31 Oct Cryptocurrency mining may kill Earth faster than coal mining, study finds — RT US News
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Thanks to the massive amount of electricity needed to mine cryptocurrency, adopting bitcoin on a society-wide basis could raise global temperatures by two degrees Celsius in just 15 years, according to a new study.
Researchers at the University of Hawaii calculated the electrical efficiency of the computers used in bitcoin mining as well as the emissions generated by producing electricity in those quantities and estimated that cryptocurrency-mining in 2017 emitted 69 million metric tons of CO2 – as much as 15 coal-fired power plants.
While bitcoin doesn’t even exist in the physical world, mining it requires significant generation of electricity to power the complex computations required to complete a new “block” of code in the cryptocurrency “chain.”
Further calculations indicate that if bitcoin and other cryptos are adopted globally at the slowest rate at which new technologies are generally assimilated, carbon…
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