Bitcoins are an Environmental Disaster
What began as an experiment has morphed into an environmental disaster. It is estimated that running the bitcoin network now consumes 45.5 terawatt-hours per year of electricity-enough to power more than four million homes in the U.S. Bitcoins consume more power annually than Argentina. Creating units of a digital currency is-by design-incredibly energy intensive. A recent study by MIT shows that Bitcoin mining generates 22 to 23 megatons of carbon dioxide annually, placing the Bitcoin between the CO2 pollution generated by the nations of Jordan and Sri Lanka.
Bitcoin uses energy to ensure that every copy of the record of who owns which bitcoin is identical. Making actual copies of that record, known as a blockchain, uses hardly any energy at all. What does take energy is ensuring that no one can erase any previous entries and that only one new set of entries can be added every ten minutes on average.
If you own Bitcoins, someone had to send them to you. That transaction was recorded in the blockchain, which is the record of where bitcoins are located. If someone could go back and erase that record, then you wouldn't own that Bitcoin anymore. Now a Bitcoin can have a decade or more of transaction history in its blockchain.
According to the Library of Congress, an "absolute ban" on trading or using cryptocurrencies applies in nine countries: Algeria, Bolivia, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Nepal, Pakistan, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. An "implicit ban" applies in another 15 countries, which include Bahrain, Bangladesh, China, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Kuwait, Lesotho, Lithuania, Macau, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan.
What goes up must come down, especially when the item has no intrinsic value. The Bitcoin, with no backing and no intrinsic value, has only increased because of the bigger fool theory. The theory goes that there is always someone stupid enough to pay more. Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of poor people who speculated on tulip bulbs nearly 400 hundred years ago and millions of investors in dot com stocks 20 years ago. This time, the Bitcoin crash will cause a recession in the United States and possibly the world. Two trillion dollars in lost value is very significant. There are also other cybercurrencies that will crash. The entire gross national product of the United States was $27 trillion in 2023. The cybercurrency crash would cost more than ten percent of the entire economy of the United States, a major hit that would reverberate across the world. It would be a crash heard round the world like the stock market crash of 1929 that led to the Great Depression.
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