Bitcoin's enormous energy consumption could tip the world beyond safe temperature levels, and new research shows how quickly that could occur. Yarikart/Shutterstock
Crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin rely on enormous amounts of computing power, and therefore electricity. As the crytpo-boom gathered steam last year, the unsustainability of this approach was noted, with the energy used to run these computations making a significant contribution to climate change. Now scientists have calculated how long it would take before Bitcoin tips the world into a dangerous climate single-handedly, should it become the dominant form of currency transaction.The Paris agreement commits the world to maintaining temperatures at no more than 2ºC (3.6ºF) above pre-industrial levels. Even that level may be unsafe, with 1.5 ºC (2.7 ºF) a better choice, but there are very few qualified climate scientists who argue we have room to go higher.Soon Pump Out More Carbon Than Czech Republic, New Study Says
A new study estimates that the energy-hungry process of bitcoin mining in China could soon generate 130.50 million metric tons of carbon emission each year – that’s more than the annual output of the Czech Republic in 2016. As reported in the journal Nature Communications today, researchers from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences predicted that the annual energy consumption of the Bitcoin blockchain in China will peak in 2024. At this point, bitcoin mining will require around 297 terawatt-hours of energy and will pump out around 130.50 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually. This emission output beats the total greenhouse gas emission output of whole medium-sized countries, including the Czech Republic or Qatar. To wind back a little, bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that allows peer-to-peer transfers without the need of a centralized authority, such as a bank. The transactions are mediated and recorded on a digital ledger, known as the blockchain, shared by everyone participating in the system. Bitcoin mining is the process of verifying bitcoin transactions in the network and recording them in the public blockchain. To do this, a computer must solve complex math problems. As a reward for contributing their computing resources to the network, the “miner” is given freshly minted bitcoin.
These mathematical problems become increasingly harder to solve, making it increasingly more difficult to earn fresh bitcoins through mining. Early adopters of the cryptocurrency used to generate bitcoin on their home computer, but it now requires a mind-boggling amount of computational power and whole warehouses' worth of computers. This requires a colossal amount of electricity to power, while even more electricity is also used to cool down the furiously working computers. China accounts for more than 75 percent of bitcoin mining operations around the world, as per the new study. Parts of rural northern China make the ideal location to run an industrial-sized bitcoin mine thanks to the cheap land, as well as easy access to manufacturers of specialized hardware.In this new study, the researchers argue that the energy consumption of bitcoin could undermine global sustainability efforts unless stringent regulations and policy changes are introduced promptly.
As part of the research, they used modeling to see how different policy changes might shift bitcoin’s energy consumption. They found that current policies like carbon taxation are pretty ineffective at curbing emissions from the Bitcoin industry. The way forward, the study argues, is individual site regulation policies. For example, authorities could introduce strict regulation on the bitcoin industry in the coal-based energy regions, persuading miners to relocate to the hydro-rich area to take advantage of the lower cost of surplus energy availability in the area.The researchers conceded that their predictions are not foolproof, since they didn't consider potential changes of the Chinese energy sector or any "unforeseeable uncertainties... that could cause the reality to deviate from the prediction."Equally, the climate concerns of cryptocurrency are not agreed upon by everyone, with some arguing that there's increasing use of renewable energy within bitcoin networks and this is, in fact, pushing a clean energy revolution. The environmental credentials of bitcoin are an intensely debated subject, often driven by ideology and politics – and it looks like the discussion is set to reach boiling point in the next few years, as this new study clearly highlights.
Here's Just How Quickly Bitcoin Could Destroy The Planet
Bitcoin's enormous energy consumption could tip the world beyond safe temperature levels, and new research shows how quickly that could occur. Yarikart/Shutterstock
Crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin rely on enormous amounts of computing power, and therefore electricity. As the crytpo-boom gathered steam last year, the unsustainability of this approach was noted, with the energy used to run these computations making a significant contribution to climate change. Now scientists have calculated how long it would take before Bitcoin tips the world into a dangerous climate single-handedly, should it become the dominant form of currency transaction.The Paris agreement commits the world to maintaining temperatures at no more than 2ºC (3.6ºF) above pre-industrial levels. Even that level may be unsafe, with 1.5 ºC (2.7 ºF) a better choice, but there are very few qualified climate scientists who argue we have room to go higher.
After considering the gas already emitted, estimations of how much carbon dioxide we can release without crossing that threshold range from 231-745 billion tonnes, depending on various assumptions. A paper in Nature Climate Change calculates that Bitcoin alone caused the release of the equivalent of 69 million tonnes of CO2 in 2017, taking into account the spread of where the computations were done.Whether paying for porn, illegal drugs, and currency speculation is the best way to use one three-thousandth of the world's remaining carbon stocks is a political matter, not a scientific one. However, Dr Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii Manoa and co-authors demonstrate that the contribution could become much larger.
“Globally, ~314.2 billion cashless transactions are carried out every year, of which Bitcoin’s share was ~0.033% in 2017,” the paper notes. However, the people who caused the value of Bitcoin to rise in value thousands of times were doing so because they expected the currency to have a much bigger future.Mora considered the rate of adoption of 40 widespread technologies, such as credit card payments and mobile phones. If Bitcoin were to rise as fast as the median of these examples, and the energy sources remain the same, it would consume the lower estimate of the world's carbon reserves in 16 years. Even at the rate of the slower technologies, it would take 22 years before we would be in dangerous climate territory, even if not a single lump of coal was burned for any other purpose.The calculations assume that we continue powering crypto-currencies using the current mix of fuels in the countries where calculations have been run. Some bitcoin miners have tried to address the issue by powering their computers using renewable electricity. Often, however, these projects have simply diverted existing hydro energy that would otherwise have been used for a different purpose, rather than stimulating the growth of low carbon sources.In this context, the damage Bitcoin is doing to the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence looks minor, but if we can't find aliens, maybe they blockchained themselves to extinction.
