Bitcoin miners showing significant inclination toward nuclear energy: Report
New data revealed that sustainable sources of energy contribution in the Bitcoin mining operations surged rapidly in the last few years.
To this date, the Bitcoin age is more than 13 years and it is enough for this biggest market cap asset of the crypto sector to show maturity, in terms of stability. But due to its decentralized nature, Bitcoin is under high mining competition, or say huge numbers of people mining Bitcoin through their respective hash power, which consumes huge amounts of electricity.
Since the beginning, Bitcoin faced criticism over its decentralized nature & high amount of carbon emissions because of bad actors involved & the mining operations, where latter is a necessary part of the Bitcoin network to make it highly decentralized & highly safe.
On 27 September, The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) published a report on the mix of electricity consumption by Bitcoin miners.
The CCAF collected data from Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) to make this report, which is a mining-dedicated data source.
The report noted that ⅔ of the total electricity consumption by the Bitcoin network comes from coal and natural gas sources to the date of January 2022. This mixed sustainable source of electricity for the Bitcoin network is around 38% of the total electricity consumption.
It is worth noting that 15% of the total electricity source for the Bitcoin network comes from hydropower sources. Between 2020 to 2021, Hydraulic electricity source contribution to the Bitcoin network plunged from 34% to 15%. So at present, the majority of the electricity source for the Bitcoin network came from coal & gas.
However, this data is not very environmentally friendly but there is good news and we can hope that the situation may improve. The data noted that in the last 3-4 years, nuclear & natural gases based electricity sources contribution in Bitcoin mining operations surged significantly, which is 13% (gas & nuclear mix electricity out of total consumption) to this date.
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