Bitcoin mining “poses a growing threat to the environment”

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Bitcoin mining generates substantial electronic waste which “represents a growing threat to the environment”, according to a recent study. A co-author of the report told AFP last week that the average lifecycle of the powerful computers used to dig up units of the world’s first cryptocurrency was only 1.3 years.

Alex de Vries noted that it was “extremely short compared to any” other electronic device such as iPhones. At 30,700 tonnes, the amount of e-waste generated from bitcoin mining in the 12 months to May was “comparable to the amount of small waste IT and telecommunications equipment produced by a country like the Netherlands.” , according to the report.

The race for new bitcoins – on Friday, September 17, a bitcoin was worth over US $ 47,000 after soaring this year – means the processing power of mining computers is soon becoming obsolete.

Bitcoinmining refers to the production of the digital coin by solving complex algorithms with specialized computers. Miners process and confirm bitcoin transactions for entry into the shared public ledger of digital currencies, a trustless verification and storage network known as the blockchain.

Miners also ensure network security. New coins are assigned to miners who do the calculations first along with transaction fees for their services. Many businesses and individuals may not realize that there is a lot of money to be made with bitcoin and other crypto mining activities, it can be a big business. Some reports suggest that mining profits reached US $ 4 billion between 2017 and 2018.

According to a report from HP, there are some fundamental risks associated with the practice known as crypto-jacking. On the one hand, it forces victims to waste energy […] the electricity consumed for a single bitcoin transaction could power 15 American homes for a day. If you multiply that by the number of machines in a business or data center, you can start to get a feel for how much power is being used and how much it could cost an electric-only business.

The computational power required to mine bitcoin, with a large number of linked computing units requiring massive amounts of energy to generate a coin or digital fund, and the power required can often come at an environmental cost.

We now have a whole new industry that uses more energy per year than many countries, said Max Krause, a researcher at the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education and lead author of a study called Quantification of energy and carbon cost. for mining cryptocurrencies. , published in the journal Nature Sustainability 2018.

And the more bitcoin is worth, the greater the amount of electronic waste, according to the study published by the scientific journal Elsevier. Alex de Vries works as an economist at the Dutch central bank, while the report’s co-author, Christian Stoll, is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Despite the high amount of waste, only a fraction of the world’s total electronic devices discarded, which stood at 53.6 million tonnes last year, remains.

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