Its energy consumption and the environmental pollution it generates have tarnished the image of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, one of the most innovative financial tools due to its digital and decentralized nature, which adds these criticisms to the stock market ups and downs of recent times.
In the case of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency -created in 2008- and today used by 89 % of those known as "virtual miners" or professionals dedicated to the management of this type of digital currency, the problem is that it implies an annual consumption of 144.28 TWH (Terawatts per hour).
That expense comes from the infrastructures needed to carry out the mining process using supercomputers that require a powerful cooling system to solve the complex calculations that make it possible to validate the transactions and grant the virtual miner a reward in the form of digital money.
Electricity consumption
This is equivalent to 0.66% of the energy produced on the entire planet according to a recent study by the Centre for Alternative Finance at Cambridge University (UK) which indicates that, if instead of a financial resource it was a state, Bitcoin's electricity consumption would place it 27th on the world list in 2019, above countries such as Sweden and Ukraine.
This environmental impact is the reason used a few days ago by the billionaire and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, to justify his change of direction regarding the use of this cryptocurrency: "a good idea..., but not at the expense of a great cost to the environment", as he explained in a publication on the social network Twitter when announcing why his company would stop accepting it as a means of payment.
Previously, Tesla's decision to acquire $1.5 billion worth of bitcoins for internal operations and liquidity pushed the digital currency above $58,000 this May: the subsequent reversal of its decision due to "concerns about the rapid increase in the use of fossil energy, especially coal for mining and transactions" has reduced its value to around $32,000.
Renewable energy
Although 76 % of the miners surveyed during the Cambridge studies claimed to use, in part, renewable energies, the available data show that hydroelectric was by far the most employed by cryptocurrency users to carry out their operations (62 %), followed by that of renewable sources (38 %) and natural gas (37 %).
Despite this, the country manager or national director of the cryptocurrency bank Bit2Me, Javier Pastor, explained that the traditional financial system - about banks and fiat money - "is much more polluting than cryptocurrencies" but "they criticize the latter because they constitute a competitor", which is becoming stronger and stronger.
According to Pastor, "many" of the cryptocurrencies allow 'tokens' or authentication factors to be set "representing their CO2 energy consumption, which can later be bought by people to offset their energy expenditure".
Alternative currencies
However, other digital currencies known as 'altcoins' or 'alternative currencies' seem more environmentally friendly, as in the case of 'Ethereum', the second virtual currency with the highest market value that according to the specialized portal Statista processed in 2020 more than three times as many transactions as Bitcoin.
Despite this volume of business, its expenditure on electricity was one-third of that of its competitor, according to a study published by the magazine 'Nature Sustainability'.
Another even "cleaner" alternative currency is 'Algo', with which 'ClimateTrade' works, whose CEO, Francisco Benedito, pointed out that Bitcoin requires 150 kilowatts for each transaction, while our cryptocurrency only uses 0.02″.
Benedito is convinced, however, that digital currencies will be "less polluting every day, thanks to the creation of protocols that imply not having to be with the computer constantly generating the cryptocurrency" and in the future "the most polluting blockchain -shared databases- will no longer be used.
