Researchers have warned against the consequential environmental costs of the huge amount of energy required to digitally mine bitcoins. In 2018, cryptocurrency production will consume more energy than in Denmark, said Max Krause of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. "We have a completely new industry that consumes more energy per year than many countries."
According to a study published by researchers around Krause in the journal Nature Sustainability on Monday, bitcoin mining alone consumed 30.1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity by the middle of this year. In comparison, Denmark had a total electricity consumption of 31.4 billion kilowatt hours in 2015 as a whole.
For cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, posting transactions are cryptographically encrypted in a decentralized database - the so-called blockchain. This requires more and more computational effort. In principle, anyone can participate in these calculations and is paid in Bitcoin shares. This creates new "coins" - the process is therefore referred to as mining.
However, this power-intensive process has long since been dominated by professional actors. About half of the Bitcoin farms are located in China, according to the study. The necessary energy is generated there to a considerable extent by coal.
For their investigation, Krause and co-author Thabet Tolaymat also calculated how much energy Megajoule needs to mine a bitcoin. The effort is thus for one of the digital coins up to three times greater than for the extraction of gold, platinum or copper. Only in the extremely energy-intensive production of aluminum is the balance even worse.