Study criticizes Bitcoin for consuming huge amounts of water, exacerbating global water shortages

News from this site on December 4, at a time when many places around the world are suffering from fresh water shortages, a new study conducted by Alex de Vries of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam pointed out that,The average water consumption per Bitcoin transaction is enough to fill a backyard swimming pool, a figure that is six million times the amount of water used by a typical credit card swipe transaction.

According to research, the reason why Bitcoin consumes a lot of water is mainly because millions of computers around the world require a lot of electricity to run and dissipate heat. According to 2021 data, Bitcoin’s water consumption is close to 160 billion liters, equivalent to approximately 1,600 gigaliters (GL), and it is expected that by 2023, water consumption will exceed 2,200 gigaliters

Bitcoin uses a lot The reason for water is mainly because it relies on powerful computing power, which consumes a lot of electricity. According to data from the University of Cambridge, Bitcoin’s electricity consumption is almost equal to that of Poland as a whole. To provide this power, gas and coal-fired power plants use water for cooling, and hydroelectric power plants lose large amounts of water to evaporation from their reservoirs. In addition, part of the water is used to cool millions of computers around the world that are used to process Bitcoin transactions

This site noticed thatThe energy-consuming process of Bitcoin core is the so-called "bit Coin mining”. Simply put, miners compete across the internet to solve mathematical equations for the chance to earn digital currency, meaning the same transaction is processed repeatedly by multiple powerful and energy-hungry computers.

If you change the way Bitcoin operates, you can drastically reduce electricity usage and thus water consumption. In September 2022, Ethereum made this transition and adopted a "proof of stake" system, which reduced its electricity usage by more than 99%. However, this transition may not be easy to achieve, because the management of Ethereum is much more centralized than Bitcoin

The study also pointed out that as many as 3 billion people around the world face water shortages, and it is expected that in the future This situation will worsen over the next few decades.

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