 Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are terrible for the environment. It's an extremely inefficient way of conducting transactions. It's a way to both hide dirty money and destroy the environment at the same time. The environmental attacks on Bitcoin are best understood as a strategy by economic, media and political elites to undermine a form of money they can't control. Critics distort the basic facts about what's known as Bitcoin mining. The process through which a global network of computers maintain the Bitcoin network through computation. Though energy intensive, this process is what makes Bitcoin a truly decentralized monetary system. The amount of energy that's consumed in processing those transactions is staggering. A single Bitcoin transaction that's one purchase or one sale or one transfer uses the same amount of electricity as the typical U.S. household uses in more than a month. I think the estimate is 53 days. Wow. Yeah. They devise this per transaction energy cost figure and then they extrapolate Bitcoin's transactional load to hundreds of billions per year. Nick Carter is a partner at Castle Island Ventures. He's written a series of influential articles about Bitcoin and energy. On the basis of this somewhat illusory per transaction energy cost figure, they assume that Bitcoin will grow rapaciously in its energy footprint. In fact, as the Bitcoin network grows to support additional transactions, it doesn't require additional energy. Just as the Federal Reserve Building's electricity bill doesn't increase with every ATM withdrawal, the electricity consumed by mining isn't used to power individual transactions. It's used to secure and administer the foundation layer of Bitcoin's monetary network, which can then be extended almost infinitely. Bitcoin transactions and Bitcoin's energy use are not really correlated. An additional marginal transaction doesn't really add much energy outlay to the Bitcoin system. The energy used by Bitcoin miners has increased significantly and it will continue to grow, but the media's claims are outlandish. In 2017, Newsweek boldly predicted that Bitcoin was on track to consume all of the world's energy by 2020. One of the most commonly cited figures comes from a 2018 two-page analysis published in Nature Climate Change and trumpeted by the New York Times and other outlets. Bitcoin's growth could single-handedly push global temperatures above the tipping point of two degrees Celsius. Effectively, it makes some very questionable assumptions about Bitcoin to drive this extrapolation of Bitcoin's future carbon footprint. It finds this cartoonish figure that Bitcoin could increase the world's temperature by two plus degrees, which is completely inconsistent with the way Bitcoin works. Nature Climate Change went on to publish three rebuttals pointing out the implausible assumptions used to generate its figure, including the same fallacy of calculating an energy cost per Bitcoin transaction and then assuming a linear increase as the network grows. So how much energy does Bitcoin mining actually consume? The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance estimates Bitcoin uses just over 100 terawatt hours per year. Which is less than gold mining and many other residential and industrial activities. Critics routinely invoke the idea that Bitcoin uses more electricity than whole countries to generate attention-grabbing headlines. But that's also true of many industries. And if Bitcoin were a country, it would rank 32nd out of 59 tracked by the Cambridge Center. And for what it's worth, Bitcoin's market cap is over a trillion dollars, far more than the GDP of many of the countries to which it's compared. Critics also tend to ignore that miners are incentivized to use energy that would otherwise go to waste. That's because electricity is hard to transport over long distances, while Bitcoin mining can happen anywhere that there's internet access. So miners gravitate toward energy sources with excess capacity. They will go to the Amazon, they will go to the Congo, they will go to Siberia, they will go to Antarctica, they'll go to the middle of the ocean, they'll go wherever the cheapest energy is. Alex Gladstein is Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation. He points out that Bitcoin miners lose money in competitive electricity markets because the cost of the power they consume exceeds their earnings. Bitcoin miners can only pay like two to five cents per kilowatt for the energy. Industrial nations consumers pay 10, 15 cents and in developing countries they pay 20 to 40 cents. What I'm concluding here with is that Bitcoin miners need like energy that nobody else wants. In the western United States, mobile Bitcoin miners are already running on electricity derived from unused natural gas from oil wells that can't be captured because there are no pipelines to carry it. Gladstein argues that Bitcoin can be used as a spur to develop more renewable energy in underdeveloped countries, remote locations and even existing landfills. A recent industry survey put Bitcoin mining's sustainable energy use at around 56%, a figure that will likely grow. Bitcoin miners are like a sponge. Any excess energy bubbling to the point where it becomes cheap enough for them, they will soak it up. There are computers all over the world right now spitting out random numbers around the clock in a competition to try to solve a useless puzzle. The claim that Bitcoin mining is useless is the essence of the government's case against Bitcoin because it's this component that directly challenges state power. The work being carried out by this global computer network is what allows Bitcoin to be controlled by mathematical rules instead of human actors vulnerable to government or corporate control. Bitcoin is a vote of no confidence in the monetary and financial system that exists today. It's a pretty exclusionary system where we are extremely beholden to the opinions of a half dozen individuals with all think the same way. Would you go so far as to say it's almost like a generational movement against the status quo in favor of a non-inflationary kind of hard currency? Absolutely. And it's not just non-inflationary, it is a non-discretionary monetary rule. There's no central banker that can come in and alter the rules and privilege one certain set of society at the expense of another. That is the core of the movement here.