Speculations ran wild— with opposing views and wild predictions covering seemingly every corner of possibility, from bullish outlooks suggesting crypto could hit up to $500K by the end of this year to the doomsayers suggesting the bubble was just about to burst.
The coin has taken over the imaginations and conversations of those in the environmental sector, energy industry, and the IT crowd as well.
Crushing through a whopping 179.4 exhales per second, nearly seven times the size of the hashrate seen in 2017, a year that heralded the first “Bitcoin Boom”.
ASICs, or Application-Specific Integrated Circuits, are the hardware behind what runs much of the Bitcoin networks mining processes.
Nearly all electronic devices in the world, those that will be built and those that have been, use these microchips.
A crisis felt even by multi-trillion-dollar companies like Ford and Apple, as delays in product launches have stalled from weeks to months.
Despite this new window of opportunity for miners that would have been otherwise outperformed, most Bitcoin mining in the world is still performed in China.
This easily explains why the country hosts several of the world’s largest mining farms, behemoth warehouses fitted with row upon row of ‘mining rigs’, mini, caseless computers that only a true IT geek would recognize.
A study published in Nature estimated that China’s Bitcoin mining rigs could potentially generate a debilitating 130.5 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2024, an amount that rivals that of some of the Carbon-dirtiest countries.
As Bitcoin steadily gains mainstream adoption, many users and proponents are hoping for greener options when it comes to Bitcoin’s mining practices— a demand that they could reasonably see in the short-term future.
This means it’s unlikely that the process could ever be removed from Bitcoin’s process.
These, along with other types of untapped energy source, such as municipal sewage systems, could prove to be the fuel that keeps Bitcoin going and keeping it green.
Renewable energy sources for Bitcoin mining have become of particular interest to miners and everyone else, not only because of their more carbon-friendly paradigms but also because they can keep associated costs of mining down— which means higher returns for miners.
With a reward that halves once roughly every four years, this means that financial incentives for miners also dwindles.
So, while mining will always be a part of the Bitcoin networks’ functionality, rampant energy consumption doesn’t have to be.