Introduction

The energy use of Bitcoin is a very controversial topic. Various studies have shown that Bitcoin uses enough energy to power an American home for six weeks. Today we will be looking at how we got here, a couple clean alternatives to Bitcoin, and finally, boring statistics.

How we got to this point

Bitcoin was created in January 2009, and in 2017 experienced it's first rise. At the time, the all-time high was around $10,000 per coin. Now, it's $68,000. As you can imagine, the only way to get Bitcoin is to buy it. So the creator made another option. Mining. Unfortunately, mining uses a lot of energy. And I mean a lot. For some people, mining uses so much energy that they actually have no ROI and lose money. Not only that, but due to the nature of Bitcoin, 1 transaction uses enough energy to power an entire home for six weeks. Due to this, people created clean alternatives, which I will list two of.

Two clean alternatives to Bitcoin

• Nano

Nano is one of the most well known clean coins. It is feeless and has instant payments. The only takeaway is that it does not rely on mining, so you won't be able to earn passive mining income for Nano.

• Ravencoin

Ravencoin is a clean coin designed to be an easy to mine coin, even on CPU and low-power GPUs. It is therefore a great option, as you do not need as much power to run it.

Statistics

• 1 transaction ≈ 1,600 kilowatt hours

• Carbon footprint ≈ The entire footprint of the Czech Republic

• One transaction uses 2 iPhone 12s worth of waste.. that's more than $1000 for you.

I just wanted to say that if you liked this article, please upvote. It is my first article. :)