The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin

By Christian Stoll, Lena Klaaßen, Ulrich Gallersdörfer. Joule, 2019

446 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Participation in the Bitcoin blockchain validation process requires specialized hardware and vast amounts of electricity, which translates into a significant carbon footprint. Here, we demonstrate a methodology for estimating the power consumption associated with Bitcoin’s blockchain based on IPO filings of major hardware manufacturers, insights on mining facility operations, and mining pool compositions. We then translate our power consumption estimate into carbon emissions, using the localization of IP addresses. We determine the annual electricity consumption of Bitcoin, as of November 2018, to be 45.8 TWh and estimate that annual carbon emissions range from 22.0 to 22.9 MtCO2. This means that the emissions produced by Bitcoin sit between the levels produced by the nations of Jordan and Sri Lanka, which is comparable to the level of Kansas City. With this article, we aim to gauge the external costs of Bitcoin and inform the broader debate on the costs and benefits of cryptocurrencies.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Information Systems, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4dd8fe53cad1826186e0a82508f0ab7285ce58bc

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Information Systems

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Aimee van Wynsberghe

Citations in the corpus

Climate change and COP26: Are digital technologies and information management part of the problem or the solution? An editorial reflection and call to action (2022, result): “These figures are comparable to the carbon dioxide production of entire countries such as Jordan and Sri Lanka (Marr, 2018; Stoll, Klaa ß en, & Gallersd ¨ orfer, 2019).”
Towards the Systematic Reporting of the Energy and Carbon Footprints of Machine Learning (2020, background): “At the application level, some work has already modeled carbon impacts speciﬁcally in computationally intensive settings like bitcoin mining (Krause and Tolaymat, 2018; Stoll et al., 2019; Zade et al., 2019; Mora et al., 2018).”
Cryptodamages: Monetary value estimates of the air pollution and human health impacts of cryptocurrency mining (2020, background): “known concentration is the Mid-Columbia Basin area in central and eastern Washington State, where cheap electricity is produced by hydropower along the Columbia River [4,6], however, mining in other US locations also occurs (see [11] and news references in”
Bitcoin-energy markets interrelationships - New evidence (2020, unknown): “Stoll et al. [2019] found that the four largest Chinese pools now provide almost 50% of the total hashrate, with Bitcoin operating three of such pools.”
The real climate and transformative impact of ICT: A critique of estimates, trends, and regulations (2021, background): “73 Stoll et al.(73) also estimated that other cryptocurrencies would add another 70”