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Bitcoin – Environmental Friendly or Foe?

Bitcoin’s effect on the environment has been a hotbed of discussion, dating almost all of the way back to when the cryptocurrency first launched in 2009. And now, over ten years later, researchers are still having trouble agreeing on an answer.

What is Bitcoin’s carbon footprint, anyway?

Depending on which study you cite, Bitcoin’s carbon footprint ranges from as little as 22 annual megatons of CO2 to estimates of over 50 megatons each year.

Although numerous factors contribute to Bitcoin’s carbon footprint, it’s the network’s mining activities that have the most substantial effect.

Thankfully, there are some solutions

Bitcoin’s carbon footprint is undoubtedly nothing to shrug at. And as the mining difficulty continues to increase, miners will need to expend more energy to remain profitable. If they don’t find solutions to operate more efficiently, Bitcoin’s carbon footprint will continue to grow.

As the rest of the world is moving toward renewable energy sources, Bitcoin mining is evolving along with it. According to a CoinShares report from June of last year, 74.1 percent of Bitcoin miners utilize renewable resources such as solar, wind, and most importantly, hydropower.



The future of Bitcoin’s carbon footprint looks promising

While it’s unlikely that Bitcoin will ever switch to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, its operations should continue to become greener. Driven by profits, Bitcoin miners are going to utilize whichever energy source is cheapest and most efficient. Thankfully for us and Mother Earth, renewable are trending in that direction.

Some efforts to reduce Bitcoin’s carbon footprint aren’t focused on Bitcoin at all. Several cryptocurrency teams have chosen to shy away from Proof-of-Work (i.e., mining) as a method of verification, implementing other consensus mechanisms, such as Proof-of-Stake, instead.

As a quick reminder, Proof-of-Stake effectively allows you to verify transactions and maintain the blockchain network by staking your cryptocurrency. If you try to approve a transaction that the majority of other participants reject, you lose the crypto that you’ve staked. There’s no mining involved.

When you remove mining, a blockchain’s energy consumption, and therefore carbon emissions, drops significantly. As you can imagine, there are quite a few cryptocurrencies taking advantage of this fact.

Most notably, the Ethereum blockchain will soon switch to Proof-of-Stake from its current Proof-of-Work mechanism. In doing so, researchers estimate that the network will consume just one percent of the energy that it does today.

It’s possible that a cryptocurrency that utilizes Proof-of-Stake (or another non-mining consensus mechanism) could dethrone Bitcoin as the top option. If so, we’ll see a dramatic reduction in not just Bitcoin’s carbon footprint but the carbon footprint of the entire blockchain industry.

Connect with the expert team for more information https://bit.ly/2B32Az7

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