In light of ongoing controversy about the environmental impact of Bitcoin (BTC) mining, the Bitcoin Mining Council (BMC) has published fresh data demonstrating that this impact is low.
As shown in a webcast broadcast on October 18, one of the findings of the BMC’s ‘Worldwide Bitcoin Mining Data Review’ for Q3 2022 is that global BTC mining utilises just 0.16 percent of the world’s energy output.
According to Michael Saylor, creator of BMC and previous CEO of MicroStrategy: Bitcoin consumes a negligible percentage of global energy. This quarter’s figure is 16 basis points (bps) or 0.16 percent of the world’s energy.”
Specifically, the entire amount of energy used globally is 165,317 TWh, but Bitcoin mining only consumes 266 TWh. According to Saylor, one-third of the world’s total energy consumption is wasted, unusable energy, with Bitcoin accounting for “a minuscule proportion” of this.
Comparing this energy use to those of other businesses, the research found that Bitcoin mining consumes less energy than residential and non-residential structures, construction, aircraft, and home appliances in the United States, and gold mining.
However, several other cryptocurrency projects have claimed to consume just a fraction of Bitcoin’s energy use, such as Chia (XCH), whose “green paper” claims it uses only 0.16 percent of Bitcoin’s yearly energy consumption.
In addition, the paper compares the sustainable power mix of the global Bitcoin mining business to that of the world’s leading nations, finding that BMC members and BTC mining are “dramatically higher in the sustainable power mix than Germany or the EU.”
Saylor said that Bitcoin has been the industry leader in sustainability for the last six quarters operating on 59.4% renewable energy. As he emphasised:
It is difficult to find any sector that uses such a high proportion of renewable energy as Bitcoin. In addition, the researchers concluded that Bitcoin mining contributes barely 0.1% of global CO2 emissions. As Saylor pointed out:
Additionally, it produces little carbon emissions – 10 bps. Therefore, 99.9% of the carbon in the world that we can monitor does not originate from Bitcoin. (…) In reality, every business produces more carbon dioxide.”
Interestingly, this is somewhat higher than CoinShares’ January report, which Finbold claimed placed the number at 0.08%.
Wallets