After the birth of Bitcoin, the growing ranks of miners have escalated the mining difficulty of the cryptocurrency dramatically. Long gone are the days when people could easily mine Bitcoin with a computer at home. The current hashrate difficulty now puts more demanding requirements on the performance of computer hardware and mining machines. With the progressive decrease of block rewards, thousands of Bitcoin miners intending to secure stable mining income have come together and kept mining day and night, thus consuming huge amounts of electricity. A Bitcoin mining machine running 24 hours a day uses electricity approximately the same as a family of five does in a month, according to the statistics of some organizations.
As covered by the UK’s Telegraph, the electricity consumed by Bitcoin mining surged to 77 TWh a year, hitting an all-time high. The amount is equal to the total power used by Chile, most of which comes from fossil energy.
In recent years, the world has faced many environmental challenges, including sudden climate change, global warming, environmental pollution, and ecological deterioration. Carbon neutrality, therefore, appears as an important topic of international climate negotiations. Against such a backdrop, many countries or regions have introduced a series of policies concerning Bitcoin mining, with an aim to cut carbon emissions, reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and curb the increasingly severe global warming problem efficiently. For the cryptocurrency mining industry, the transition from traditional energy to clean energy has become an inevitable trend in the future.
China’s recent regulatory clampdown on mines in several hubs of mining operations is a testament to the country’s impactful and determined efforts made to deliver on the promise it made at the UN General Assembly in 2020 to reach the peak output of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.
On June 19, mines were ordered to close across the Chinese cryptocurrency industry, mining machines ground to a halt, and miners started to put their rigs for sale. The hashrate of the entire network plummeted as a result. According to the data of the day, the crackdown in China knocked 2.37% off the hashrate of ViaBTC, 15.66% from BTC.com, 24.62% from Binance Pool, and 29% from AntPool within 24 hours. A large number of Chinese miners have been forced to shut down their mining machines or sought to relocate abroad.
Chinese miners are still unable to rest easy, even after turning their eyes overseas. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has more than once mentioned on Twitter the negative impact of Bitcoin mining. He posted this May that Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin, out of concern over the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions. The CEO said again on June 14 that the company would resume Bitcoin transactions when there’s confirmation of about 50% clean energy usage by miners with a positive future trend. It can be seen from Musk’s recent attitude towards Bitcoin that China is not the only one aware of the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, and foreign countries or regions simply have not yet released corresponding policies. To uproot the environmental problem, the Bitcoin mining industry has to divert its attention away from traditional energy and towards clean, renewable energy.
At present, there have been quite a few sustainable mining projects abroad. Below are two examples. In Canada, some people use the waste heat from Bitcoin mining to fuel greenhouse and fish pond operations. The financial services provider Square confirmed on Twitter that it would invest $5 million to build an open-source, solar-powered Bitcoin mining facility in collaboration with the blockchain technology provider Blockstream Mining. All of these projects provide very good ideas for the sustainable development of Bitcoin mining in the future.
There will definitely be more news about the use of clean energy in Bitcoin mining, as a large number of renewable energy projects kick off, many countries step up their environmental protection efforts, and modern technology keeps advancing. By then, Bitcoin mining will no longer be resisted by people and suppressed by governments, because its use of fossil energy violates the low-carbon concept.
