What’s causing the emissions explosion?
Bitcoin miners are the reason for the ugly energy report card. Bitcoin has no central bank. It’s a peer-to-peer decentralized network for digital currency. Bitcoin purchases generate blocks of data. It’s like a folder with a complicated math problem inside as the key. A miner is simply anyone who wants to join the Bitcoin network and owns powerful Bitcoin processing hardware necessary to support the software capable of solving the key and verifying the Bitcoin. This makes Bitcoin super hard to counterfeit. As compensation for providing this level of computationally intensive security, miners get a percentage of the Bitcoins they verify. But verification takes an enormous amount of energy and as Bitcoin gets more broadly adopted, the energy demands increase perilously. The current analysis suggests mining data for profit is even more destructive to the planet than mining the planet itself for profit.
