The debate surrounding the energy consumption of bitcoin (BTC) mining has existed for a long time. The news about Tesla not accepting bitcoin anymore and China banning bitcoin mining caused this debate to become more serious. The big question in this whole discussion; does Bitcoin waste electricity?
Bitcoin as a battery of value
Let’s look at this issue from a different perspective. It is indeed easy to state that Bitcoin consumes a lot of electricity. But is it true that this energy is “wasted”? For starters, the energy is consumed to run a global decentralized financial network. An easy counterargument would be to ask how much banks and other financial institutions worldwide consume.
Bitcoin miners may be an answer to the waste of renewable energy. Solar, wind, and hydro are sustainable energy sources that don’t generate a consistent output. When people don’t need it, they may generate a lot of electricity. What happens when no one uses it? It is wasted. A solution for this waste would be integrating bitcoin miners in the grid that kick in once there is an electricity surplus.
In that sense, Bitcoin can serve as a battery of value. The electricity surplus is converted into bitcoin, which can then be sold on the global market. A more straightforward solution if you compare it to selling the electricity surplus itself on the open market, as you’ll need infrastructure to do so. Bitcoin mining can, therefore, especially for remote regions, be an excellent solution to make sustainable energy more cost-effective.
Bitcoin mining helps prevent flaring on oil fields
As a society, we will have to face the fact that fossil fuels will be a part of our economy for at least a little while. Also, here, bitcoin mining can offer a solution. When extracting oil from the ground, a byproduct is natural gas. Often, however, this gas can’t be transported to be used for electricity generation for the sole reason that it is economically unviable to do so.
Oil companies either flare this gas, meaning it gets burned, leading to harmful emissions, or simply vented into the environment. Both ways of handling natural gas are extremely harmful. The solution mining offers here is using this gas on-site to mine bitcoin.
In other words, while bitcoin mining does consume a lot of electricity, the network has the potential to make sustainable energy sources more economically viable. On top of that, it can make the traditional extraction of fossil fuels more environmentally friendly.
By Editor Team of GRN Energy. Please read our article also on Linkedin.
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