Under the Microscope: Economic and Environmental Costs of Bitcoin Mining
Hass McCook is a chartered engineer and freshly minted Oxford MBA. He has been researching bitcoin over the past several months and recently joined the Lifeboat Foundation's New Money Systems advisory board. Here, in the first in a series of articles on bitcoin's sustainability, he seeks to analyse the economic and environmental factors involved in the process of bitcoin mining. There has been a lot of uncertainty surrounding the sustainability of the bitcoin network, with this fascinating nascent technology facing several unsubstantiated claims that it is highly unsustainable from a....
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Hass McCook is a chartered engineer and freshly minted Oxford MBA. He has been researching bitcoin over the past several months and recently joined the Lifeboat Foundation's New Money Systems advisory board. This, the final instalment in his five-part series, evaluates the relative sustainability of the bitcoin network against the costs of gold production, the printing and minting of physical currency and the legacy banking system. Under the Microscope has aimed to cast a critical eye over the social, environmental and economic impacts of the way we currently transact and transfer wealth,....
Hass McCook is a chartered engineer and freshly minted Oxford MBA. He has been researching bitcoin over the past several months and recently joined the Lifeboat Foundation's New Money Systems advisory board. This article is the second in a series on bitcoin's sustainability. Having previously examined the cost of bitcoin mining, here McCook seeks to quantify the economic and environmental factors involved in mining gold. Gold has been used for millennia as a means to project and protect wealth. As the data below indicates, 52% of all gold ever mined is used for jewellery and palatial....
Twenty-three U.S. lawmakers have called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to increase oversight of cryptocurrency’s environmental impacts. “We request that the EPA evaluate ‘Proof-of-Work’ mining facilities’ compliance with environmental statutes,” they said.
Lawmakers Want More Oversight of Bitcoin Mining Industry
U.S. Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA) and 22 other Congress members jointly sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan regarding cryptocurrency mining operations....
The Environmental Protection Agency or EPA keeps receiving mail. This time, 14 members of Congress provided the counterpoint and singled out the environmental benefits of bitcoin mining. They also made a point about how crucial this industry is, and the damage the USA would inflict on itself by banning it. Plus, they schooled the EPA […]
There are plenty of people who believe they can predict the future of Bitcoin, but no one can really say for sure what will happen over the next five to 10 years. Some say that bitcoin will become the new reserve currency of the world, while others say issues involving scalability or regulation will eventually get in the way. Although no one can know what will happen, it's still useful to analyze where Bitcoin has been, where it is right now, and where it may go in the future. Dave Hudson, who is vice president of software architecture at Peernova and previously worked at Qualcomm, was....