Technology: University of New Mexico researchers find Bitcoin mining is environmentally unsustainable
www.eurekalert.org
Taken as a share of the market price, the climate change impacts of mining the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin is more comparable to the impacts of extracting and refining crude oil than mining gold, according to an analysis published in Scientific Reports by researchers at The University of New Mexico. The authors suggest that rather than being considered akin to ‘digital gold’, Bitcoin should instead be compared to much more energy-intensive products such as beef, natural gas, and crude oil.

Each coin mined in 2021 caused $11,314 of climate damage, adding to the total global damages that exceeded $12 billion between 2016 and 2021.

  • dreiwert@szmer.info
    51·
    2 years ago

    Big tech companies route loads of data through their data centers that could either be processed on the end users’ devices, or that aren’t needed at all for the services that help the end users. A comparison between the climate impact of all the big tech data center processing that is done for the sole purpose of the big tech companies and other factors relevant to climate would be both interesting and meaningful.

    Edit: Funny to see downvoting without making a point. Regarding the latter mentioned source of serviceless resource wasting of big tech, see https://www.inkandswitch.com/slow-software/ (under “user-hostile work”). Regarding the former one, think about why your average smartphone keyboard implementation needs to phone home to the tech company’s data center, while there are implementations that work right on the device. Removing all this stuff could most likely greatly reduce the resource usage of today’s end user devices, and does not provide any useful service to the end users.