Bitcoin mining is extremely energy intensive. A single transaction of bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of watching YouTube, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.
The Oak Ridge Institute in Ohio found that a dollar’s worth of bitcoin took 17 megajoules of energy, that’s more than double the amount of energy it took to mine a dollar’s worth of copper, gold and platinum.
That poses serious ethical questions for corporations and governments looking to curb their own carbon footprints. Currently 60% of coins mined in Bitcoin come from China where they don't care about the environment or about sustainability, and they certainly have issues around human rights.
Patriot, Outstanding points, and why I suspect Bitcoin is coming to a end. I have not dealt in it or will, and also not a Financial adviser. Just wanting those that do to consider this and make their own decision.
It's interesting to see that as energy prices have just spiked the price of bitcoin crashed 12% yesterday!
They are inversely correlated!!!
A big jump in energy price could destroy bitcoin. By design imho.
Patriot, I noticed like Elon Musk, European Central Banks are making distance also, I posed a thread on that. We will see.
Interesting observation.
Some say that this is the true value of Bitcoin - nobody can create something similar because it would be too expensive to use the proof-of-work approach of Bitcoin to create a direct competition. All what the competition and state actors can do is to move to a proof-of-stake approach - which may require 99% less energy. This could mean that, while all the other cryptocurrencies will be used to move money, Bitcoin will be used to store money.
When Ethereum moves to a proof-of-stake model it will outpace Bitcoin
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