ACCORDING TO A PAPER PUBLISHED IN THE journal Scientific Reports, the mining of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is environmentally unsustainable because of the huge amount of electricity it requires. Mining has at times created harm to the environment not only greater than beef farming and other industries, but also greater than the value of the currencies produced.
This energy use “is because of the proof-of-work production process that [Bitcoin] uses,” Benjamin A. Jones, an associate professor at the University of New Mexico’s Department of Economics and co-author of the paper, tells. Bitcoin mining uses an estimated
