Alex de Vries from the Dutch Central Bank and Christian Stoll, who is responsible for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Technical University of Munich show in a study that will appear in the December issue of the magazine “Resources, Conservation and Recycling” that an enormous amount of electronic waste is associated with Bitcoin could.
Bitcoin: Immense power consumption and large amounts of e-waste
That de The Bitcoin blockchain’s ecological footprint is huge is not a new finding. The University of Cambridge has been dealing with the power consumption of the Bitcoin network for years and is seeing increases every year. From 2020 to 2021 alone, consumption increased by 80 percent. With 128 terawatt hours, Bitcoin is in annual consumption over Argentina.
Now de Vries and Stoll show that energy consumption may not represent the entire problem. Bitcoin mining then creates a completely different problem. According to the authors of the study, a single Bitcoin transaction generates the equivalent of 272 grams of electronic waste. That would be equivalent to the weight of two iPhone 12 Mini. Calculated over the year, Bitcoin mining would produce 30,700 tons of e-waste. That corresponds to the volume of small electronic scrap that is generated annually in the Netherlands. The calculation is based on the 112.5 million transactions processed in the Bitcoin network in 2020.
ASIC miners must always be up to date with the latest hardware
De Vries and Stoll justify the extremely unfavorable calculation for Bitcoin with the relatively short lifespan of the ASIC processors used for Bitcoin mining. ASIC stands for “Application Specific Integrated Circuits”, translated as application-specific integrated circuit. Special ASICs that are optimized to solve the SHA-256 hash algorithm quickly and effectively are used for Bitcoin mining.
For Bitcoin mining to be as profitable as possible, miners are reliant on always having the latest ASIC chips the study authors point out that they should not be used. According to their calculations, the mining hardware has a lifespan of 1.29 years before it has to be replaced by current devices.
The devices would then no longer be suitable for other applications, they would fall into the trash can. The authors of the study admit that constellations are conceivable in the future under which the continued operation of older ASIC miners could become profitable again. De Vries and Stoll consider it unlikely that miners would acknowledge these eventualities by storing their older devices.
