Is Bitcoin bad for the environment

It’s hard to track the energy supply of Bitcoin and similarly incentivised blockchains, though, the use of Blockchain is not necessarily going to cause a climate catastrophe.

Blockchain and Distributed Ledger technology are rapidly evolving and unlikely to cause climate catastrophe. We could, however, improve the measurement of the energy supply for blockchain technologies.

On the one hand we have the main mud slingers like Alex de Vries, a blockchain specialist and proprietor of Digiconomist, backing claims that Bitcoin is bad for the environment. 

On the other side of the muddy coin we have the CoinShares report which needed to draw on sources like surveys, interviews, news reports and bitcoin network’s performance estimates, when it concluded that three-quarters of bitcoin’s electricity comes from renewables.

To clear up the noise it might be helpful to draw attention to the longer term social, economic and organisational benefits of technologies like the blockchain to help the wider public understand that it’s a rapidly evolving system that’s becoming ever more efficient in systems design and architecture and energy efficiency.