Yesterday, one of the headlines in our crypto news section was the report about Bitcoin and its impact on global warming. Every now and then, there are major news outlets reporting about the (dangerous) effects of Bitcoin and the fact that it may consume all the world’s power.
These ‘conspiracy theories’ are often backed by the international banking cartels in order to maintain the fear that Bitcoin is not sustainable as an alternative. According to recent findings on the matter, Bitcoin cannot consume all the world’s power and moreover, the metrics used to reach such conclusions were faulty in the first place.
Dr. Jonathan Koomey has responded to an article published in Nature Climate Change and an earlier one that was published in Newsweek, in which he pointed out the methodology used and labeled it as “not sound” – mostly because it claims that “Bitcoin mining is on track to consume all of the world’s energy by 2020” or “Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C.”
As Koomey wrote:
“While I encourage everyone in the electricity sector to track Bitcoin as a potential source of new load growth, please use caution and avoid being misled by the hype. Breathless media coverage papers over the uncertainties in the underlying data, and makes it seem like Bitcoin is taking over the world, but in fact it’s likely only 0.1% of global electricity consumption, and it is unlikely to continue growing at recent historical rates.”
Koomey also said that there are many misleading factoids about this technology mainly emerging from the coal-industry funded studies around year 2000.
“The claims were reported in every major newspaper, cited by investment banking reports and politicians of both political parties, and avidly promoted by people and companies who should have known better […] All of these claims turned out to be bunk, but it took years of creating peer reviewed research to prove it. We found that the Internet (defined as those authors defined it) used only 1% of US electricity in 2000, all computers used 3%, the total would never grow to half of all electricity use, and that the factoid about the wireless Palm VII overestimated networking electricity by a factor of 2000,” he concluded.
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