Energy cost of mining Bitcoin more than twice that of copper or gold

theguardian.com

25 points·TimTheTinker··3 comments

>Any cryptocurrency mined in China would generate four times the amount of CO2 compared to the amount generated in Canada

Metal mining has a comparably wide variation in energy intensity, though not mentioned in article. The headline's broad-brush claim deserves skepticism.

Bitcoin is a practically insignificant part of the climate change puzzle.

All of these "We must stop Bitcoin to save the environment" articles that have been popping up kind of seem like sour grapes.

Also, amount of energy expended is directly proportional to price (x block reward) - if you want to reduce Bitcoin's emissions, short it hard!

If you want to limit Bitcoin's CO2 impact, you should do the same thing as for every energy using activity: ensure, through international agreement, that CO2 emission is taxed or capped in a way that reflects its future impact.

Like with every other good in existence, such a tax will affect the amount -- and by which energy source -- it is profitable to produce [1].

If there is a place where it is possible to avoid such an imposition, then production will leak to that location, just like for every other good in existence.

If you think that bitcoin is somehow "different" than all other trivial things that people spend energy to produce, because you think it's stupid, you're opening a can of worms I'm sure you don't want to deal with (deciding how much people "really should like things" compared to their energy cost).

[1] Technically, it will affect the production of hash computations, not bitcoins themselves.

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