One of the often heard accusations about Bitcoin is that it consumes a lot of electricity due to mining. How much it really pollutes has been revealed by a Coinshares research which, according to its calculations, states that today bitcoin mining emits only the 0.08 percent of all carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere worldwide by human activities. In light of the CO2 that human activities emit into the atmosphere every year, that emitted by the mining machines put together is irrelevant, it has no concrete weight. Bitcoin mining pollutes, therefore, but very little. Indeed, so little as to be irrelevant. In the event that it was decided to totally ban bitcoin mining to reduce pollution, the real impact on the environment would be almost zero.
The same research says that the energy consumption of bitcoin at this moment is not predictable, but we must be careful because, already starting from 2040 (in eighteen years) more than 99 percent of all bitcoins will have been mined and since the the vast majority of the energy consumed by bitcoins is basically used to mint new bitcoins, it is foreseeable that in the future less will be consumed, because only what will be used to validate transactions will be consumed Every day 900 bitcoins are minted which are in fact given to the miners as a reward for their work, and given that mining it is a competition in which whoever produces more work wins, or who consumes more, at the moment there is a competition to consume more. By decreasing this figure, significantly, in the next few decades, it is possible that in the more distant future the energy consumption of bitcoin will decrease.
The same research underlines that the co2 emissions of bitcoin mining, since January 2020 have not changed much, this is because more and more renewable energy is being used, therefore that it does not release co2 into the atmosphere and because the mining machines are becoming more efficient. In light of this, the problem of bitcoin’s energy consumption seems to be greatly reduced, because it seems that it has a real substantial concrete impact only in those countries where there is a shortage of electricity. In countries where instead of electricity there is an abundance of it, the problem of bitcoin energy consumption is practically irrelevant We hope that with this data we will stop blaming bitcoin, incorrectly, for having a significant impact on the environment and producing more pollution than it actually generates, taking away the attention from how the blockchain works and what advantages it could give.
