Costs are not always monetary, but hurt nearly as much. From NewScientist (9 December 2023) comes the story of another valuable resource being used:
Buying or selling bitcoin uses 16,000 litres of clean water for every single transaction, which could exacerbate existing droughts around the world. While the energy consumption and carbon emissions produced by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been well studied, this is the first assessment of its water use and wider environmental impact.
Of course, the water doesn’t disappear; it’s generally used to cool computers or the power plants generating the electricity used by the computers. But still, Alex de Vries, the author of the article, makes a bold statement:
While bitcoin’s water consumption is a huge environmental problem, it pales in comparison with its energy demands, says de Vries. “The mining devices are effectively just generating random numbers all day long, and they just throw them all away and nothing – nothing – useful comes out,” he says.
I’ll guess the cryptocurrency fans will be unhappy to see such a statement.
