The Cost of Bitcoin
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining has its ethical trade-offs in terms of societal power and successful marriages.
I’m sure you have seen or heard about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum in media and the wealth people are making from them. To many (including myself a few months ago before a class lecture on blockchain technology), Bitcoin seems just as complicated and sketchy as that one friend who tries to rope you into a pyramid scheme company. To put it simply, it is a currency that can be exchanged just like any other, except people can mine it. That is, they can earn Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies without having to put money down for it.
Unlike the Genie in Aladdin, it takes a lot of guesswork and luck to mine a Bitcoin and because that is hard to achieve on a computer, you need to get a very expensive, very powerful computer — this means high energy consumption and negative environmental impacts. A study by the University of Cambridge estimated that mining Bitcoin uses the same amount of energy that the country of Switzerland uses (Baraniuk, 2019), which is quite the carbon footprint.
You have probably heard of crazy wealth success stories of Bitcoin, but there are societal implications to that both morally and socially. It takes a lot of initial capital to begin mining bitcoin, already setting a socioeconomic standard for starting to mine Bitcoin, and thus narrowing the gap for whom this is an option. As Winner points out in “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, there are two choices in technological change that impact the relative distribution of power, authority and privilege, the second of which has to do with the “arrangement of a technical system”. Changes to cryptocurrency mining and the decision of when to “half” (just know it is a decision) has social and environmental significance on the balance of wealth in time spent mining.
The environmental moral dilemma here is also alarming. As Floridi argues in The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, nature and tech must have a successful marriage — “ information societies … need a healthy, natural environment to flourish”. With the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency mining, the carbon footprint and power consumption only increases. Skewing this balance further will be devastating to our habitat, which questions the ethics of why mining was created.
Works Cited
Baraniuk, Chris. “Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption ‘Equals That of Switzerland’.” BBC News, BBC, 3 July 2019, www.bbc.com/news/technology-48853230.
