.
An entire network of overclocked 2080’s would consist of 10.2 million GPUs. These would consume about 21 TWh per year. This is about as much as Azerbaijan or Ecuador uses annually.
In the summer of 2018 it was estimated there were around 10 million GPUs churning hashes for the Ethereum network. For instance, JPR Research estimated that 3 million GPUs were sold to cryptocurrency miners in 2017. During those heady days, mining farms such as Genesis Mining, rented 747s to fly large batches of GPUs to its mining farms.
Because of the mix of older, less efficient GPUs (such as the RTX 10 series) or first generation ASICs that have been switched back on, it is likely that the network hashrate is closer to the upper bound of Ecuador than mid-range of Bolivia or Panama. This would put Ethereum around the 70th largest country by energy consumption.
Unlike many Bitcoin promoters, most Ethereum developers – and even some miners – believe that this energy footprint is temporary, pointing to an ongoing transition to proof-of-stake which started with the Beacon chain (Phase 0) launched last December. Obviously the work-in-progress towards PoS has been known since before mainnet was even launched, yet it has been a slow slog.
Despite the desire of developers to quickly sunset proof-of-work, last month we contacted Vitalik Buterin who pointed out that there is currently no EIP to switch over from PoW to PoS. Based on the roadmap at least one EIP is expected to be crafted during the year.
It also bears mentioning that Buterin – unlike Bitcoin promoters – recognizes the large aggregates of energy consumption that PoW chains account for. In an interview three years ago he explained:
“I would personally feel very unhappy if my main contribution to the world was adding Cyprus’s worth of electricity consumption to global warming.”
While “DeFi” usage and total-value-locked (TVL) has soared since the previous two articles on this topic were published, this would be an ends-justify-the-means argument. Not a fallacy per se, but also not a frequently used argument, because greenwashing is not part and parcel to the Ethereum ecosystem.
(5) Other large PoW chains
(5a) Litecoin
The fact that Litecoin is still a “Top 10” coin in 2021 should indicate how ridiculous proof-of-work coins are for society. No one really uses it for anything. Except one guy who invested more than he could afford to.
In fact, the hashrate is roughly the same today as it was two-and-a-half years ago because — as pointed out many times — hashrate follows coin price. Its most recent surges were due to PayPal adding it as an option users could buy or sell with, and an adult website (PornHub) that announced it would accept it as a form of payment.
Despite having launched several years ago, Bitmain’s Antminer L3+ is still basically the top ASIC mining unit that is used today. It generates ~500 MH/s with ~800 watts. A slightly more powerful L3++ is on the market as well.
At around 300 TH/s, there are the equivalent of about 600,000 L3+ machines generating hashes for Litecoin. In aggregate, these machines would consume 4.2 TWh per year. It would be placed around 130th, between Namibia and Cyprus.
The Antminer L3++ specifications are similar:
If only L3++’s were used, the outcome would be about the same. 9
This consumption is pretty absurd once we factor in things like how there are only a couple of active developers who basically just merge changes from Bitcoin into Litecoin. In other words, one of the largest PoW networks has very few users or developers, yet consumes the same amount of energy as Cyprus.
How is that a socially useful innovation?
(5b) Bitcoin Cash
Unlike Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash has seen a dramatic decline in hashrate since it briefly peaked at over 5 million TH/s in 2018. In fact, it is now oscillating around 1.3 million TH/s, or half of what it was 15 months ago.
The calculations for Bitcoin Cash are very straightforward since it is just a modified version of Bitcoin.
Recall from above that a single S19 Pro generates a maximum hashrate of 110TH/s or terahashes per second with a power consumption of 3250W.
A network consisting of just Bitmain S19 Pro systems would comprise about 12,000 systems.
In a given year these would use about 336 GWh, this will serve as our lower bound.
Not counting e-waste, that would put the energy usage of Bitcoin Cash somewhere around 174th or about the same as Burundi. Despite the fact that BCH has almost doubled in value since the last article, the hashrate decline is likely due to more efficient hardware now available.
This presents a problem for potential malicious forks as an attacker could rent hardware (via NiceHash) or purchase older discarded hardware previously used for Bitcoin mining. There are disagreements as to how to prevent this but most of them involve some kind of centralized group of developers manually inserting themselves into the validation process (via block signing).
For an upper bound, let us use an S9i for approximation. Recall it churns out 14 TH/s and consumes 1320 watts. That would involve about 93,000 systems consuming 1,073 GWh placing it somewhere between Fiji and Benin at 160th place.
Unlike last update, there is relatively little economic activity beyond speculators moving coins from one intermediary to another. In fact, an economist with Chainalysis noted that Bitcoin Cash saw less merchant processor volume, about $12 million in 2020.10
Clearly on-chain payments is not the use case, even though the infrastructure exists to do so.
(5c) Monero
Unlike the previous article, it appears that the decision makers behind Monero stopped trying to fork it every six months to prevent involvement from ASICs.
At the time of this writing Monero’s hashrate is hovering near its all-time high, likely due to the fact that XMR’s price has also risen, reaching a two-and-a-half year high.11
Compared with the previous article, the hashrate has increased nearly six fold to about 2 GH/s. And it is believed that most of this hashrate is still generated by GPUs and CPUs.
There are lots of how-to guides for building a CPU-focused Monero mining system, and NiceHash even has an easy-to-use profitability calculator.
In the previous article we looked at a Vega-based GPU build, which could still work, but again, CPU mining is still typically used for Monero. Currently the top performing CPU system on Monero Benchmarks is a modified 3990X Threadripper which generates 64,000 hashes/s and sips 600 watts. Note: these are self-reported, user-submitted numbers.
If the entire network were composed of just this type of machine, there would be 31,250 systems running. They would consume 164 GWh annually. This would place it around 195th, between American Samoa and Saint Kitts and Nevis. This would be the lower bound.
For comparison, a slightly more common Ryzen 3600 generates 7,400 hashes/sec and consumes 100 watts. A network would consist of around 271,000 systems. They would consume about 237 GWh annually. This would place it around 190th between Chad and Sierra Leone.
In terms of GPUs, a RTX 3090 generates 2053 hashes/sec and consumes 350 watts. A network of these would involve 974,184 systems. Altogether they would consume about 2,987 GWh per year. This would place it around 136th, between Montenegro and Jamaica. This is not the upper bound.
As you can see, just like ASICs in sections above each older or slightly less energy efficient CPU or GPU system will incrementally increase the aggregate energy consumed.
For instance, in the previous article we looked at a 12-card Vega build, the user was able to generate 28,100 hashes/sec and consume 1920 watts. That’s about 2341 hashes per card.
That’s about 854,335 GPUs each sipping 160 watts. Altogether these consume 1,197 GWh annually. This is still not the upper bound.
What is the upper bound then?
A few months ago a manufacturer, ASICLine, claimed to be shipping a mining system that can generate hashes for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Monero. Because of how inflexible ASICs are, it is unlikely that their claim is true. While we would like to be able to say for certain how much energy Monero is consuming, there is a possibility that someone has built a custom ASIC (or FPGA) which could throw off our estimate.
Based on the same electricity consumption chart as the others, we can guesstimate that Monero drinks around 1 GWh a year and would be placed somewhere definitely above Chad and probably below Montenegro.
(5d) BSV and ZEC and DOGE
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of dead PoW coins. Three proof-of-work coins that have remained in the “Top 50 as measured by USD” over the past few years are Bitcoin SV (BSV) and Zcash (ZEC) and Dogecoin (DOGE).
BSV was created (forked) by Craig Wright, an Australian who claims – without sufficient evidence – to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Due to a lack of interest beyond a core group of his followers, BSV — as measured in USD — has declined relative to its cousins BTC and BCH. As a result, its hashrate has also declined. At the time of this writing it is just over 600 PH/s, which is a two-and-half-year low. This makes it relatively inexpensive to successfully double-spend or reorg the chain.12
If the BSV network was composed only of S19 Pro’s there would be around 5,454 systems consuming 155 GWh per year. That is about as much as America Samoa at around 200th place. This is the lower bound. An upper bound is unknown but if we re-use the S9i there would be about 43,400 of these systems consuming 502 GWh. That would put it around Andora or South Sudan, around 170th place.
There are a number of gambling-related apps that have been built around BSV, but no substantive economic analysis beyond the regular speculation that dominates in other chains.
Zcash received a lot of attention when it first launched for its privacy and confidentiality (opt-in) properties. For one reason or another, it has not seen as much market interest as Monero (despite arguably having stronger technical capabilities).
Either way, at the time of this writing Zcash’s current hashrate (6.79 GH/s) is hovering near its all-time high. That may sound like a relatively small number compared to Bitcoin or Ethereum, but it uses a hashing algorithm called Equihash, which is more difficult to generate hashes. Unlike Monero, it is primarily mined via GPUs instead of CPUs. There are a variety of online calculators and guides comparing different setups.
There are also multiple ASIC miners for ZEC available including the Antminer Z15. The Z15 churns out 420 KH/s and consumes 1,510 watts. If the entire network were comprised of these ASIC machines there would be about 1,620 of them. Altogether they would consume 21.4 GWh each year. It would rank around 215th, near the Falkland Islands and Kiribati. This would be the lower bound.
One of the slightly dated comparisons involved tweaking a Nvidia 1080 Ti. One user was able to achieve around 641 H/s at 300 watts. A network of these GPUs would comprise 1.06 million GPUs. These would consume about 2,783 GWh. That would place it around 140th, between New Caladonia and Mauritius. While there may be older GPUs and even some CPUs mining, this is probably closer to the upper bound.
What about Dogecoin?
We wrote a bit about Dogecoin in 2014 but stopped because it merge mined with Litecoin in September of that year. While it is no longer independent — as it piggybacks off of Litecoin mining — people still mine it with the same L3+ machines mentioned above (both Litecoin and Dogecoin use the same hash generating algorithm called ‘scrypt’). Despite new record highs in prices, Dogecoin’s hashrate is about 30% less than its all-time high. In fact, it is nearly identical to Litecoin’s hashrate because it uses the same farms and pools. While some have suggested that this is an efficient usage of resources (two-chains-for-the-price-of-one) it creates a top-heavy situation that in theory, makes them both less secure.
(6) Status check
With all of these numbers and calculation spread around, let us briefly collate them in an easy to view section.
If the entire Bitcoin network were solely comprised of:
If the entire Ethereum network were solely comprised of:
If the entire Litecoin network were solely comprised of:
If the entire Bitcoin Cash network were solely comprised of:
If the entire Monero network were solely comprised of:
If the entire BSV network were solely comprised of:
If the entire ZEC network were solely comprised of:
As mentioned above (and in numerous previous articles) there are hundreds if not thousands of dead or dying PoW chains.
If we took the most efficient energy consumption assumptions above (the lower bounds), these seven PoW chains consume 59.3 TWh per year. Roughly the footprint of Kuwait, around 46th place. But in most cases – such as with Bitcoin itself – the lower bound is not realistic because the necessary amount of efficient hashing equipment (miners) have not been manufactured.
In contrast, if we took a less conservative assumption and used the upper bound these same PoW chains consume 180.1 TWh per year. Roughly the footprint of Poland or Thailand, around 25th place. The upper bound scenario is likely unrealistic for coins that have seen their value (measured in USD) decline or stay the same. For those that have seen rapid appreciation (such as Bitcoin), it is possible that older equipment temporarily comes back online until newer replacements are installed.
And yet, in either scenario, these PoW networks are not also adding the equivalent GDP output of similar sized countries. Society is in effect, at a net loss.
As we have mentioned in this article and others, historically, as a country industrializes, its growth is often limited by access to energy which throttles its energy consumption. Simultaneously, as it grows and develops, it becomes more efficient per wattage of input.
For example, according to the Energy Information Agency:
In the United States, energy intensity has been declining steadily since the early 1970s and continues to decline in EIA’s long-term projection. A country’s energy intensity is usually defined as energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). Greater efficiency and structural changes in the economy have reduced energy intensity.
Despite dozens of RTGS systems being deployed across the world, in no instance do any of them consume the footprint of a small or medium sized country to operate.
The next section will look at some of the coin promoters and how they try to whitewash this issue away.
Only two nuclear reactors have been built in the U.S. in the past 25 years. One of the reasons why others may not be built in the future: the shale boom.
Interested in hearing the twenty-first century equivalent of “smoking is good for you”?
On with the show!
No, Bitcoin is not a battery.
Contrary to the musings of venture capitalists with a heavy stake in coins (and coin mining), mining PoW chains is not the same as a battery. It should be obvious that energy used in mining is not reusable, it is turned into heat as it enters the environment. When miners pay bills they convert some of their holdings into actual money, energy is not released in this process because no energy was stored to begin with.
It is hard to know where to start with this batch of Bitcoin promoters, nearly all of whom work for prominent cryptocurrency intermediaries.
Fun fact: despite continual claims that Bitcoin will spur development of Thorium-based nuclear power plants, to date, there have been zero Thorium plants built let alone funded by Bitcoin personalities.
What about stranded energy?
In practice “stranded energy” means there is some kind of inefficiency in storage and/or the transportation grid. In some cases capital could be used to increase efficiencies (e.g., new pipelines) which could reduce the price of energy extraction or transmission. Yet because it is stranded, it centralizes PoW mining in that specific area.13
But what about renewables?
Hitchen’s Razor: That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
In terms of cyclical generation, even in the summer, when hydroelectric dams are at their peak output in the northern hemisphere, Cambridge BCIE estimates that more than half of energy generation still relies on non-renewables such as coal or gas.
Many miners themselves do not provide any reason to believe this. Cambridge surveys miners, and they indicated that while a majority has renewables in the energy mix, only 39% of mining is done with renewables (as it can be a small part of the energy mix).
The location data above is from Cambridge, sourced from mining pools rather than a survey. If you look at where miners are situated most of the time, you also see that while they use some renewables during the summer (wet season) in China, they are using fossil fuels the rest of the year.
According to Stoll et al., the carbon intensity of the energy used for mining Bitcoin was 480-500g CO2 per kWh in 2019 and went up to more than 550g CO2 per kWh recently due to increasing popularity of Iran and Kazakhstan. 8% of miners are now using sanctioned Iranian oil-based energy to mine.
There is also a steady stream of on-the-ground local stories providing anecdotes to the rush for relatively cheap energy. For instance, clandestine Bitcoin mining in Iran is believed to be one of the reasons for a rash of blackouts (and smog).
Lastly, even if Bitcoin miners were mostly run on renewables (which is not occurring) Bitcoin mining could not be considered environmentally friendly. Why? Because of the regular cycle of e-waste that is created as next generation ASICs are introduced.
(8) Whataboutisms
Whataboutery is commonplace and normalized in the cryptocurrency world.
Tired of policy makers pointing out that illicit activity is attracted to KYC-less chains? Whatabout HSBC! Dislike the moans from hospitals impacted by Bitcoin-funded ransomware operations? Whatabout nuclear warfare!
This fallacy rears its head in the discussion of energy consumption: ignore this category of waste because there is also a category of waste there!
This is not a contest to waste as much energy as possible. Aircraft carriers, submarines, and airborne infantry divisions do not protect RTGS systems. All wasteful activities – such as nuclear warhead production – can clearly be categorized as bad and undesirable. It is also unclear from that thread how Bitcoin can end war or reduce military spending.
Speaking of poor analogies:
If we are going to play along with this game above: we actually know who participates in Federal Reserve decision making processes. Whereas we still do not have a regularly updated list of who funds those with merge control in the Bitcoin Core github repo.
At the time of this writing about 70 RGTS systems are live across the world. But only a small handful of countries with an RTGS also have nuclear weapons and/or aircraft carriers. And only six have both. 15 This illustrates that you can have one – a secure large value transfer system – without the other.
Held’s argument is a Whataboutism. Why? Because this is not a contest over who wastes more (or less).
As Galloway correctly points out in that thread: no one is trying to run a PoW-based payment system with Christmas lights. Christmas light operators are not incentivized to string up more lights as the aggregate market capitalization of light manufacturers increases.16
No one is trying to run a PoW-based payment system with smartphones. Furthermore, telecoms do not need to consume oodles of more energy per extra unit of phone added to their networks. PoW chains empirically and theoretically will consume energy in direct proportion to the value of the coin price. That is why we continue to see ever larger amounts of ASIC machinery sold by Bitmain and MicroBT to miners, not less. Yet PoW chains do not have a monopoly on securing permissionless payment systems.
Proof-of-stake (PoS) chains require some electricity too. If this was a comparison of say Polkadot or Avalanche (both of which are PoS-based), they would consume several orders less than Bitcoin does today.
And if these were compared to running full nodes (since there is no hash generation needed)?
For instance, according to Bitnodes there are approximately 9,415 nodes relaying transactions on the Bitcoin network (including the 25 or so mining pools).
Virtually every sentence is incorrect. And this is all Whataboutery. Bitcoin mining usage could boil the ocean? But what about banks!
The bar should be: how can a value transfer system reduce its energy consumption and externalities, not to distractingly point fingers at other entities that also waste.
Speaking of which, in her examples above, it is also a different type and magnitude of waste. Banks do not generate more revenue if they leave their computers on 24/7 whereas PoW miners have to be left on around the clock to generate hashes in order to compete for block rewards.
Furthermore, banks as a whole provide many more services (and products) beyond just processing payments. In contrast, Bitcoin has very limited functionality, including the inability to do any on-chain lending.
That is not an accurate description of boiling gold (alchemy?) or what proof-of-work is as described by the original creators (Dwork and Naor). Neither its supply schedule nor energy consumption is what creates value for PoW coins, external demand is.
Claiming that PoW imbues a cryptocurrency with value because it requires real effort to produce it is a variation of the Labor Theory of Value. And saying PoW can promote energy efficiency is like saying paying people to dig holes and fill them up again helps the economy. 19
In his accompanying article for this image Held states that: “The pressure to find cheap electricity sources will accelerate the effort to build fusion reactors.”
But that basically saying if you leave your car running it is good because it incentivizes finding alternate power sources.
Speaking of which:
Due to the demand shock from COVID-19, depending on geography, the cheapest sources of energy today might actually be oil and gas. Perhaps the near-future of mining are cars parked outside of refineries in Houston, churning up hashes for PoW networks.
And last but not least:
According to modeling from the Resources for the Future, a think tank, Miami will become the most vulnerable major coastal city in the world with “100-year floods” occuring every few years rather than once a century in many locations. A quarter of all homes at risk from flooding due to climate change reside in Miami-Dade county. If the mayor wanted to stave off this crisis the last thing he should be encouraging is direct investments in proof-of-work based cryptocurrencies.
(9) Competing for scarce resources
Due to the rapid rise in some cryptocurrency prices, foundries that churn out semiconductors have months of backlogs due to GPU and ASIC demand. Why? Because there are only a small handful of foundries capable of manufacturing state-of-the-art chips and as a result there is a limited capacity irrespective of what the ultimate destination may be.
This has led to a shortage of chips used in automobiles to the point where large manufacturers such as Ford or General Motors (GM) have announced plant shutdowns. In its most recent earnings announcement, GM estimated that:
The semiconductor shortage will shave $1.5 billion to $2 billion off adjusted earnings before interest and taxes this year.
How much semiconductor output capacity is being squeezed because of PoW miners?
History repeats itself: in November 2017, Chen Min (a chip designer at Avalon Mining) gave a presentation which noted that 5% of all transistors in the entire semiconductor industry were used for mining and that was driving up DRAM prices. Last cycle this negatively impacted a variety of ancillary set of actors, such as astronomers who rely on GPUs to chug through cosmic signals.
The current surge in demand for GPUs for mining has led some participants to acquire hundreds of gaming laptops en masse, crowding out, again, anyone who needs a high performance GPU. The image (above) comes from a Weibo account tracking various China-based miners who are showing off their GPU farms consisting of high-end laptops.
“Laptop mining” has pushed new buyers down the performance curve, to hardware that is two generations old.
Below are three publicly listed companies that have announced large purchases of mining equipment in the past several months:
A few days ago UK-listed Argo Blockchain announced it would build a 200 MW mining facility in West Texas.
Private companies have also announced large purchases of coin miners. For instance, last month Blockstream announced that it had purchased $25 million worth of equipment from MicroBT and that this would be part of its 300 MW of mining capacity.
And an anonymous buyer in Russia, recently acquired 20,000 mining systems that consume 70 MW for a new farm in Bratsk, Siberia.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
A GPU farm of 78 GeForce 3080s was photographed (above) churning up hashes for Ethereum last month.
An entire paper or two could be written on large bulk purchases of ASICs or GPUs which crowd out other industries that need the same resources for actual productive activities.
(10) Undead countries are an ESG nightmare
Is it a stretch to call Bitcoin a ‘smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Silicon Valley’?
In May 2014 we briefly discussed a hypothetical “million dollar” bitcoin. At the time, Bitcoin’s price had dropped below $500 and we were already able to empirically discern that hashrate grows (or declines) directly proportional to coin value.
In the previous articles we found that, despite the introduction of increasingly energy efficient hardware, a PoW network like Bitcoin consumes ever larger amounts of energy. That is because of the Red Queen’s Race: miners do not downsize farms in aggregate, they simply replace aging hardware with newer ones; they must run faster in order to stay in the same place.
That is why anyone that has access to a hashrate chart can project with decent certainty what the likely outcome of a “million dollar” bitcoin will be in the future.
If a $40,000 bitcoin has already led miners to consume the energy equivalent of the Netherlands or Egypt, a million dollar bitcoin would be about 25 times as much.
What does that mean in actual numbers?
Critical to any analysis of energy usage is economic output. In a million dollar bitcoin world, society would be bearing the externalities of mining activity that does not produce a proportional amount of GDP. For instance, much of the coin mining industry is reliant and dependent on taxpayer funded utility companies and grids. As a result, we would see the equivalent of an additional U.S.-sized energy usage without seeing anywhere near the economic output, this would be a huge net loss.
This also does not take into account e-waste that is created via discarded single-use ASICs. And it does not take into account other PoW networks such as Litecoin which are basically ghost towns yet consume country-sized energy units too.
Miners will surely lead to greener sources of energy production, right?
This is a red herring.
Through the usage of either permissioned systems (like an RTGS) or a proof-of-stake chain, the energy consumed by PoW chains did not need to take place at all. In fact, PoS chains can provide the same types of utility that PoW chains do, but without the negative environmental externalities. PoW chains are the equivalent of adding an undead country – a zombie chain – to the power grid: one that consumes energy and produces little more than emissions.
Because of disputes among its undead participants these zombie chains must utilize the judicial and legal resources of third party countries. The chains also have a parasitic relationship to other government-run services that they continue to rely on such as taxpayer-financed energy grids.
(11) Call to Action
What can be done?
For starters, do not patronize coin lobbying organizations that weaponize misinformation. They are not dedicated to protecting consumers or the environment. Their mission is to convince legislators around the world to take a hands-off approach to regulations, including potential taxes on miners.
Nearly three years ago, the executive director of Coin Center, Jerry Brito, solicited names to hire to whitewash easy-to-prove energy consumption numbers.
Why? Because it is bad for business. Some Bitcoin promoters like to present themselves as being part of the cutting-edge future, one disassociated with the ancien régime. But as we have seen repeatedly in this paper, PoW miners compete for the same scarce resources and capacity that society relies on to generate real goods and services.
This is not true. Agrawal, who works with Brito at Coin Center, attempts to limit the available options when there are a wide range of other possibilities.
For instance, according to The New Republic:
In 2020, Tesla sold about $1.58 billion worth of these [carbon] credits—almost exactly the value of the Bitcoin purchased.
Tesla is going to account for its Bitcoin holdings as intangible assets (goodwill) which is not how this line item was intended for. This is clearly shrewd opportunism (and accounting), not some re-imagination of resource consumption.
According to Digiconomist:
If 12 million people used Bitcoin to buy a Tesla, it would be enough to completely offset the combined total of CO2 saved by these EVs (by Tesla’s own account).
Elon Musk says he is now a fan of Bitcoin but PoW miners are directly cannibalizing the chip production capacity required to produce Tesla vehicles, a point that Tesla’s latest 10-K filing indirectly touches on.
What can you do?
Most developed and developing countries levy taxes on polluters or “sin” activities. ((Another consideration that funds with an ESG mandate should consider is not just the environmental impact of PoW mining but also the human rights that may be violated in the production of said coins.)) Clearly proof-of-work mining falls into both categories.
Contact your local Public Utility Company and explain the socialized losses and privatized gains that are possibly accruing to miners. In addition to levying a tax on coin mining activity, perhaps introducing a tax on PoW-based holdings at intermediaries could be discussed since they directly benefit from miners providing the underlying blockchain infrastructure.
And if you are a user of a cryptocurrency, publicly advocate for switching to proof-of-stake (PoS) chains or accelerating such transitions if they are already underway. You can still enjoy decentralized finance in a way that does not dramatically contribute to climate change.24
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the following people for their helpful feedback: CK, JG, VB, RG, KR, JH, MW, and AV.
Endnotes
12 Feb 2021
3 min read
0
0
