A new UN report has found that cryptocurrency mining has extremely high costs in the form of astronomical amounts of water and land, bitcoin mining consumes huge amounts of energy, which gives it a bad reputation as a threat to the environment and an accelerator of climate change.
According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, the global carbon footprint from 2020 to 2021 amounted to the equivalent of carbon emissions from the burning of 84 billion pounds of coal, 190 natural gas-fired power plants, or more than 25 million tons of waste in landfills.
The global water footprint in the period from January 2020 to December 2021 amounted to 1.65 cubic kilometers, equivalent to filling more than 660 thousand Olympic swimming pools, and more than the current domestic use of water for 300 million people in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa.
The land area of mining in the same period amounted to “more than 1870 square kilometers, which is 1.4 times the area of Los Angeles”.
China and the United States are among the largest violators in the world, using at least 50% of the resources in their mining operations more than any other country.
A large part of this cost is due to how electricity is produced, during this period from 2020 to 2021, hydropower supported 16% of bitcoin mining in the world.
Although hydropower is a renewable resource, it requires the flooding of large areas of land to build reservoirs for hydroelectric dams.
Beyond these land requirements, hydropower production also loses a lot of water through evaporation, and it was previously reported that the carbon footprint of bitcoin mining rivaled beef production and precious metal mining.
The new report shows that “the environmental footprint of bitcoin mining is not limited to greenhouse gas emissions”.
Cryptocurrency mining describes how computers around the world solve complex mathematical problems to complete and verify transactions.
It can be profitable because cryptocurrency mining rewards the miner for verifying transactions and bringing more bitcoins into existence.
However, making money from bitcoin mining depends on the abundance of cheap energy, and for an enterprise to be profitable, the cost of operating mining computers must be lower than mining bonuses, and bitcoin mining powered by natural gas increased from 15% in 2021 to 21% in 2022.
The report warns that these hidden environmental costs are particularly worrying, given that many of the countries at the top of the list are lagging behind in the field of social and economic justice, and unregulated and untaxed mining activities exacerbate inequality in these areas and have lasting environmental impacts.
