The Bitcoin is the Hummer of speculative vehicles; let's hope it doesn't make it to its Bar Mitzvah.
On 31 October, 2008, someone calling him or herself Satoshi Nakimoto published the Bitcoin White Paper, which started the Bitcoin craze. Since then Bitcoin has grown like mad, burning tons of terawatts of electric power. It's not a bug, but a feature; as Alex Hern of the Guardian explained,
Burning huge amounts of electricity isn’t incidental to bitcoin: instead, it’s embedded into the innermost core of the currency, as the operation known as “mining”. In simplified terms, bitcoin mining is a competition to waste the most electricity possible by doing pointless arithmetic quintillions of times a second.
Now a new paywalled study published in Nature Climate Change concludes that Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C. A team at the University of Hawaii analyzed the power used for Bitcoin and according to the press release,
Researchers also studied how other technologies have been adopted by society, and created scenarios to estimate the cumulative emissions of Bitcoin should it grow at the rate that other technologies have been incorporated.
The team found that if Bitcoin is incorporated, even at the slowest rate at which other technologies have been incorporated, its cumulative emissions will be enough to warm the planet above 2°C in just 22 years. If incorporated at the average rate of other technologies, it is closer to 16 years.
Digiconomist/Screen capture
