For the uninitiated in the esoteric realm of
cryptocurrency, "mining" is a loose metaphor for what is actually going
on. Indeed, there is no real mining as in extraction of precious ores -
like gold - to make bitcoin. It is rather the continuous use of powerful
computers to keep solving numerical - math problems and conundrums, in 10
minute stretches, to create the basis for generating bitcoin. According
to the website "Investopedia":
"Bitcoin mining is the process by
which new bitcoins are entered into circulation, but it is also a critical
component of the maintenance and development of the blockchain ledger. It is
performed using very sophisticated computers that solve extremely complex
computational math problems. Cryptocurrency mining
is painstaking, costly, and only sporadically rewarding. Nonetheless, mining
has a magnetic appeal for many investors interested in cryptocurrency because
of the fact that miners are rewarded for their work with crypto tokens."
Truth be told the very existence of a
"coin" that- in order to be created - requires vast
fossil fuel energy to be consumed by using immensely powerful computers
to solve ever more complex puzzles shows we have gone through the looking
glass as it were. It shows clearly how the human brain's microglial cells can make people think the very act of computing, for example, is producing actual currency - when it's no more real than Monopoly money. Unless one also factors in its environmental impacts.
Estimates
vary, but the annual crypto-bitcoin footprint is projected to surpass 591 billion gallons of water this
year, according to an article published last month in the peer-reviewed journal
Cell Reports Sustain-ability. For comparison, New York City residents and
businesses consumed 403 billion gallons in 2022, according to the U.S.
Geological Survey.
The bitcoin miners need this water directly to cool their computer
servers and indirectly by running both computers and air-conditioning systems
powered by gas- and coal-fired power plants that require cooling water. Some of
the cooling water used by power plants evaporates and is no longer available
for anything else. In other words, a casualty of a high entropic process.
But why does bitcoin mining require such massive amounts of
energy? During mining, computers generate random numbers in hope of getting the
correct one to unlock fresh bitcoin. The volume of water to support the mining
is an environmental concern, especially in areas that lack freshwater or are at
risk of drought. One single puzzle, if complex enough, can consume enough water for colling to fill several Olympic -size swimming pools. In the words of Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Hamilton, Ontario:
“We are struggling with water shortages around
the world, so having another demand is not something that we would welcome
right now,”
Well uh, yeah, because the water waste from fracking is bad enough! With billions of gallons wasted here in Colorado and other frack states to do the hydraulic fracturing needed to free natural gas and shale oil from hard rock.
Madani examined the environmental impact of
bitcoin mining for the U.N. in a study published in October and found that in
2021, the operations had a global water footprint of 255 billion gallons of
water. Meanwhile, last month an article appeared in the journal Cell Reports
Sustainability which found that global bitcoin mining used 415 billion gallons of
water in 2021 and 591 billion gallons this year.
The author, Alex de Vries, is
a doctoral candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and founder of
Digiconomist, an online platform that tracks environmental impacts of
cryptocurrencies. Madani and de Vries each said getting accurate
data about water use is difficult and attributed differences in their
estimates to having used different data sources and methods.
The U.N. report relied on data from the
International Energy Agency and the University of Cambridge Centre for
Alternative Finance. De Vries used the Cambridge data, compiled publicly
available data from 34 large-scale bitcoin-mining operations in the U.S., and
used estimates taken from previous studies of computer-server operations. In
the U.S., bitcoin mining consumes enough water for 300,000 households a year,
according to de Vries.
This is indeed madness, given an irreplaceable and critical resource (essential for life) is being used to generate a fantasy - one its promoters firmly believe can replace what they disparage as "fiat money". But which they are too purblind to recognize as fiat currency in its own right.
How to get
round the pollution and water impasse? Bitcoin could change its software to
require fewer calculations to mine its currency, significantly reducing its
need for electricity and cooling water, according to Paolo Natali, principal at
the Rocky Mountain Institute. Of course the bitcoin promoting pinheads would then just squeal that the worth of their fiat currency was being "degraded" by too facile puzzles to create it. Nope! They'd demand energy and water intensive computing continue to justify their looney lucre.
In any case, it's all purely academic given bitcoin isn’t owned by a single company, so that any change in the basis of generation would require nearly all parties involved in its maintenance to agree. As Natali puts it in a recent interview with the WSJ:
"Changing the way bitcoin is mined is a bit
unwieldy and unworkable because it will require some consensus among all the
holders of bitcoin, or for them to start trading different currencies."
And god forbid they'd do that. Too big a hit on their infamous fiat coins. Better to continue wasting billions of gallons of our water each year in pursuit of empty bollocks.
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