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The environmental toll of Bitcoin mining

Written by Dean Lee, SEO team writer at CCP Marketing for 1k Daily Profit.

Bitcoin was created as a digitalised coinage for intensifying decentralised transactions. Bitcoin is subjected to a peer-to-peer network, and every progression facilitates instant payments. The process of finding hidden bitcoin units is known as bitcoin mining. 

Bitcoin mining is utterly different from the land-based mining progression as bitcoin mining is accomplished by the use of massive amounts of energy hungry computers employed to process complex mathematical puzzles on the bitcoin network. 

These puzzles are so complex that they cant be solved by hand and are so complex that they tax even the most powerful computers.  When computers solve these problems on the bitcoin network, they produce new bitcoin. By solving these puzzles, the Bitcoin miners make the payment network trustworthy and secure by verifying transaction information. 

They are rewarded in Bitcoin for this verification. If you are interested in finding out more about Bitcoin and Bitcoin trading, or if you want to become a successful trader, then visit the 1k Daily Profit online trading platform.

Bitcoin Mining Energy Consumption

Energy consumption driven by bitcoin mining has resulted in a lot of controversy driven predominantly by the carbon footprint that it is creating throughout the world.

More and more countries have an are considering the ban of bitcoin mining.   Below is a short overview of the environmental toll that mining a portion of bitcoin has on the environment. 

Bitcoin mining is labelled as an energy guzzler as the energy consumption demand from the mining of bitcoin grows with every instance. The energy source consumed by bitcoin miners while mining bitcoin is electricity, and the consumption of electricity in the entire bitcoin mining chain per annum is attributed to a few main regions, China being in the lead between September 2019 and April 2020 according to information released by Statista on 22nd July 2021.  

The digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energey Consumption Index estimates that the electricity consumption to mine one bitcoin takes 1 544kWW to complete, or approximately USD200 in energy bills. According to an analysis from Cambridge University in February 2021, the annualised energy consumption of bitcoin mining last year reached 121.36 terawatt-hours, which is equivalent to the total energy consumption of Argentina.

Bitcoin mining in the past was predominantly performed in China. However, this has dwindled hugely because of the drop in coal production resulting from a clampdown by the government due to the high incidence of coal mining accidents.  

This coal shortage affected the production of electricity, which caused incremental black-outs across many areas in China, and turned the entire bitcoin mining industry upside down as places like Kazakhstan and the United States becoming contender in the bitcoin mining race.   

Environmental Toll Of Bitcoin Mining

The carbon footprint generated by coal which is burned for electricity production and the greenhouse gas emission related to the huge banks of computers that carry out bitcoin mining is correspondingly projected to increase global warming by 2 degrees celsius as soon 2033, according to a paper presented by Lars Ditmar, Department of Energy Systems, Germany at the 41st IAEE International Conference Gronigen in 2018.

Due to the environmental impact of bitcoin mining, many countries are clamping down on bitcoin mining.  In the United States of America for example, a New York senate bill has banned bitcoin mining for the following three years.  And countries like Iran have partially or temporarily banned bitcoin mining.   

Despite originally being recognised as the capital of bitcoin mining, China has announced a bitcoin mining ban, which is now claimed to be permanent, and there is very little chance for reversal as bitcoin mining destroys Chinese president Xi Jing Ping’s vision of China as being carbon neutral by the end of 2060. And China is only one country to announce this ban, it is going to be interesting to see how many countries who use fossil fuels for the production of electricity are going to act.

[Image – Photo by Executium on Unsplash]

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