Bitcoin Mining Has A Bad Impact On The Environment, Needs More Strict Regulation

Bitcoin mining creates environmental damage. (photo: dock. pexels)

Bitcoin mining consumes a large amount of energy, providing these assets with a bad reputation as a threat to the environment and accelerating climate change.

A new report from the United Nations found that cryptocurrency mining costs very high in the form of astronomical amounts of water and land.

Global water trails from January 2020 to December 2021 are 1.65 cubic kilometers, 'equivalent to filling more than 660,000 Olympic swimming pools, and more than the current use of domestic water of 300 million people in rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa.'

Traces of mining land in the same period were'more than 1,870 square kilometers, 1.4 times the Los Angeles area.'

Global carbon footprint from 2020 to 2021 is 'equivalent to carbon emissions from 84 billion pounds of burning coal, 190 natural gas power plants, or more than 25 million tons of waste dumped in landfills.'

China and the United States are the biggest violators in the world, using at least 50 percent more resources for their mining operations than other countries.

Most of these costs are related to how electricity is produced. During the 2020 to 2021 period, hydroelectric power supports 16 percent of Bitcoin mining in the world.

Although hydroelectricity is considered a renewable resource, this requires flooding in most areas to build reservoirs for hydroelectric dams. In addition to this land requirement, hydroelectric production also loses a lot of water through evaporation.

It has been previously reported that the carbon footprint of Bitcoin mining rivals beef production and precious metal mining.

This new report shows that 'environmental tracks from BTC mining are not limited to greenhouse gas emissions.'

" Mining" cryptocurrencies by describing how computers around the world solve complex mathematical problems to complete and verify transactions.

This effort can be profitable as cryptocurrency mining rewards miners to verify transactions and bring in more Bitcoins.

Making money from Bitcoin mining depends on abundant cheap energy. For a business to be profitable, the cost of operating mining computers must be lower than mining rewards.

Bitcoin mining supported by natural gas has increased from 15 percent in 2021 to 21 percent in 2022.

"This increase is mainly due to the high dependence of the top BTC mining countries on natural gas for power plants," the report said.

During the 2020 to 2021 research period, China and the United States were at the top of the list of countries that used the most resources and caused the most environmental degradation with a large difference.

The study's authors wrote that there may be benefits from the increasingly digital nature of the global economy. However, as demand for exchange and investment in digital currencies is growing faster than ever before, the world should pay attention to the impact of the hidden environment and be neglected from this increasingly growing sector.

The report warns that the cost of a hidden environment is very worrying, considering that many countries at the top of the list lag behind social and economic justice. Unregulated and taxless mining activities exacerbate inequality in these areas and have longstanding environmental impacts.

Although the data collected for the study, the authors of the report emphasize that the anonymous nature of Bitcoin makes it difficult to track precisely where Bitcoin is mined and who mines it.

To reduce environmental disasters, they recommend that the government work together to create more transparency in cryptocurrency policy.

They also recommend economic and regulatory tools such as taxes and higher energy prices to limit the growth of uncontrolled cryptocurrency mining and force miners to shoulder part of their costs. Thus dissaried from DailyMail.