Bill Gates is incessantly warning the world about the dangers of climate change. After talking about the recommendation to eat synthetic meat, he is now giving his comments about Bitcoin.
Gates said in a live Clubhouse session that Bitcoin is consuming an alarming lot of energy.
‘Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind, so this is not a good thing for the climate problem,’ Gates told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, Monday (15/3/2021).
On the same occasion, Gates admits that he is more interested in investing in products that are beneficial to people, such as the malaria vaccine and measles vaccine.
Quoting Forbes, Alex de Vries, a data scientist at the Dutch Central Bank, echoed Bill Gates. He estimates that each bitcoin transaction requires an average of 300 kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) – the equivalent of the carbon footprint generated by Visa’s roughly 750,000 swipes.
That’s because nearly all cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, document every transaction on what is called a public ledger, which helps ensure transactions are transparent and safe from tampering. Note, however, that this constantly takes up additional storage space or ‘blocks’.
The blocks are created by miners, who are awarded Bitcoin, as a reward after hard work running code around the clock on special hardware called rigs, a process that consumes the same amount of energy each year (about 78.5 terawatt-hours).
As cryptocurrencies become more popular, their energy consumption has jumped 10 times since 2017.
Now, did you know that it turns out that a single Bitcoin transaction uses about 707.6 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy – the equivalent of 24 days of power consumed by an average US household, according to Digiconomist? Every year, Bitcoin consumes more energy than almost any country in the world (except 38 countries), in line with countries like Finland, Chile, and Austria.