Cryptocurrency A new analysis of the environmental impact of Bitcoin Mining requires as much water as all the UK’s bathrooms use annually.
Economist Alex de Vries, who runs the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, estimated that around 16 trillion liters of water are needed each year to cool the computers used to support the cryptocurrency’s network.
Another study in 2018 found that all UK bathrooms use the same amount of water each year, 16 trillion litres, which is enough to fill around 660,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
A single bitcoin transaction can use as much water as a household swimming pool, according to an analysis published Wednesday in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability.
Alex de Vries said: ‘Many parts of the world are suffering from drought and fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce. If we continue to use this precious resource for useless calculations, I think it is really painful.’
Alex’s ‘useless computations’ refers to the complex calculations required to create new units of cryptocurrency and verify transactions on the network. The use of water to cool the hardware needed in the process could be significantly reduced if miners moved their operations underwater, as companies such as Microsoft already put some of their data centers in the ocean to keep them cool. have been
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Earlier this month, China announced that it had begun building the world’s largest underwater data center to cut electricity and water costs.
Bitcoin mining has previously been criticized for its high electricity consumption. De Vries’ company Energy Consumption Index estimates that the cryptocurrency network consumes about as much electricity as the country of Poland.
Bitcoin proponents have denied allegations of electricity use in bitcoin mining, claiming that miners are increasingly shifting to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.
A recently published study suggests that Bitcoin mining could actually help accelerate the transition to renewable energy, as solar and wind power plants generate additional electricity and earn hundreds of millions of dollars from Bitcoin mining. can
Apoor Lal, a doctoral student at Cornell University involved in the research, said: ‘These benefits could serve as an incentive for mining to adopt environmentally friendly energy sources that mitigate the effects of climate change, including renewables. Improvements in energy efficiency and additional profits during pre-commercial operation of wind and solar farms can have a combined positive effect.’
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2024-09-24 11:52:08
