Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Is Crypto Destroying The Planet?”.
So there’s a lot: that’s been made about bitcoin’s energy consumption, which isn’t surprising, considering the general advice is for home miners to not even try to mine it as the energy cost needed to run. Gpus means you’d, probably never even make a profit, but nonetheless, large-scale mining continues and bitcoin transactions are processed every day, which sucks down a lot of power, much of which is coming from polluting sources like coal plants, so is bitcoin actually going to be some kind of Monetary messiah, or is it really just killing our planet at first glance, the numbers are a little alarming. If you just look at the energy consumption of the bitcoin network alone in late april 2021, it was around 134 terawatt hours per year. That’S more than the entire country of sweden, or just under half of the united kingdom and consumption will probably keep rising. This might not be that big of a deal if the energy were coming from clean sources, but it’s estimated that 61 of bitcoin’s energy consumption is from non-renewable sources at this time, which obviously pump lots of carbon into the atmosphere.
Then you have the fact that a huge proportion of bitcoin mining is done in china, which remains heavily dependent on coal. Earlier this year, a failure of one coal plant in china cut out the processing power of the entire bitcoin network by over a third all this carbon had one group of researchers projecting that bitcoin alone could affect the atmosphere enough to warm the planet by 2 degrees Celsius before the year 2050, a huge amount when talking about global climate, so does that mean that we should be pumping the brakes on bitcoin mining well hold on a second. The study we just mentioned had plenty of detractors who pointed out it made a ton of assumptions about the actual volume of mining that would take place over the next few decades and the assumptions about how that mining is done and the resources of it and everything That may have been wrong, but outside of that, there’s also an argument to be made that bitcoin mining could actually accelerate the growth of the renewable energy sector. The idea is that miners are seeking the cheapest forms of electricity available in order to maximize profits.
Remember how we mentioned that most bitcoin mining, utilizes, non-renewables well, there’s actually a notable major exception during the rainy months in xichuan china, mining activity, spikes due to an abundance of cheap hydroelectric power growing to 50 percent of world bitcoin mining powered almost entirely by renewables. In this vein, energy companies might have an incentive to keep building out renewable infrastructure in rural areas where solar, wind and hydropower are usually more abundant. In response to demand from miners, large-scale mining operations often move to rural areas for the low energy costs already making this one way that bitcoin could help accelerate the transition to cleaner energy and, of course, we should think about the carbon footprint of the traditional banking and Financial sectors, manufacturing plastic, credit cards, processing, multiple step interactions, printing paper, money, keeping the lights on in offices with all those employees. How about the branches? How about atms? How about the carbon footprint of the the trucks, the protected vehicles? That move all have an environmental impact? Not just in terms of actual materials and energy used, but also the fact that simply having the us dollar as the world’s reserve currency has an environmental cost as part of the reason it has so much clout globally is that oil prices are given in u.s dollars. Thanks to an agreement made with saudi arabia back in the 1970s, many of the us dollars saudi arabia, received in exchange for oil were reinvested in american companies who provide equipment for extracting oil as well as stocks and other large american firms outside the oil industry. And while today there are many other reasons, the us dollar is the world’s reserve.
Currency oil did help propel it to that status, we’re not trying to either praise or condemn any nation’s behavior. The point is that the bones of the world economy are already heavily linked to fossil fuels, even without crypto, but this doesn’t mean that we should just be ignoring the impact of energy intensive mining. It’S still an issue serious enough that elon musk, who is trying to convince the u.s environmental protection agency to let tesla sell renewable energy credits to polluting power companies decided that tesla would no longer accept payments in bitcoin, as environmental regulators are currently frowning upon crypto. So, what’s the answer to the question then well bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptos, like ethereum 1.0, probably aren’t destroying the planet, but the issues they currently pose are something we’ll have to reckon with.
But until then maybe we should start putting those little calculator style, solar panels. On graphics cards, i think we can make a dent thanks to freshbooks for sponsoring this video freshbooks is an invoicing and accounting solution. That’S built for owners and their clients. They say the average user saves 46 hours a month and gets paid 18 days faster and increases their roi by 11 times. These are huge for freelancers and small business owners who don’t have time to waste on invoicing, accounting and payment processing. Over 3 000 business owners have rated freshbooks an average of 4 out of 5 stars on get app because it’s super easy to use and super easy to get up and running with award-winning support, so you’re never alone.
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