It creates as much CO2 as a million transatlantic flights. Why isn’t this a bigger deal?
Here on TreeHugger, we have spent a decade telling people to buy efficient light bulbs. Meanwhile, people who mine bitcoins are using more electricity than all of New Zealand, perhaps 42TWh in a year. It’s a feature, not a bug; as Alex Hern of the Guardian wrote,
Lately, those bitcoin miners have been chasing cheap and dependable electricity around the world, with Iceland being the hot cool spot, thanks to lots of real geothermal and hydro-electric power and only 340,000 people to use it. The Wall Street Journal’s Zeke Turner writes a long article
Tourists in Iceland /CC BY 2.0
But there are problems; environmentalists are complaining that all these power plants might muck up the biggest industry in Iceland: Tourism.
Other more successful politicians have complaints too.
But buried in the second-last paragraph of this entire article is the key point:
As always, I recommend that you never read the comments on the Wall Street Journal, which in this case are entirely an attack on environmentalists for complaining about green power. I think this was a setup by the author, given the quotes from „a poet, activist and third-place finisher”. But at least one reader got to the end of the article and noted:
That was the banking crisis. Before that, there was a fishing crisis.
Digiconomist/Screen capture
But surely, if 90 percent of your output is going to bitcoin, all your eggs are again in one basket. Environmentalists everywhere should be getting loud about the issue of cryptocurrencies; right now, according to the Digiconomist, making them is creating 30,162 kilotons of CO2 per year, and using enough electricity to power 5,699,560 American households.
Why isn’t this a bigger issue?
