Last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a sharp correction in the cryptocurrency market by tweeting that his eponymous auto company would abandon plans to accept BTC, citing "the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for mining. and bitcoin transactions ". However, a recent report published by CoinShares notes that despite the widespread use of coal, oil and gas for bitcoin mining, the network accounts for less than 0.08% of global CO2 production. During an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Kristian Csepcsar, chief marketing officer of Slush Pool, the oldest bitcoin mining pool, provided information on what he believes are current misconceptions about the environmental impact of bitcoin mining. According to Csepcsar, the gas burned during oil extraction could be better exploited. "We are literally burning the gas in the atmosphere just because it is not cheap to do anything with it. Instead, we can put it in an engine to produce electricity and use it to mine bitcoins. " Ph. Marco Verch Flaring is the process of burning excess natural gas during oil extraction due to the lack of pipeline infrastructure to bring it to market. Recently in the United States and Canada, bitcoin miners have found clever ways to instead funnel natural gas to generate electricity, instead of simply burning it in the atmosphere, thus solving a critical environmental problem. But Csepcsar remains skeptical of some renewable sources of bitcoin mining, calling them "marketing noise", in particular, solar energy. As Cointelegraph says: "On our blog, we published research that we are not big promoters of solar extraction; when you calculate the profitability, it's not that good ”. Cespcsar also explains that about 70% of all solar panels are produced in China and that there has not been much research on the environmental impact during their production process: "Producing them creates a lot of harmful chemicals. And nobody talks about it. Everyone just thinks that solar panels grow on trees, and then the sun shines on them. But no, the creation process is brutal ”.
Are we wrong about the environmental impact of bitcoin mining?