There's been a bit of buzz around Bitcoin recently, because the cryptocurrency keeps increasing in value. Currently, it's a bit over $40,000 CDN. Some people think it may go a lot higher, but at what cost? This Twitter thread describes the environmental cost of Bitcoin mining – the process of running the Bitcoin algorithm on a computer until a Bitcoin is produced.
Let's discuss the environmental cost of bitcoin. Because despite all the push for sustainable and green investment in the tech sector, there's a giant smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Silicon Valley which a lot of investors would prefer you remain quiet about.
TLDR on bitcoin economics: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do.
That alone is sufficiently awful on its own merits, but on top of this the environmental damages of bitcoin are enough to make even Greta Thunberg weep at the pointless waste of it all.
The underlying technology of bitcoin is based on the notion of "mining", a technical term for a process that keeps the network running and processing transactions.
I won't cover the details of the algorithm, suffice it to say the premise of bitcoin mining is to prove how much power you can waste, and the more power you can waste, the more tokens you can probabilistically secure in exchange for your energy waste.
I won't cover the details of the algorithm, suffice it to say the premise of bitcoin mining is to prove how much power you can waste, and the more power you can waste, the more tokens you can probabilistically secure in exchange for your energy waste.
He goes on to elaborate with some truly disturbing numbers. It's not just the power consumption that's a problem, but the CO2 produced to generate the power and the electronic waste that the computers will eventually become.
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