Blockchain Bubble or Revolution: The Future of Bitcoin, Blockchains, and Cryptocurrencies

The solution that Bitcoin uses to prevent this “double-spending problem” is called “mining,” and it’s incredibly complicated and confusing. It also uses so much electricity that the White House has warned it might prevent the United States from slowing climate change. It’s like something out of the world’s most boring dystopian science-fiction movi

As bitcoin mining is unusually sensitive — reactive, even — to the cost of the energy it consumes, this means it is overwhelmingly likely that Bitcoin will be the cleanest consumer of energy in the world before too long, entirely as a side effect of its brilliant design and not at all because it is conscious of its environmental impact.

The problem with these alarming projections is that they were based on flawed data from Blockchain.info, which was still using outdated GPU-based assumptions about electricity usage.