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Bitcoin is the most successful digital currency that’s reliant on cryptography, it’s decentralised in contrast to fiat money which is overseen by governments and banks. Despite Bitcoin being a digital currency bitcoin mining produces a large amount of electronic waste every year.
Miners make money from Bitcoin via complex computer rigs that solve complex puzzles, confirming groups of transactions called blocks. When successful, these blocks are added to the blockchain record, and miners are rewarded with small amounts of bitcoins, with an average of 9 years of a household’s electricity to mine one Bitcoin.
With the computers they use consuming a large amount of energy, a large amount of greenhouse gasses and pollution has been created due of the mining and the equipment used with an estimate of 30,700 tonnes of e-waste produced by bitcoin miners each year.
As electricity is the main cost for Bitcoin miners, they have changed to more efficient processors that subsequently produce less waste. A shift has been made to Application-specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) these are highly specialised chips that are designed for one purpose. An issue with ASICs is that they are difficult to be repurposed for another mining task or even another type of cryptocurrency mining. That being said, although the chips can’t be reused in themselves the components that they are made from can.
In the whole world, only around 17% of e-waste is recycled, with it being thought to be less than this depending on what country’s e-waste regulations are. With most of the miners being located in countries with poor e-waste regulations, this 17% figure may be lower.
Industries all over the world are struggling with a computer chip shortage. Not only will going through lots of mining devices to find more chips produce a lot of waste it could also disrupt other electronic gadgets.
With an increasing number of people Bitcoin mining, how can we reduce the amount of e-waste?
One solution to resolving this e-waste issue could be for bitcoin to change the way transactions are verified from proof of work which necessitates a large amount of energy, and miners must eventually sell their coins to cover the costs to proof of stake which determines a miner’s mining power by the percentage of coins held by a miner.
