Guest essay by Eric Worrall

Grist has joined the rising chorus of greens condemning the vast energy expenditures of Bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin gobbles up clean energy — just when the real world needs it most

By Eric Holthaus on Feb 16, 2018

One of the biggest near-term threats to our clean energy future doesn’t even physically exist — but the danger is increasingly very real.

The stupendous growth of the virtual currency Bitcoin is creating real-world consequences. Massive number-crunching computer facilities for mining Bitcoin have popped up in parts of the planet where renewable electricity comes especially cheap. And now it looks like this mining is starting to siphon green energy away from everybody else.

…

To maintain security as its network grows, the math problems that Bitcoin “miners” must solve are getting ever more difficult. That requires a constant supply of additional computing power, which requires a constant supply of additional electricity. One Bitcoin transaction uses as much energy as a single U.S. household consumes in three weeks, and there are nearly 200,000 transactions around the world every day. In total, Bitcoin now consumes about as much energyas Portugal.

And it’s about to get much, much worse than that. A couple of months ago, I wrote that Bitcoin mining’s rapid growth was unsustainable, because the electricity required to feed it would overtake the supply. In Iceland, that’s starting to happen.

“We are spending tens or maybe hundreds of megawatts on producing something that has no tangible existence and no real use for humans outside the realm of financial speculation,”Smári McCarthy, an Icelandic member of parliament recently told the Associated Press. “That can’t be good.”

…