Mother Nature hates HODLers

If you’re in the Bay Area, you’ve been covered in a ton of smoke over the past few days. WIldfires have been raging and increasing in intensity over the last few years, a byproduct of climate change. What does this have to do with crypto? Well, as a HODLer and participant in the crypto world, you could be helping to destroy the environment — via mining. In fact, it was recently determined this week that Bitcoin mining consumes three times the energy of gold mining!

For the uninitiated, it takes energy to mine Bitcoin — a ton of energy. In order to mine Bitcoin, you have to do a “competition” to solve a pointless math equation. To prove that you’ve earned the Bitcoin, you are issued a computational challenge. At first, this wasn’t an issue as the mathematical challenges were easier — so you could easily use your laptop to do this.

Today, it has gotten much more complex and challenging to mine, thus using much more power. These days, to mine Bitcoin, you need to essentially build your own mini data center of sorts, with stacks of hard drives testing infinite combinations to get crypto gold. This could become an issue down the line, and folks should look into using more alternatives to Proof of Work such as Proof of Stake. Otherwise, things could start getting a lot warmer.

For more articles like these and crypto-related events in the SF Bay Area, please sign up for our free weekly newsletter at thepublickey.io.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Our sponsors:

Are you a developer seeking to dive into the blockchain space where you can have a disruptive impact on society and make a high-end six-figure salary?

There are currently 14 open jobs for every Blockchain Engineer.
Condense months of independent struggle and research into just one week with a curated Blockchain development experience as part of The Den’s premiership course: Blockchain Professional Developer Bootcamp. Get a $300 discount with the Key ‘s promo code: Monero39.