Bitcoin Mining contributes heavily to climate change

Bitcoin’s 2017 meteoric price rise has received major press attention with a lot of discussion around whether or not it’s a bubble waiting to burst. However, most the coverage has missed out one of the more interesting and unintended consequences of this price increase. That is the surge in global electricity consumption used to “mine” more Bitcoins.

According to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, as of Monday June 25th, 2018 Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption stands at 71.2TWh. That’s the equivalent of 0.32% of total global electricity consumption, making it the 41st biggest electricity consumer as compared to all countries of the world. To put this into context, every single Bitcoin transaction can be attributed to about EUR 50.00 of energy costs (based on the viennese cost of electricity for about 1.011 KWh per transaction). Or every single Bitcoin transaction consumes the same amount of electricity as about 600.000 VISA transactions!

Updated data as per December 8th, 2019

Bitcoin’s biggest problem is perhaps not even its massive energy consumption, but the fact that most mining facilties in Bitcoin’s network are located in regions (primarily in China) that rely heavily on coal-based power (either directly or for the purpose of load balancing). To put it simply: “coal is fueling Bitcoin” (Stoll, 2019). So we decided to shift our attention (and awareness campaign) from the "TerawattHours" of energy consumption towards the climate crisis relevant numbers of carbon footprint (all data is of course still available at Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index ).

We cannot support this behaviour

As responsible and globally active enterprise, we decided to take a stand and do not support this waste of energy and threat to our global climate.

So we decided to neither accept this CryptoCurrency nor use it - as an enterprise or as individual human beings. As specialists in developing payment solutions for webshops, we also refuse to embed Bitcoin payment services into our solutions. We further actively advocate this decision to our customers and business partnerns and ask them to join us in working against global climate change.

Status as per june 21, 2019: 67,5 TWh, 359.000 VISA transactions,

Status as per Monday December 15th, 2017