Crypto conferences like Bitcoin 2021 – billed as the biggest bitcoin event in history – have chosen Miami as their host city because the area has rolled out the red carpet for this industry.
But not everyone is onboard with the crypto giddiness being expressed by America’s political class.
According to Digiconomist, a single bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month – which equals roughly a million times more in carbon emissions than a single credit card transaction.
Such currencies require miners to compete to validate transactions on their blockchains, and that takes enormous, power-hungry servers.
The damages Jones and his colleagues pinpointed arise from increased pollutants generated from the burning of fossil fuels used to produce energy.
Last month, a group of 70 climate, economic and racial justice groups wrote a letter to Congress urging leaders to address the climate implications of cryptocurrency.
Crypto-related mining already has an impact on local communities such as Seneca Lake, New York, and Limestone and Jonesborough in Tennessee, through environmental destruction, noise pollution and plummeting property value, the letter says.
Environmental groups say the extra pressure on Texas’s grid could cause more blackouts of the sort that happened in February, when households were plunged into dark and freezing circumstances.