How will current energy sources sustain crypto-currency?

by Anuran Khan, Feb 15
1 minute read

Medium called blockchain as the most significant technology trend of 2020 and with a rising focus on digitisation and fintechs around the globe, a shift to crypto-currency is foreseen especially when in the last few months the valuation of Bitcoin has soared stupendously.

Elon Musk, an advocate of clean technology, has played a part in this when Tesla invested in Bitcoin.

So what?

Mining cryptocurrencies involves prolonged use of servers and supercomputers which in turn result is huge energy consumption. This is quite unsustainable in the current times where there is still a heavy dependence on limited, polluting sources of non-renewable energy.

More emphasis on crypto-currency will only lead to excessive energy consumption which will have other detrimental effects like air pollution due to burning of fossil fuels to keep the servers running.

Unless, an equal emphasis is given on clean and renewable energy, pushing for crypto-currency is only going to widen the energy imbalance, and a radical shift towards crypto-currency can only impede worldwide efforts to limit global warming.

Sources

Details

Location: United States
Topic: Climate changeEconomy & businessFinanceTransport
Other Tags: Air pollution Blockchain Currency Finance Fossil fuel Supercomputers