Bitcoin mining generates 30.7 kilotons e‑waste annually – enough to cover Luxembourg’s e‑waste five times

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  • Bit­coin is esti­mat­ed to annu­al­ly gen­er­ate e‑waste equiv­a­lent to over five times that of Luxembourg’s.
  • Experts also sug­gest that the top cryp­tocur­ren­cy uses the same amount of elec­tric­i­ty annu­al­ly that Norway’s 5.5 mil­lion pop­u­la­tion does.
  • There are two ways to make Bit­coin more envi­ron­ment-friend­ly, accord­ing to studies.

Bit­coin, and oth­er cryp­tocur­ren­cies, have often been crit­i­cised for the amount of e‑waste they gen­er­ate, and the pow­er that is con­sumed in min­ing coins. Now, a report has tried to quan­ti­fy just how harm­ful Bit­coin min­ing is to the environment.

Accord­ing to a study by
StockApps.com, Bit­coin min­ing gen­er­ates 30.7 kilo­tons of e‑waste annu­al­ly. That is enough to cov­er Luxembourg’s e‑waste five times. For con­text, Lux­em­bourg has a pop­u­la­tion of 6,00,000 people. 

Cryp­tocur­ren­cies have long been crit­i­cised for being inef­fi­cient. This is espe­cial­ly true of major cryp­tos like Bit­coin and Ethereum. Although solu­tions are being worked on to reduce the envi­ron­men­tal impact of min­ing these cryp­tocur­ren­cies, there’s still a lot of room for progress in this regard. 

Why is Bitcoin mining so ‘dirty’?

Bit­coin uses a ‘proof of work’ (PoW) mech­a­nism to reg­u­late the cre­ation of new blocks and the over­all state of the cryp­tocur­ren­cy. ‘Proof of stake’ (PoS), on the oth­er hand, uses a sim­ple mech­a­nism to lock coins in a smart con­tract and own­ers make their stakes via a lot­tery system. 

Bitcoin mining generates 30.7 kilotons e-waste annually – enough to cover Luxembourg’s e-waste five times
Unsplash

For long, PoW has been crit­i­cised for con­sum­ing more ener­gy than PoS. The PoS evan­ge­lists also claim that it is more secure than PoW – essen­tial­ly, there is lit­tle rea­son to not use PoS.

Esti­mates
sug­gest that Bit­coin uses approx­i­mate­ly 127 ter­awatt-hours of pow­er every year – that is equiv­a­lent to the entire annu­al elec­tric­i­ty con­sump­tion of Norway. 

Even on a per-trans­ac­tion basis, Bit­coin min­ing is expen­sive – min­ing a sin­gle coin of BTC con­sumes 707 kilo­watt-hours of elec­tric­i­ty, which is 11 times that of Ethereum. 

It’s not just excessive power consumption that is the problem

Bitcoin’s more-demand­ing min­ing process also has its impact on the min­ing equip­ment, which is the rea­son it gen­er­ates so much e‑waste.

Bit­coin min­ers use appli­ca­tion-spe­cif­ic inte­grat­ed cir­cuits (ASICs) for min­ing the cryp­tocur­ren­cy, since they are tai­lor-made for this pur­pose. How­ev­er, ASICs have short lifes­pans – at about 18 months – and once they are obso­lete, they become e‑waste.

What can be done to reduce Bitcoin’s environmental footprint?

There are two pos­si­ble ways to help reduce Bitcoin’s impact on the environment. 

The first solu­tion is to tran­si­tion to PoS from the cur­rent PoW mech­a­nism – experts sug­gest this will result in sig­nif­i­cant sav­ings in terms of ener­gy consumption. 

The oth­er solu­tion being sug­gest­ed is adop­tion of a pre-min­ing mech­a­nism that coins like XRP use. This sys­tem would allow for algo­rithms to mine new coins instead of gen­er­at­ing them on demand. This, experts believe, will reduce the need for high-end min­ing equip­ment and there­by help reduce e‑waste.

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