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Extracting a cryptocurrency value of one dollar as bitcoins from the deep Web consumes three times more energy than digging a gold dollar, according to the researchers.
Now there are hundreds of virtual currencies and an unknown number of server farms all over the world that run all day to bring them to light, more than half of them in China, according to a study by the University of Cambridge.
Virtual currencies extracted with real value, in other words, entail a hidden environmental cost that is rarely measured or taken into account.
"We now have a whole new industry that consumes more energy in the year than many countries," said Max Krause, a researcher at the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education and lead author of the study published in the journal. Sustainability of nature.
"In 2018, bitcoin is on track to consume more energy than Denmark," he told the France-Presse agency.
Denmark consumed 31.4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2015. Starting from 1 July of this year, bitcoin mining used about 30.1 billion kilowatt-hours, according to the study.
The highly competitive practice of mining cryptocurrencies requires hundreds, even tens of thousands, of connected computers that perform intensive calculations in search of the internet's equivalent of precious metals.
New coins are assigned to those who complete the calculations first, with the transaction confirmed and entered into the public shared ledger of the digital currency, known as blockchain.
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The first 100 cryptocurrencies have a current market value of around US $ 200 billion, according to the site coinmarketcap.com. Bitcoin accounts for more than half of this amount.
"We wanted to spread awareness about potential environmental costs for mining cryptocurrencies," said Krause. "Just because you're creating a digital product, that does not mean it does not consume a lot of energy to make it".
The films, music and videos that billions of people broadcast online every day all have measurable environmental costs, they have shown previous research.
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For the study, Krause and Thabet Tolaymat, an environmental engineer based in Cincinnati, Ohio, have calculated the average energy consumed to create a US dollar value of four major virtual currencies – bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and monero – in the # 39th span of the 30 months following June of this year.
That sum was 17, 7, 7 and 14 million joules, or megajoules (MJ), respectively.
A joule is a unit of energy equivalent to the work required to produce one watt of power for a second.
Up to three times the energy needed to dig gold, platinum or copper was found. Among the metals examined, only aluminum – at 122 MJ for each dollar – was more energetic.
It takes 556 days of processing and a heavy energy bill to extract a single bitcoin. Is it worth it?
A complete calculation of the environmental cost of virtual currencies would take into account the computer banks used to extract them.
"Computers are made of gold and other precious metals," Krause said. "They are aggressively managed, which means that the hardware is destroyed much more quickly than you or I would expect for regular use, maybe a year instead of five or ten."
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