A Comparison Of Bitcoin’s Environmental Impact With That Of Gold And Banking
The impacts of gold and banking on the environment relative to Bitcoin are much greater than mainstream narratives suggest.The following is a republishing of Hass McCook’s “Comparing Bitcoin’s Environmental Impact…,” which was first published here.NOTE: The methodology and underlying figures (specifically, emission rates for gold and banking) mentioned throughout are generally derived from my 2014 and 2018 works. The 2018 work is available as an easier-to-digest 10-part medium series here.Bitcoin’s energy consumption and environmental impact are commented on very regularly, but ultimately,....
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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. 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....
Bitcoin’s comparison as “merely” digital gold demonstrates that legacy financial bureaucrats are in for a rude awakening.
2020 was the year of the digital gold narrative amid a pandemic and unprecedented money printing. In 2021, only Bitcoin matters and comparing it to gold at this point is selling the coin short. Now is the age of cryptocurrency, and no comparison shows that better than the two charts you are about to see […]
While detractors often cite Bitcoin’s energy consumption as a negative, this doesn’t automatically imply environmental impact.
The impact of BTC mining on the environment has turned into a debate — here’s what academics think and if “green Bitcoin” is possible. The debate around the environmental impact of the Bitcoin mining ecosystem is heating up once again as academics have provided a fresh dose of perspective on the subject. In an opinion piece written by Noah Smith, a former assistant finance professor turned columnist, took aim at the Bitcoin (BTC) mining industry in March, suggesting that the constantly growing energy consumption of the network is simply unsustainable. Smith’s belief is that more countries....