Bitcoin energy consumption memorandum: Mining reduces the total carbon emissions of human society and accelerates the realization of carbon neutrality

Recently, the debate about redefining Bitcoin as a waste of energy and causing huge environmental damage has once again attracted attention. Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday that Tesla has "paused the use of bitcoin to purchase vehicles" due to concerns about "the rapid increase in fossil fuels used for bitcoin mining." How Climate Issues Are Positively Correlated With Bitcoin Mining?

Bitcoin was born more than eleven years ago, and it is gradually gaining wider institutional and market recognition. While constructive criticism is helpful, we believe that these energy-wasting arguments against Bitcoin are based on outdated data and incomplete analysis.

In this article, we have collected public data from multiple channels including research reports of investment institutions and academic papers, organized and analyzed them, and prepared this memo.

There is a debate over the fact that mining bitcoins through computation produces massive carbon emissions and further contributes to environmental degradation.

According to the data below, the actual consumption of Bitcoin mining is lower than that of gold mining, finance and computer industry.

Ark Investment Management critiques some common misconceptions about Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s energy footprint is an easy draw for criticism. However, from an electricity standpoint alone, Bitcoin is far more efficient than traditional banking and gold mining on a global scale. Traditional banks consume 2.34 billion GJ per year, gold mining consumes 500 million GJ per year, while Bitcoin consumes 184 million GJ, which are less than 10% and 40% of traditional banks and gold mining respectively. Additionally, Bitcoin mining is 40 times more efficient than traditional banking in terms of dollar cost per GJ spent, and 10 times more efficient than gold mining.

BitMEX will fund Exonumia to translate Bitcoin-related content-zce into African languages: On September 30th, the cryptocurrency derivatives exchange BitMEX announced that it will provide no less than $1,500 for translators of the non-profit organization Exonumia to translate Bitcoin-related content-zce into African languages. Content translated into some important African languages. Current priority languages include Swahili, Yoruba, Arabic, Zulu, Shona, Somali, Hausa, Igbo, Berber and Chewa. [2021/9/30 17:18:04]

CoinShares asserts that Bitcoin mining arguably uses more renewable energy than almost every other industry in the world when it comes to total renewable energy use. Use gold and the development of the traditional financial industry to make a more intuitive comparison (see below).

The researchers assume that the energy consumption per kilogram of gold mining is 175GJ, and about 3,100 tons of gold are mined every year. Based on this, the total energy demand for gold mining is calculated to be close to 150TWh per year.

Based on this graph, it can be determined that gold mining requires more energy than Bitcoin mining.

Director of Kraken Business Development: Bitcoin HODLing is not easy, and it is difficult for mainstream financial circles to do it: Kraken Business Development Director Dan Held said on Twitter that people say that Bitcoin HODLers who entered the market early are lucky and do not need to put in effort . This is total bullshit, HODLing couldn't be harder! In the mainstream financial world, who else can insist on holding an asset when it fluctuates 10-40 times up and down 4 times, and then falls by 80%? ! [2020/11/29 22:29:48]

It is important to note that there is an important difference between how much energy a system consumes and how much carbon it emits. While determining energy consumption is relatively simple, without knowing the exact energy mix, the makeup of the different energy sources used by the computers that mine Bitcoin, you can't deduce the associated carbon emissions. For example, each unit of hydroelectric energy will have a much smaller impact on the environment than the same unit of coal-fired energy.

As you can see, projections for the percentage of renewable energy used in Bitcoin mining vary widely. According to a CoinShare report, 73% of Bitcoin’s energy consumption was carbon-neutral in December 2019, largely due to the abundance of hydropower in major mining centers such as Southwest China and Scandinavia.

Voice | U.S. government defense attorney: Bitcoin is doing what it was designed to do: Jake Chervinsky, a U.S. government law enforcement defense and securities litigation attorney, tweeted that Bitcoin is doing what it was designed to do: Fed cut interest rates , the yuan devalued, the currency war escalated, the Dow Jones fell 760 points, losing its January 2018 high, and Bitcoin rallied sharply. [2019/8/7]

In stark contrast to all other fuels, renewable energy used to generate electricity will grow by almost 7% in 2020, according to the International Energy Association (IEA). Global energy demand will fall by 5%, but access to grid priorities and the continued installation of new power plants set the stage for strong growth in renewables.

The IEA also said it expected the drop in economic activity due to the pandemic to hurt heat consumption from renewables. According to what Bill Gates mentioned in his new book, electricity and heating generate a lot of carbon emissions, and it is difficult for clean energy to solve the problem of peak regulation and consumption. SAI (www.sai.tech) innovatively reuses the heat generated by calculations for heating services, which can simultaneously solve the problems of energy consumption and carbon emissions. In this form, we can understand Bitcoin mining as an "economically profitable battery" to consume idle electricity.

Analysis丨The market value of Bitcoin continues to increase: comprehensive analysis of the golden disk: According to coinmarket data, the market value of Bitcoin as a percentage of the total market value of digital currencies has continued to grow since May, while the total market value of altcoins has continued to decline since May. The two trend lines have come out of a nearly symmetrical shape, so it can be judged that the current sentiment in the market is still weak. [2018/8/16]

Another key factor in how Bitcoin consumes energy differently than most other industries is that Bitcoin can be mined anywhere. Almost all energy use in the world must be produced relatively close to its end-user, but Bitcoin has no such constraints, allowing miners to harness electricity that most other industries cannot.

Hydropower is a very intuitive example - during the Fengshui period in Sichuan and Yunnan, China, a large amount of renewable hydropower energy is wasted every year. Electricity production capacity in these areas greatly exceeds local demand, and battery technology is far from advanced, so there is no way to store and transport energy from these rural areas to the urban centers that need it. It is no coincidence that these provinces are the heartland of China's mining industry, responsible for 10% of the world's bitcoin mining during the dry season and 50% of the bitcoin mining during the Fengshui period.

Brian Stutland: Bitcoin becomes a new gauge of market panic: According to CNBC, Brian Stutland of Equity Armor Investments said that the price changes of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have become a better indicator of market volatility, just like the VIX (panic index) the same as the index. "There is a huge correlation between Bitcoin price and VIX over the past thirty days". At the same time, cryptocurrencies allow investors to transfer their funds out of banks to reduce credit risk. [2018/5/30]

As mentioned above, on the other hand, Bitcoin mining can be said to be an effective link between renewable energy and storage to some extent. When power generation is combined with storage and mining, a higher return on investment will be achieved than building power generation and storage equipment separately. In the BCEI white paper, by combining miners with renewable energy + storage projects, we believe it can provide the grid with readily available "excess" energy to deal with increasingly common overheating or cooling similar to demand surges Day (such as the Texas blackout in early 2021) black swan events.

In other words, some of the electricity consumed by Bitcoin is energy that is "destined to be wasted", and to some extent improves the benefits of clean energy generation.

Only by increasing the benefits of using renewable energy and reducing its cost, the market will spontaneously choose to use clean energy, and the transformation of energy utilization will truly accelerate. And at this point, Bitcoin mining has made a kind of "facilitation".

Bitcoin mining is more ESG-compliant and carbon-neutral

Many journalists and academics talk about Bitcoin's high "energy cost per transaction," but this metric is misleading. Most of Bitcoin's energy consumption occurs during mining. After the coins are "mined", the energy consumed to enter the transaction link is very small. So it doesn't make sense to just look at Bitcoin's total energy consumption to date and divide that by the number of transactions. Most of the energy is used to mine bitcoins, not to support transactions. This leads us to a serious misconception: the energy costs associated with mining Bitcoin will continue to increase exponentially.

Bitcoin mining is a relatively energy-intensive industry. Correspondingly, the mining machine generates a large amount of heat during operation, which is usually discharged into the atmosphere. A number of companies, represented by SAI, are exploring different ways to recover and reuse waste heat to create additional revenue streams and offset electricity costs.

In fact, many companies are using technological means to improve the utilization rate of energy in high-performance computing represented by mining, which in a sense reduces the use of energy.

For example, in a project of SAI Technology located in Central Asia, SAIHEAT Computing Energy Center can technically recycle waste heat generated by computing for heating, and then use the heat for greenhouse heating. The greenhouse can be maintained at 43.4 degrees (the outdoor environment is minus 7 degrees). The average heat recovery rate of the whole process is more than 80%. This allows customers to reduce computing power and heating costs by about 35%, while effectively reducing power supporting investment, and realizing a clean computing power solution.

Similarly, Genesis Mining plans to build a 600 kW air-cooled data center container-zce that will supply heat to a 300-square-meter greenhouse through a specially constructed air duct system. This heat will keep the greenhouse at a comfortable 25°C year-round, while outside temperatures in the region can drop as low as minus 30°C. Heat from these data centers will also be used for fish, insect and algae farming, among other uses.

Using renewable energy to empower mining machine chips, and efficiently utilizing the waste heat generated by computing through technological means, this forms a carbon-neutral closed loop.

Bitcoin has been dealing with all sorts of skepticism since its inception. Under the general trend of carbon neutrality, Bitcoin's energy consumption and its so-called environmentally harmful carbon emission levels have undoubtedly become the hottest issues, and this controversy will continue. We think this kind of discussion is meaningful, and it can continue to promote and accelerate the development of the Bitcoin industry in the direction of clean computing power provided by clean energy. With the continuous efforts of companies like SAI Saire Technology, the computing power industry will continue to be clean The energy consumption of Bitcoin mining will be further reduced. This is not only in line with the social ESG development direction, but also provides an optimal solution in line with economic benefits. With the development of the clean computing industry becoming more and more mature, it is more conducive to reducing the total carbon emissions of human society, thereby helping to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality.

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