Totting up bitcoin’s environmental costs
Without regulation, mining in China could consume as much energy as Italy by 2024
AS COINBASE’S IPO shows, cryptocurrencies have many fans. But they have detractors, too. Environmentalists, in particular, fret about how much energy bitcoin uses. In a paper in Nature Communications, a group of academics led by Dabo Guan of Tsinghua University and Shouyang Wang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences examine bitcoin’s energy use in China. They conclude that, in the absence of legal curbs, bitcoin could by 2024 become a “non-negligible” barrier to China’s efforts to decarbonise its economy.
This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “The dirty truth”
Finance & economics April 10th 2021
- House prices in the rich world are booming
- The IMF marks up the global recovery
- Janet Yellen calls for a global minimum tax on companies. Could it happen?
- Coinbase goes public with a pop
- Totting up bitcoin’s environmental costs
- As China’s stockmarket corrects, regulators try doing less
- Robert Mundell, an influential international economist, has died
- In poor countries, statistics are both undersupplied and underused
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