I Spoke to the Experts. Bitcoin Isn’t Going to Change.

I Spoke to the Experts. Bitcoin Isn’t Going to Change.

The people behind Bitcoin, the No. 1 cryptocurrency by market value (and renown), are under heavy pressure to reduce its carbon footprint — the planet-warming emissions from burning fossil fuels for electricity to run the network’s computations, known as mining. I spoke with people on both sides of the argument and came away thinking that Bitcoin is highly unlikely to change its fundamental way of operating.

Bitcoin feels wasteful to a lot of people because its security depends on buying lots of specialized computing hardware that’s useless for any other purpose and then running it hard, which consumes joules and joules of electricity. The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance calculates that Bitcoin mining, on the whole, consumes slightly more energy than gold mining, which is a fair comparison, since both Bitcoin tokens and gold are pitched as alternatives to fiat currencies such as the US dollar. Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity than Norway but slightly less than Egypt, the center says, and accounts for 0.62 percent of the world’s total electricity consumption.

Here is a mind-blowing stat about Bitcoin: Every second, the Bitcoin network performs about 200 quintillion hashes, which are essentially guesses about a certain very long string of digits. There’s