The energy cost of mining gold, copper is lower than the mining cost of bitcoin

A high school student who came from a small town in India on Monday 5 November threatened to blow up Miami Airport after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) refused to help him recover lost Bitcoin against a US crook.

Needless to say, the madness that surrounds the cryptocurrency is not over yet, even if last December was a great fall. While this incident has alerted both the FBI and the Indian National Investigation Agency (NIA), new investigations suggest that we must be more interested in Bitcoin than a rogue teenager.

According to a new study, Bitcoin extraction consumes more than twice the energy of gold and copper extraction. These numbers are identical for other common currencies of Kyrpto such as Ethereum, Litecoin and Monero. As a reference, the extraction of a cryptographic currency is a calculation process in which a network confirms the transaction and adds a new block to the public ledger called blockchain. The person who uses processing power to add a new block to the register receives an encrypted currency as a reward for their efforts.

Researchers at the Oak Ridge Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio discovered that Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Monero used an average of 17, 7, 7 and 14 million joules of energy to generate $ 1. conventional extraction of aluminum, copper, gold and platinum consumed only 122, 4, 5 and 7 million joules of energy to produce $ 1.

This suggests that the extraction of cryptocurrencies (with the exception of aluminum) requires more energy than the extraction of minerals in order to obtain a corresponding market value. The degradation of the crypto-currencies not only consumed a lot of energy, but also left a large carbon footprint.

To take into account the fluctuations in cryptocurrency prices, researchers have limited their search times from 1 January 2016 to 30 June 2018.

They found that the degradation of all four cryptocurrencies during the period was responsible for 3 to 15 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. They also found that a cryptocurrency extracted in China would produce four times more carbon dioxide than the virtual currency extracted in Canada.

In the long run, the profitability of the encrypted currencies on the market will depend not only on their environmental impact but also on energy consumption.