Mining bitcoin uses more energy than what’s needed to excavate gold, platinum or copper: study
- Mining cryptocurrencies requires hundreds, even tens of thousands, of linked computers running intensive calculations in search of the internet equivalent of precious metals
Extracting a dollar’s worth of cryptocurrency such as bitcoin from the deep Web consumes three times more energy than digging up a dollar’s worth of gold, according to researchers.
There are now hundreds of virtual currencies and an unknown number of server farms around the world running around the clock to unearth them, more than half of them in China, a study from the University of Cambridge has estimated.
Mining virtual currencies with a real-world value, in other words, carries a hidden environmental cost that is rarely measured or taken into account.
“We now have an entirely new industry that is consuming 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 the study published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
“In 2018, bitcoin is on track to consume more energy than Denmark,” he told Agence France-Presse.