In May, when bitcoin mining difficulty peaked, making a single coin
took as much electricity as an average household uses in 13 years. The same month, when Elon Musk pointed out bitcoin’s energy problem in a tweet -- tanking its value -- he made it even harder to ignore the fact that the network is unsustainable. As a miner, you may not care about the environment, but when someone who can cut the value of your business in half with a single tweet speaks up on the issue, you tend to pay attention. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology aren’t going away, and they have to live somewhere. How can we build and run data centers that host this infrastructure in an environmentally responsible way?
