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The title makes quite a statement, but which comes to no-one as a surprise surely. That is the insane kilowatt hour (KWh) consumption per transaction of BTC, which is 707. Using Visa requires 149 KWh for 100,000(!) transactions, and BTC roughly 70-74 million times more energy compared to a one made with Visa.
Yes, of course banks, fiat currencies, and the traditional money is not green neither. But as we have now seen from the example set up by El Salvador with Bitcoin, the cryptos are more undoubtably here to stay.
So what we can do then, use renewable energy, like solar power? Definitely we should all gravitate towards that, and if you have solar panels at home, you should look into Solarcoin! Still the root problem remains, that is Proof-of-Work which is wasteful by design and is unnecessary. If we want to reduce waste, our main priority should be preventing it from happening altogether by rethinking and redesigning. The less wasteful the process is the better, and after that is taken care of we should focus on secondary issues like using renewables, which is the right direction, but not as good as not minimizing the amount of waste in the first place.
Digital assets such as Bitcoin have a considerable environmental footprint, due to the amount of energy required to power the algorithms behind them. While this could theoretically be done using renewable energy, in reality it usually isn’t. China is a leading player in mining for Bitcoin, and 60% of the energy it uses to do so is powered by coal.
Think about the enormous scale of cryptocurrencies, and the growing demand for Bitcoin mining, and you can see the problem. Currently, blockchain-based currencies are using as much energy as many small countries, yet their popularity continues to grow. And as demand increases, so too will the energy requirements of this industry.
This makes Proof-of-Stake with its redesigned decentralized network validation hundreds of times less wasteful. And this is important. This is the way for cryptocurrencies with a more secure future, and a proper place in there. I am not too much of an expert on these, though some kind of a scientist I am, but I feel these less energy consuming alternatives is where investments should be made. If you are in the situation of being able to invest money monthly in cryptos or stocks, why not put at least some of it into sustainable options?
I wish you closed this post right away, if your thoughts on climate change are that it is fake nor a huge human crisis as well as for the major part of the nature, which we are destroying and continuing to do so, and supporting these other, better alternatives and withdrawing funds from those that are not is something I recommend people to think about. This post is not about showing what lies ahead of us, if we are not both making changes and demanding them.
I hope PUBLISH0X hops into this and I'd love to see an option for maybe exchanging one or all of the current coins into something eco-friendlier, though Ether (62.56 KWh) is not as bad as BTC, we need to reduce the costs still: as much we can!
Given the public-private hybrid XinFin blockchain, XDC is a super-secure, completely-decentralized, and hyper-fast cryptocurrency with more than 2000 transactions-per-second and a one-click installer. The XDPoS consensus ensures that while the minting of XDC coins and stable decentralized network consumes as much energy as a word-processor, it can also be completed within seconds, making it a highly energy-efficient process.
The article "XDC: The ideal coin for Green Energy and the Renewables Sector", published three years ago, clearly shows that cryptocurrencies are not doomed in any way, but some of them are as they're not just sustainable enough.
I'd love to hear thoughts on the subject, learn more, and hear about good options to look into!
