Some ecologists cheerfully celebrate the current market for cryptographic bears, and say it is a sure sign that bitcoin is “becoming useless” and “will soon cease to exist”. And they have breathless the days that are missing for his disappearance.
“Bitcoin is a colossal waste of energy. [and] soon there will be no more, “the writer Ilana Strauss said in TreeHugger”. Good trip … We know that Bitcoin was falling for a while, but the nails are already in the coffin”.
Strauss said she has always disliked the “imaginary coin” because it takes “a ridiculous amount of energy” to mine bitcoin.
“In 2018, bitcoin mining consumed more energy than 159 countries,” he wrote. “12 states in the US use less energy than bitcoin”.
“Bitcoin mining threatens our existence”
Strauss echoed the sentiments of other environmentalists, some of whom claim that bitcoin mining is an existential threat to humanity.
Jon Truby, director of the Law and Development Center at the University of Qatar, says the huge amount of electricity needed for cryptocurrency mining will exacerbate greenhouse gas emissions and pollute the environment.
“Digital currency mining is the first important industry developed from blockchain, since only its transactions consume more electricity than entire nations,” Truby wrote in an October 2018 paper for the academic journal Energy Research & Social Science. “It must be directed towards sustainability if it wants to realize its potential advantages”.
Others point out that cryptographic mining has a much lower environmental impact than legacy systems such as gold and fiat currencies and that their electricity consumption is ridiculously exaggerated.
Truby says that Bitcoin was designed without taking into account its environmental impact and, as such, “threatens our existence”.
As a result, he requested government intervention in cryptography mining and said that the additional blockchain development should be stopped to mitigate its serious environmental threat.
“Many developers have not taken into account the environmental impact of their designs, so we should encourage them to adopt consensus protocols that do not generate high emissions” Truby wrote. “Failure to take action means that we are subsidizing a technology that consumes a lot of energy and that future blockchain developers follow the same damaging path”.
Enviro-Academic: ‘Bitcoin is here to stay’
That said, Jon Truby acknowledged that blockchain is an “important technology” that deserves further development. And unlike the TreeHugger writer, Truby said that Bitcoin is not going anywhere, so we have to find a way to accommodate it.
“Bitcoin is here to stay and, therefore, future models must be designed without relying on energy consumption disproportionately in their economic or social benefits”, Truby wrote.
Despite these serious warnings from environmental activists, the industry is moving forward and betting heavily on bitcoin.
The cryptographic mining firm Coinmint plans to invest up to $ 700 million to build the largest bitcoin mining center in the world in the state of New York.
Coinmint has already invested $ 50 million to date to convert a 1,300-acre aluminum smelter in Massena, New York.
So that nobody thinks that the project is short-term, it should be noted that Coinmint signed a 10-year lease on the property. The new mining farm is expected to be operational in June 2019.
Also published on Medium.