Bitcoin Energy Consumption

This cluster centers on debates about Bitcoin mining's high energy use, whether it constitutes waste, its environmental impact like CO2 emissions, and counterarguments that it incentivizes renewables or provides value.

📉 Falling 0.1x Finance & Crypto
3,677
Comments
16
Years Active
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#5170
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Keywords

e.g IMO HN CO2 coindesk.com wired.com BTC digiconomist.net FT zorinaq.com bitcoin energy mining energy consumption coal bitcoin mining proof work consumption carbon environmental

Sample Comments

0xFFC Dec 27, 2017 View on HN

It is not fault of bitcoin you are burning oil/etc for mining it. Use renewable energy.

exabrial May 13, 2020 View on HN

Please stop legitimizing bitcoin :( This is the biggest waste of energy and a contributor to global warming.

yaa_minu May 2, 2021 View on HN

bitcoin is burning down down the planet? Why do you equate energy use to environmental destruction?

dvfjsdhgfv Apr 27, 2021 View on HN

No, I don't think you are completely wasting the energy. I think the waste is disproportionately large in relation to other services providing some value to society, including the ones by FAANG.I understand that you personally view Bitcoin as the first implementation, but the reality is that it is now the dominant one that is starting to exert non-negligible influence on the planet we are all living in. And it is not fixable, because it is one of the core features of Bitcoin. Good luck c

alwillis May 3, 2021 View on HN

Bitcoin doesn’t waste energy—https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-does-not-waste-en...

lawwantsin17 Jan 17, 2021 View on HN

Bitcoin mining doesn't have emissions. Producing energy does. And emission producing energy is on it's way out. So, fuck right off.

alwillis May 20, 2021 View on HN

Bitcoin Does Not Waste Energy: https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-does-not-waste-en...

zucker42 Mar 3, 2021 View on HN

Bitcoin fundamentally wastes energy and BTC proponents don't see it as a problem to be solved. There is a big push to alter other technologies with environmental problems to make sure they don't use more energy than necessary.

arcticbull Apr 30, 2021 View on HN

Sorry its no longer that simple. It's wasting as much power as all of Switzerland and all of Austria combined. 52MT of CO2 emitted annually. 10kT of e-waste. And growing like grey goo. [1] Dormant coal facilities are now being re-activated to hash noise as fast as they can. [2]This is literally everyone's problem now and we should all do everything we can, tell everyone we can, to shut this down before it's too late.Your game of pass-the-spreadsheet-cell is now actively thre

torpfactory Dec 11, 2017 View on HN

Seriously everyone, please stop using bitcoin. The environmental impact of energy generation for mining and proof-of-work is totally untenable. I understand this is key to why Bitcoin works, but we absolutely should not be scaling a technology which so inefficiently uses energy. This is not an argument about the profitability of mining or other technical merits of Bitcoin. Even if all cryptocurrency mining were to use zero-carbon energy generation, we still should not use it: that energy ought t