Report: Justine Calma. Image: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images
"Bitcoin mines aren’t just energy-hungry, it turns out they’re thirsty, too. The water consumption tied to a single Bitcoin transaction, on average, could be enough to fill a small backyard pool, according to a new analysis. Bitcoin mines are essentially big data centers, which have become notorious for how much electricity and water they use. (...)
All in all... cryptocurrency mining used about 1,600 gigaliters of water in 2021 when the price of Bitcoin peaked at over $65,000. That comes out to a small swimming pool’s worth of water (16,000 liters), on average, for each transaction. It’s about 6.2 million times more water than a credit card swipe."
"Bitcoin mines aren’t just energy-hungry, it turns out they’re thirsty, too. The water consumption tied to a single Bitcoin transaction, on average, could be enough to fill a small backyard pool, according to a new analysis. Bitcoin mines are essentially big data centers, which have become notorious for how much electricity and water they use. (...)
All in all... cryptocurrency mining used about 1,600 gigaliters of water in 2021 when the price of Bitcoin peaked at over $65,000. That comes out to a small swimming pool’s worth of water (16,000 liters), on average, for each transaction. It’s about 6.2 million times more water than a credit card swipe."
There’s another way to get the cryptocurrency to use a fraction of the water and electricity it eats up now and slash greenhouse gas emissions: get rid of the mining process altogether and find a new way to validate transactions. That’s what the next biggest cryptocurrency network, Ethereum, accomplished last year. (Ethereum just completed The Merge — here’s how much energy it’s saving):
"Ethereum’s electricity use is expected to drop by a whopping 99.988 percent post-Merge, according to the analysis published today by research company Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI). The network was previously using about 23 million megawatt-hours per year, CCRI estimates."
