In past weeks, the value of a Bitcoin for the first time exceeded $ 10,000, reaching the point at nearly $ 20,000. By the beginning of 2017, its value was less than $ 1,000.
If you had bought $ 100 in Bitcoin in 2011, today your investment would be worth around $ 4 million. There are stories of people across the internet who have paid their lunch with Bitcoin, but if they had kept the coin, they would now have enough money to buy a home.
Of course, this rapid growth is amazing, but it was not intended to be an investment instrument. Its creators had predicted it as a substitute for self-money - a decentralized, secure, anonymous method of transferring values among people.
But what they have not been able to count is how much energy the computer network that lies behind Bitcoin consumes.
Simply, Bitcoin is slowing down efforts to avoid fuel.
Moreover, this is just the beginning. Considering its rapid growth climate, Bitcoin is a bad development and is getting worse.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin provide a special service: Financial transactions that do not require governments to issue coins or banks to process payments. Derek Thompson, calls Bitcoin a "smart and potentially transformative technology" that can build a whole economy - the equivalent of the digital currency. Some even speculate that Bitcoin could one day pull the US dollar out of circulation.
Also, the rise of Bitcoin is happening at a particular moment: Humanity is decades behind to fight climate change and any action in this era should be assessed in its climatic impact. More and more, Bitcoin is failing.
The tremendous growth of cryptocurrencies has created a tremendous demand for IT power. With Bitcoin's growth, mathematical problems need to be resolved to make more Bitcoin [this process is called mining] - as an opportunity to control and create currency.
Today, every Bitcoin transaction requires the same amount of energy used to supply nine homes to the US for a day. Bitcoin miners are constantly installing computers faster and faster. Already, the Bitcoin grid computing power is almost 100,000 times greater than the world's 500 fastest supercomputers combined together.
The total energy use of this network is large - about 31 Terawatts per hour per year. More than 150 countries around the world consume less energy. And the network is growing more and more, power consumption is currently 450 Gigawatts / hour, roughly the same amount of electricity used in the state of Haiti within a year.
This amount of electricity use is causing problems all over the world. In Venezuela, where rampant hyperinflation and subsidized energy has led to a rise in Bitcoin mining, illegal connections are causing power cuts across the country from time to time.
Bitcoin's largest mining is in China, where they use energy from large hydroelectric dams, some of the cheaper sources of carbon-free power.
In just a few months at the current rate of growth of Bitcoin, the electricity demanded by the cryptocurrencies network will begin to exceed what is available, demanding that new power generation plants to be created. The concern is related to climate change to replace renewable energy production, new stress means more equipment that uses improper technology.
By July 2019, the Bitcoin network will require more energy than the US currently uses. By February 2020, it will use as much electricity as the world uses today.
Already some efforts are being made to reform Bitcoin's network of processing transactions in the hope that one day it will require less electricity to produce new currencies. But, like other technological advances such as the irrigation system in agriculture and LED lighting, more efficient Bitcoin mining systems may have the effect of attracting many people to invest in these technologies.
It is certain that the increasing energy burden of Bitcoin transactions will divert the progress from electrification to the world and reduce global carbon emissions. In fact, I think maybe already there. The only question at this point is "How much?".
