A recent tweet by genius entrepreneur Elon Musk has pushed Bitcoin harshly in a sharp downfall. There could be many motives for doing so but what's most interesting here is, Tesla Inc owned by Elon, which only three months ago in February revealed that it has bought Bitcoin worth 1.5 billion USD and announced purchase of Tesla cars with BTC suddenly goes back on their announcement declaring BTC unsafe for environment today only.
Below are tweets from Elon's official twitter account :-
Tesla Inc announces discontinuing car purchase with BTC!!!!!!!!
Environmental stats :
Shaken BTC :
With these two tweets only, bitcoin is thrashed badly like nothing in a while. Bitcoin registered a single day price fall by 17% in just two hours of the tweet and every since the investors with bitcoin as their fortune are awe struck. Earlier in February, Cambridge University Researches study suggested that BTC uses 121.36 TWH (terra watt hour) a year which is equal to Argentina's yearly electricity consumption. Thus, BTC uses electricity much as a country itself to be produced. It's worth questioning the future of currency itself if energy alternatives other than fossil energy are not adopted for mining.
Energy consumption data on BTC as per Cambridge University : -
Bitcoin sure is killing environment but Musk in is tweet also mentioned that they are now looking for cryptocurrencies with power consumption less than 1% that what Bitcoin consumes per transaction.
Talking some stats here, Bitcoin uses 707KWh per transaction while the Elon's new star, " 'hustle' :- dogecoin" consumes 0.12KWh per transaction which is surely less than 7.07KWh(1% of what BTC consumes). So is dogecoin gonna be new star.
In feb only, Musk posted a tweet about buying some dogecoin for his toddler :
Here's a recent post from Elon's account about people's poll on whether Tesla should accept doge :
The biggest thing which matter is should Doge be considered ideal for investment right at this time. Maybe, Elon alone can take it to new heights. FYI, dogecoin currently is at 0.389744 USD.
A little something on energy consumption :
Fossil fuels : These are the fuels obtained from fossils deposited over time. They are regarded as non-renewable sources of fuel because it take millions of years for them to be obtained. Their examples include coal, oil and gas.
How much of them are left? :
The data above clearly tells how long before we run out of these. Now use of coal for mining of bitcoin is a serious threat actually. When bitcoin mining rises, to balances the price, the puzzle being solve is made more difficult thus increasing the complexity need to be spend to gain rewards from mining. Thus, machine power needs to be amplified which in turn will again increase energy consumption.
Also, rising rewards from the change in the puzzle will attract more miners which will increase the machines on the mining network again.
Mostly, the mining power needs are fulfilled with coal which in turn increases the carbon emission in the environment which itself is a huge problem, global warming and concerning rise in global temperature, whole lot of misery again.
Alternatives regarding energy transition :
Go solar : Each hour Earth gets 430 quintillion Joules of energy from the sun. Thats a pretty big number actually : 430000000000000000000! In comparison, the total amount of energy that all humans use in a year is 410 quintillion Joules(data from year 2015).
Seeing the figures, even if the population has risen, there is a lot of potential in solar energy. Though it would require some extra investment but advancements bring with them their own costs which BTC might face in some way.
Imposing carbon emission taxes on BTC : Considerable emission taxes can be imposed on BTC which will effect its usage but can be adopted to save mother earth.
Thanks for reading!!
sources :
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-reserves-left
