Beyond the huge quantity of power utilized in the bitcoin mining procedure, the cryptocurrency has a different significant difficulty – producing tons of electronic waste. The per year e-waste, as of Tuesday, stood at 22.59 metric kilotons (2.25 crore kilogram) comparable to the tiny IT gear waste of the Netherlands, showed Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Electronic Waste Monitor. “The reason for this is that Bitcoin mining is done with specialized (singular purpose) hardware, which becomes obsolete roughly every 1.5 years,” it stated. The e-waste recorded an all-time higher of 30.39 metric kiloton (3.07 crore kilogram) on May 9, this year ahead of it slipped to 14.99 metric kiloton on June 29 – the lowest due to the fact June 2019 levels, information showed.
In truth, bitcoin generates 242.50 grams of typical e-waste per transaction processed on the blockchain. That’s equivalent to the weight of 1.48 iPhones 12 or .49 iPads. Explaining how bitcoin generates e-waste, Digiconomist stated that inside the bitcoin network, all of the participating mining machines are competing with every other for the reward of producing a new block for bitcoin’s underlying blockchain. The opportunity of building a new block for the blockchain is proportional to one’s share of the total computational energy.
“In such an environment, miners can only compete in terms of cost-efficiency. Mining machines require energy for the task of generating hashes. Therefore, the efficiency of this hardware is determined by the amount of electricity required to complete a certain amount of computations. The more computations per unit of energy, the more profitable a machine can be. This has caused a rat race to develop more efficient mining hardware,” it added.
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In comparison to the 242.50 grams of typical e-waste generated by 1 bitcoin transaction, 10,000 Visa transactions create only 40 grams of e-waste. “The only way to make Bitcoin truly sustainable is to replace its mining mechanism. Alternatives to this (e.g. Proof-of-Stake) are already available and used by an array of alternative cryptocurrencies,” the monitor stated.
According to a current study report by Bloomberg, the total energy consumed by the bitcoin network has currently crossed the 2020 consumption level of about 67 terawatt-hours (TWh) and by the finish of 2021, the mining is anticipated to consumed 91TWh of energy — as much as Pakistan. As per the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index by the University of Cambridge, bitcoin’s energy consumption is closely linked to the economic fees incurred in mining as effectively as bitcoin’s anticipated price tag trajectory.