This is post is taken from the Frequently Asked Questions.

One of the major campaigns going on against Bitcoin has been lead by Greenpeace and is funded by a competitor to Bitcoin. The claim is that Bitcoin’s energy usage is bad for the environment. 

First, how much electricity does bitcoin use? In 2021, it was stated that bitcoin uses 0.55% of the global electricity production, or roughly the equivalent of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden. As the network gained strength and usage over the last few years, this number has continued to go up. 

If you feel that bitcoin has no use, then maybe any amount of electricity use is too much. However, the amount of electricity that goes into bitcoin is directly proportional to the amount of people using bitcoin and how those people value the bitcoin. 

The companies and individuals that mine bitcoin are incentivized to find the cheapest forms of energy since the higher cost electricity eats into their profits. Consequently, the majority of bitcoin mined today is mined by renewable energy and actually encourages the construction of energy producing equipment in areas of the world that would otherwise have been stranded without the availability of energy.

Here is an example: Why would a company choose to build a hydroelectric dam in the middle of Africa? It might be for humanitarian purposes, but the incentive has to at least be partially for profit in order for the endeavor to be sustainable. 

The population that would benefit directly from having access to clean, nearly free energy from a hydroelectric dam would be not able to afford it. With bitcoin, these dams can be built and the energy basically given away to the local population to help improve their quality of life while any excess energy can be used by miners to mine bitcoin. 

There is a reason to increase energy abundance in the world.

As mentioned above, bitcoin is literally energy that is saved in digital form to be either spent as bitcoin or converted to some other means of exchange in the future. And remember, that is all that money is. It should serve no other utility than being a unit of exchange that allows to different people to fairly exchange value.

Here’s another example showing the benefits to the environment from bitcoin. Let’s say a community wants to build a solar plant. It currently needs 50 MW during the day but at peak times might require up to 75 MW. You can’t build a solar plant that is capable of 75 MW unless you have a place to store the excess energy. Bitcoin can act as an energy battery. By choosing to build a plant of 100 MW, it would ensure that 50 MW would be available to the community with the other 50 MW used by the miners until there is a demand by the community for some of that energy. Then it is just a matter of turning off the power to the miners and suddenly that extra energy is available. Before bitcoin, the community would build a 50 MW plant and then have to power up a polluting natural gas or diesel plant when additional power was needed. Bitcoin fixes this. It is actually better for the environment.

Finally, another example: Large waste dumps generate a lot of methane. So much so that many of these sites use it to power their facilities and even with this require the excess methane to be burned since the carbon dioxide generated with burning is much better for the environment than releasing direct methane. Bitcoin can solve this too by using the energy generated from the methane fuel to mine bitcoin. It can convert a previous waste product into money.