76% of miners use renewable energy, but it looks like 39% of all energy used for crypto mining is renewable. Expect that number to grow as we get more breakthroughs in solar and wind energy.
Re: replacement, the digitalization of the economy is definitely replacing legacy infrastructure, just like e-commerce shut down thousands of brick and mortar stores.
Crypto is just starting to hit its mainstream stride, so expect this shift to take another 10–20 years. In the meantime, cryptocurrencies are already greener than the legacy system, and a growing number of cryptonetworks are moving to proof-of-stake systems instead of proof-of-work systems (proof of stake systems use money staking instead of energy burning to secure the network). Ethereum in particular is among them, and Ethereum, not Bitcoin, is where most of the metaverse is currently being built.
In the meantime, the more Bitcoin gets used, the more economic value we get from the same number of transactions, and unlike gold and traditional bank infrastructure, it can scale that way infinitely while everyday transactions move to hyper-efficient layer 2 networks.
And like I mentioned, the demand for energy efficiency is pushing advancements in computing equipment, solar panels, and batteries in ways that drive efficiency improvement across a large number of industries.
Economics is all about incentives. Crypto is incentivized to secure itself as efficiently as possible, driving energy consumption per unit of economic value DOWN over time, even as hashrates climb. We do that by packing more value into each transaction, by making mining hardware more and more energy efficient, by seeking out the most efficient energy sources (which tend to be renewable), and so on.
In the meantime, the legacy system stagnates while crypto improves on all of those fronts orders-of-magnitude every few years.
I care about the environment as much as you do. But it seems obvious to me that the best way to save it is to embrace any change that makes the world’s economic production more efficient. And crypto has the best shot of doing that on a global, macroeconomic scale.
