Food for thought.
Alex de Vries, an analyst for at PwC, who started the Digiconomist blog to show the potential pitfalls in cryptocurrency, said: “The energy-consumption is insane. If we start using this on a global scale, it will kill the planet.”
One major producer, Bitmain Technologies Ltd, runs a server farm in Erdors, Inner Mongolia, housed inside eight 100-meter-long metal warehouses, with about 25,000 computers dedicated to solving the encrypted calculations that generate each bitcoin.
The entire operation runs on electricity produced with coal, as do a growing number of cryptocurrency “mines” popping up in China.