La pollution du Bitcoin

Bitcoin

Today I’m going to talk about bitcoin related pollution. On one hand I’m going to explain what is bitcoin and how it works, then on the other hand I will address the environmental consequences of bitcoin and its alternatives.

Bitcoin was created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s a crypto currency, which means that we can’t hold it in our hand, it’s a digital currency. It is a completely decentralized virtual currency, therefore it’s independent and it does not relies on any central entity such as the government or banks. Indeed they can’t see our transactions and they have no control over them so it’s a good way to buy things online anonymously. But bitcoin is very volatile and its value always fluctuates. We can get bitcoins by mining them, which means that we can use our computers to solve complex math problems. Currently, a winner is rewarded with 12 bitcoins roughly every 10 minutes. All the transactions ever made are stocked in the blockchain. Since the growing popularity and the soaring of its value, more and more people are interested in bitcoin. A lot of people just buy bitcoins as an investment, hoping that they’ll go up in value, but this phenomenon takes a lot of resources.

Each day, new miners join the blockchain, which increases the electricity consumption but also the carbon footprint resulting from each transaction. The discovery of new bitcoins is increasingly difficult and requires increasingly more powerful computer resources. Ten years ago, to mine bitcoins, you only had to have a personal computer at home. Over time, due to the diminishing returns of mining, miners turned to faster graphics cards. It’s estimated that bitcoin transactions are responsible for 0,14% of global pollution. It doesn’t sound like it’s a lot but behind that little figure there is a huge energy-consuming system. The annual electricity consumption of Bitcoin mining is estimated at 58.93 terawatt, which is as much energy consumed as a country like Switzerland. It has already exceeded 136 countries in terms of consumption, including Iceland and Denmark. There are about 300,000 transactions a day. To put it in perspective, each transaction could supply electricity to 25 French households for a whole day.

Moreover, the bitcoin network alone would consume 100 times the power used by all of Google’s servers (which has about 1.5 billion users) versus 1.5 million for bitcoin.

However, there are various alternatives to Bitcoin, that are far more environmentally friendly such as SolarCoin which promotes the usage of photovoltaic electricity. The same goes for HydroCoin this time with hydrogen-based energy production. Peercoin, on the other hand, is considered environmentally friendly because it uses a much more energy-efficient protocol system, in fact Peercoin uses 30% less energy than Bitcoin to operate.