https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-18686-8
"This paper provides economic estimates of the energy-related climate damages
of mining Bitcoin (BTC), the dominant proof-of-work cryptocurrency. We provide
three sustainability criteria for signaling when the climate damages may be
unsustainable. BTC mining fails all three. We find that for 2016–2021: (i) per
coin climate damages from BTC were increasing, rather than decreasing with
industry maturation; (ii) during certain time periods, BTC climate damages
exceed the price of each coin created; (iii) on average, each $1 in BTC market
value created was responsible for $0.35 in global climate damages, which as a
share of market value is in the range between beef production and crude oil
burned as gasoline, and an order-of-magnitude higher than wind and solar power.
Taken together, these results represent a set of sustainability red flags.
While proponents have offered BTC as representing “digital gold,” from a
climate damages perspective it operates more like “digital crude”."
Via a co-worker at Block.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
