If Bitcoin is adopted at rates similar to other technologies, like credit cards, it could increase global temperatures by two degrees Celsius by 2033 according to a study published on Monday in Nature Climate Change. To put this in perspective, a recent climate change report from the United Nations found that a temperature increase of over 1.5 degrees Celsius would lead to irreversible, catastrophic climate effects.
Bitcoin requires massive amounts of energy to run the computers that secure the record of transactions that have occurred on the network, which are stored in a digital ledger called a blockchain. Each computer is simultaneously searching for the solution to a complex math problem—a process known as mining since the first computer to solve the problem is rewarded with newly-minted Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s environmental footprint has been a serious point of criticism for years, mostly thanks to the work of the Dutch economist Alex de Vries. De Vries’ work has long lived on his blog Digiconomist, and more recently in Joule, a peer-reviewed academic journal. As Motherboard has previously reported, de Vries’ research has found that Bitcoin’s energy consumption likely roughly equivalent to the energy needs of Austria and may be more resource intensive than mining gold.
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