The Cost of Bitcoin
You may have made a couple hundred bucks by buying and selling a fraction of a Bitcoin or heard of others doing the like, but you might not have realized the ethical environmental trade-offs and successful marriage requirements.
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), 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 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 determined that total Bitcoin mining 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 they often come at a cost to the environment. Even if you have heard it a million times, I’ll tell you again — climate change and global warming is a reality and is prominent during our lifetime, and Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies reinforce it. As Floridi argues in Ethics after the Information Revolution, 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-dioxide emissions and power consumption only increases. If the economy consumes too much of the environment, our welfare and well-being of the world suffers. Skewing this balance further will be devastating to our habitat, which questions the ethics of why mining was created.
Floridi also highlights that the “greenest machine is a machine with 100% energy efficiency”. It seems improbable that cryptocurrency could exist as an information technology with 100% energy efficiency — cryptocurrency comes with mining, and mining will always consume energy. However, even if we can’t eliminate the carbon footprint completely we can still be stewards of nature. The way it currently consumes energy can be made more efficient by using renewable energy. We can work towards reducing the carbon-dioxide emissions a little bit at a time in cryptocurrency and other information technologies to create a thriving environment.
Works Cited
Baraniuk, Chris. “Bitcoin’s Energy Consumption ‘Equals That of Switzerland’.” BBC News, BBC, 3 July 2019, www.bbc.com/news/technology-48853230.
