What is the Environmental Impact of Crypto Mining?

A lot of people these days are into cryptocurrency. After all, the popularity of bitcoin made everybody look into what crypto actually is, and made some invest in it. But there has to be a place where all these crypto coins come from. That place is called a crypto mine.

A lot of people have started their own ‘crypto mining rigs’, using a lot of GPUs that are running at full speed 24/7 in order to have the best efficiency. Mining is a slow process, so this has led people to expand their mining rigs, and since all these graphics cards are always in maximum use, it uses a lot of electricity. Some interesting statistics say that bitcoin alone generates 132.48 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually, which easily surpasses the annual energy usage of Norway at 123 TWh in 2020.

The amount of carbon dioxide emitted is of course correlated to how the energy was created, but in 2020 in the USA alone, 0.85 pounds per kWh were created, which is nearly 40 billion pounds of CO2 from bitcoin alone. This shows that crypto does not have a good impact on the environment, it is quite the opposite.

Take a look at this interesting diagram of bitcoin energy use.

Sadly, the mining doesn’t show any signs of slowing down, and people who have already committed too much of their lives to it will only continue to hurt nature in search of financial success. You can freely learn about crypto and invest in it however much you want, but I would seriously advise against mining it. We already have enough problems in this world from vehicles and gas emissions, we do not need any more.