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If use of the power-hungry digital currency bitcoin grows rapidly in the coming years, its emissions could significantly accelerate global climate change, according to an analysis published today (October 29) in Nature Climate Change.
Critics say the study is flawed, and its problems include ignoring likely future energy-efficient advances in how bitcoin operates.
It’s well known that bitcoin and similar digital currencies have high energy demands. Bitcoin has no central banking authority, and transactions are instead verified by “miners” through a computationally demanding process. “Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency with heavy hardware requirements, and this obviously translates into large electricity demands,” says study coauthor Randi Rollins of the University of Hawaii at Manoa in a press release.
Rollins and her colleagues estimated that the use of bitcoins in the year 2017 emitted 69 million metric tons of CO2. They also used the rates of adoption of popular ...
