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RESEARCH :
''' '' BITCOIN MINING
BITINGS '' '''
THE RESEARCHERS FROM VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT AMSTERDAM, the Technical University of Munich, ETH Zurich and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that -
That Bitcoin mining maybe responsible for about 65 megatons of carbon dioxide a year, comparable to the emissions of Greece. ''It's bad news for Bitcoin owners, because their holdings just got dirty,'' said Alex de Vries, a co-author of the paper.
CHINA'S CRACKDOWN ON CRYPTOCURRENCIES upended the world of Bitcoin last year, leading to mass exodus of ''miners'' - who use power-hungry computers to mine, or create, new Bitcoins - to new locations around the world.
Now, research has found that the exodus probably made cryptomining, which already uses more electricity than many countries, even worse for the climate.
According to the peer-reviewed study, which appears in the journal Joule, the Bitcoin network's use of renewable energy sources like wind, solar or hydropower dropped from an average of 42 percent in 2020 to 25 percent in August 2021.
One likely reason : Bitcoin miners lost their access to hydropower from regions within China that had powered their computers with cheap, plentiful, renewable energy during the wet summer months. A substantial number of miners migrated to nearby Kazakhstan and farther afield to the United States.
In those countries, miners have been using more fossil fuels, mainly coal in Kazakhstan and natural gas in America. Coal and natural gas are both drivers of climate change and because burning fossil fuel pumps vast amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
''There was a lot of optimism that China banning Bitcoin mining would make mining more green,'' Mr. de Vries said. ''But the fact is, it was already a dirty business, and it just got worse.''
The latest research adds to the debates about Bitcoin mining's environmental effects at a time when the cryptocurrency's standing in mainstream finance has grown. Mining for Bitcoin, in particular, has come under scrutiny because it is designed to become more difficult as more miners participate, making mining each Bitcoin more energy intensive.
[Ethereum, another cryptocurrency, is working on an alternative method that would use far less energy]
There have been widely varying past estimates of the share of renewable energy sources that Bitcoin miners use. A survey at the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance put the global average used in mining at around 40 percent.
The Bitcoin Mining Council, an industry group, has said the number was closer to 60 percent. And Coinshares, the digital-asset investment firm, has estimated that as much as 73 percent of the electricity bitcoin miners use powered by renewables.
One big reason for those differences is that it's difficult to pinpoint the exact locations of all of the world's miners of Bitcoin, by far the largest cryptocurrency.
For several years now, Cambridge researchers have compiled data on the global distribution of miners, based on information collected from four ''mining pools,'' or groups of miners that combine their computational resources. But that covered only about 44 percent of Bitcoin mining as of October 2021.
The new research used the Cambridge location data, matching it with data on how carbon-intensive the electricity generation is in that country.
For the United States, the study used data from Foundry USA, a mining pool that allows for a further breakdown of miners' locations, which is important because how electricity is generated, and how much renewables figure as part of the energy mix, varies across the country. But for other countries, that breakdown wasn't available.
Chris Bendiksen, the Bitcoin research lead at Coinshares, said that his firm tapped location data gathered from financial disclosures, as well as proprietary industry data, to arrive at its estimate of renewable use.
It also accounted for the fact that a growing number of miners in the United States were entering into contracts with natural gas drillers to use excess gas that would otherwise have been ''flared'' -intentionally burned off as waste - or else simply released into the atmosphere unburned and unused.
Ultimately, the Bitcoin industry's aim remained aligned with climate goals, he said. ''I think we all agree that we need to move away from fossil fuels,'' he said.
Benjamin A Jones, an assistant professor in economics at the university of New Mexico whose research involves the environmental effects of cryptomining said the latest findings seemed consistent with expectations.
''If true,'' he said, ''their implication is that Bitcoin mining is moving in the wrong direction.''
The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Bitcoin and Crypto currencies, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Hiroko Tabuchi.
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