I’m no fan of Bitcoin.

It’s rich people paying smart people to do tricky technological stuff to make the rich people richer and the smart people richer too. All in a regulatory bubble that lets it happen.

Articles like this just highlight the level of abomination we’re talking about:

“Whinstone US Inc., a Louisiana-based developer of high-speed data centers, and Northern Bitcoin AG, a Germany-based bitcoin mining firm, have merged to open a 100-acre bitcoin mining farm in the U.S. state of Texas".
“Jointly announced Monday, Whinstone and Northern Bitcoin said the farm would be the “largest bitcoin mining facility worldwide with a capacity of one gigawatt.” One gigawatt is equal to 1,000 megawatts”.

So, they’re going to fill one hundred acres of land with computers and then run them to “mine” bitcoin.

One gigawatt capacity means that if the “farm” runs at full speed, it uses one gigawatt of electricity every hour.

Let’s have fun and calculate the “farm’s” daily CO2 emissions if it’s running at 50% capacity.

It will be in Texas whose energy mix (2017 data) produces 1166 pounds of CO2 per megawatt hour.

1166 pounds is around 529 kg.

One day’s CO2 emissions for this “farm” running at 50% capacity (i.e., 500 megawatts) are therefore:

529 x 500 x 24 = 6.3 million kgs of CO2 per day.

That’s 2.3 billion kg of CO2 per year. Without even taking into account the CO2 emissions of building 100 acres of computers.

And all this is legal.

If this isn’t evidence 101 that CO2 emissions are massively underpriced, I don’t know what is.

Meanwhile, people are trying to cure cancer, feed the planet, save forests from destruction, live an honest life.

And we let this shit go on on the sideline.

It’s wrong.