will get worse before it gets better.
