Higher consumption in Denmark: Bitcoin miners consume more electricity

economy

Tuesday, November 06, 2018

For the extraction of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin consumes more and more energy. Much of it comes from coal plants. Researchers are already sounding the alarm. They fear serious damage to the environment.

Given the huge energy costs badociated with the digital exploitation of bitcoins, researchers warn of the costs that this entails for the environment. This year, cryptocurrency production will consume more energy than the rest of Denmark, said Max Krause of the Institute for Science and Education at Oak Ridge: "We have a any new industry that consumes more energy per year than many countries. "

According to a study published by researchers around Krause in the journal Nature Sustainability, so-called bitcoin mining alone has used 30.1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in the middle of this year. By comparison, Denmark had a total electricity consumption of 31.4 billion kilowatt hours in 2015.

For crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin, accounting transactions are encrypted in a decentralized database – the blockchain. This requires more and more computation efforts. In principle, anyone can participate in these calculations and is paid in Bitcoins. This creates new "pieces". The process therefore calls extraction.

The exploitation of Bitcoin is mainly in China

However, this energy-hungry process has long been dominated by professional actors. According to the study, about half of the Bitcoin farms are located in China, where coal is mainly used as a source of energy.

For their investigation, Krause and his co-author, Thabet Tolaymat, also calculated the amount of energy Megajoule needed to extract a bitcoin. It is therefore one of the digital parts up to three times larger than for the extraction of gold, platinum or copper. It is only in the case of aluminum production with very high energy intensity that the balance is even worse.

Before Ethereum, Dash and Ripple, Bitcoin was considered the largest and best known cryptocurrency ever. More than 16 million Bitcoin coins are currently in circulation.

Source: n-tv.de