Electricity to extract bitcoins is widely used in all countries

Extracting Bitcoin, the procedure in which a bitcoin is assigned to a PC that solves a complex set of algorithms, is a energy-intensive procedure.

Finally, on Saturday, February 27, 2021 at 08. 03 GMT

It’s not just the price of bitcoin that has soared over the next year, it’s just the huge amount of energy it consumes.

The price of cryptocurrency has recently fallen after exceeding $50,000, however, the power used to create it has continued to increase its epic increase, achieving the equivalent of Argentina’s annual carbon footprint, according to the Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index of Cambridge, a tool from the University of Cambridge. researchers who measure the energy consumption of the currency.

Recent interest from Wall Street primary establishments such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs has probably resulted in the price of the currency and Tesla’s approval by Elon Musk has helped to succeed at its recent peak, as investors bet that the cryptocurrency will be followed more widely in the near future. .

While the recent fall has broken Musk’s fortune, bitcoin also poses a risk to the company’s project towards a “future without electronic projects” and raises serious questions for governments and corporations to reduce their own carbon footprint.

Bitcoin mining, the procedure in which a bitcoin is assigned to a computer that solves a complex set of algorithms, is a energy-intensive procedure.

Bitcoin mining comes to solve complex mathematical disorders in order to create new bitcoins. Miners are rewarded with bitcoin.

Previously in the relatively short history of bitcoin, the currency was created in 2009, it is possible that bitcoin will simply be extracted from an average computer, but the way bitcoin mining was configured through its author (or its authors, no one knows for sure who created it). ) is that there is a finite number of bitcoins that can be extracted: 21 million. The more bitcoins you extract, the more complicated the algorithms you want to solve to get a bitcoin become.

Now that more than 18. 5 million bitcoins have been extracted, the average computer can no longer extract bitcoins. Instead, mining now requires special computer appliances capable of handling the intense processing force to download bitcoins today. And, of course, those special computers want a lot of electrical power to work.

The amount of electricity used to extract bitcoins “has been more than [the electricity used by] entire countries, such as Ireland,” said Benjamin Jones, professor of economics at the University of New Mexico who has studied the environmental effect. about bitcoin. ” We are talking about several terawatts, dozens of terawatts consistent with the year of electric power used only for bitcoins . . . It’s a lot of electrical energy. “

Bitcoin advocates say that mining is done with electricity generated from renewable sources, as this type of energy becomes less expensive and the energy used is much lower than other, more wasteful energy uses. the United States alone can boost bitcoin mining for 1. 8 years, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.

But environmentalists say mining remains a concern, especially as miners will go where electricity is cheaper and that may mean it uses coal. According to Cambridge, China has the maximum extraction of bitcoins from any country. renewable energy, about two-thirds of its electricity comes from coal.

Since there is no government company or organization that officially follows where bitcoin is extracted and what kind of electricity miners use, there is no way to know that miners use electricity that is powered by renewable energy or fossil fuels.

Mining platforms can move from one position to another depending on where energy is cheaper, making it difficult to track mining.

“The places where you operate [bitcoin] can move and in some cases you don’t even know where they are,” said Camilo Mora, a professor of geography and surroundings at the University of Hawaii.

The Cambridge Alternative Finance Center estimates that Bitcoin’s annualized electricity intake is soaring just above 115 terawatt hours (TWh), while Digiconomist’s high-tracked rate brings it closer to 80 TWh.

A single bitcoin transaction has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51210 hours of YouTube viewing on the site.

A 2018 article from the Oak Ridge Institute in Ohio found that for every dollar of bitcoin, 17 megajoules of strength were needed, more than double the amount of force needed to extract a dollar of copper, gold, and platinum. last year he said that the computing force needed to extract Bitcoin had quadrupled in 2019 compared to last year, and that mining had influenced costs in some application and power markets.

Bitcoin advocates have made it clear that they believe that all environmental prices related to Bitcoin extraction are valuable, the more it has an effect on this, it can have on society.

“Bitcoin couldn’t fulfill its role as a secure global price movement and a garage formula without being expensive to maintain,” says a defense opposed to Bitcoin critics of Ria Bhutoria, director of studies at Fidelity Digital Assets.

“Computers and smartphones have a much larger carbon footprint than typewriters and telegraphs. Sometimes a generation is so revolutionary and so for humanity that society accepts compromises,” investor Tyler Winklevoss wrote on Twitter.

Some have pointed out that there is no compromise between cryptocurrency and the environment. The creators of Ethereum, the most popular type of cryptocurrency at the time after bitcoin, have promised to replace the currency’s rule set to make its mining more environmentally friendly.

Vitalik Buterin, the computer scientist who invited Ethereum, told IEEE Spectrum that extracting the cryptocurrency can be “a massive waste of resources, even if there are no pollutants and carbon dioxide is a problem,” Buterin said. “There are genuine consumers — other genuine people, whose need for electricity is replaced through these things. “

Currently, Ethereum mining works in the same way as bitcoin, where the toughest computers have the merit of getting the maximum bitcoin while computers compete to make a transaction first. Ethereum developers are converting this formula for miners to enter a group and do so at random. decided to complete the transaction and get an ether in return. This method, called the “participation test”, ensures that less electrical energy will be used to exploit the currency.

But with bitcoin still reigning as the first cryptocurrency and, backed by established corporations and investment banks, the environmental effect on the currency will only grow.

As for the electrical power, “the computer doesn’t care. The computer only makes electric power work, however, the source of its electrical energy makes a big difference [for the environment],” Mora said.

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