After an article in Nature Climate Change column, it is confirmed that Bitcoin’s mining could raise the world temperature by 2°C in less than thirty years, there were reactions from analysts on this report during Monday along with the reviews of climate experts and Crypto lovers who did not think the study’s arguments were very strong.
A research team from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, led by Camilo Mora and Randi Rollins, in an article entitled “Only Bitcoin emissions could drive global warming above 2 °C”, points out that if the planned use of the Bitcoin network followed the same rate as the introduction of other massively adopted technologies, “it could generate CO2 emissions to increase global warming to above 2°C in less than three decades”.
The study reports were presented on Monday by numerous media around the world, which in turn provoked reactions from Bitcoiners, ecosystem members, analysts and climate experts. The @nic_carter’s next tuit thread highlights some methodological flaws in the publication:
On to the 'paper'. It's… three pages, published under the 'comment' section. So, not really a paper. The section on how they estimated Bitcoin's energy use is 357 words. Here's how they guessed at Bitcoin's emissions: pic.twitter.com/pWm2Vd8Wiq
— nic carter 🧊 (@nic__carter) October 29, 2018
The possible resolution of global warming caused by cryptocurrency mining
Carter shows a paragraph from the study, in which researchers from the University of Hawaii explain how they calculate energy consumption per extracted block in 2017 and recommends that researchers “do a real study” because it is virtually impossible to accurately calculate CO2 emissions from mining equipment. “You don’t have to be a genius to realize that it’s not right to naively assume that mining companies follow their countries’ energy consumption patterns perfectly,” he said in the tweet.
Bitcoin, for example, consumes more energy than a number of homes, according to several reports, including one from the International Energy Agency. The Digiconomist site, which created a Bitcoin energy consumption index, also shows that a single Bitcoin transaction consumes enough electricity to power eight American homes for an entire day. In other words, Bitcoin is a serious environmental issue identified by the new study precisely in terms of its impact on global warming.
How CO2 emission is calculated in the study?
Based on the analysis of this data, the researchers found that Bitcoin produced 69 million tonnes of CO2 last year. To predict Bitcoin’s environmental footprint, researchers at the University of Hawaii examined the acceptance of popular new technologies in the United States, some with extremely fast acceptance (such as credit cards) and others with slow acceptance (such as dishwashers). If Bitcoin is used at the average rate of these technologies, the study says it could produce enough CO2 emissions to heat the planet by 2°C in just 16 years. And even if it had the lowest acceptance rate, researchers say it would reach the same threshold in 22 years. It is important to note that these projections assume that the ratios of fuels and renewable energies to electricity generation will remain the same in two decades.