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Rational mining limits Bitcoin emissions

Nature Climate Change volume 9, page 655 (2019) Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 28 August 2019

The Original Article was published on 29 October 2018

arising from Mora, C. et al. Nature Climate Change https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8 (2018)

The Bitcoin network is criticized for its energy consumption1. Mora et al.2 estimated that the 2017 carbon footprint of Bitcoin was 69 Mt of CO2-equivalent (MtCO2e). We criticize the inclusion of unprofitable mining rigs in their analysis—as a consequence, they highly overestimate emissions.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this manuscript are available in ref. 2 or provided in the Supplementary Code and Data.

Code availability

The code to identify rig profitability and recalculate the 2017 carbon emissions is provided in the Supplementary Code and Data.

References

  1. Krause, M. J. & Tolaymat, T. Quantification of energy and carbon costs for mining cryptocurrencies. Nat. Sustain. 1, 711–718 (2018).

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  2. Mora, C. et al. Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2 °C. Nat. Clim. Change 8, 931–933(2018).

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  3. Taylor, M. B. The evolution of bitcoin hardware. Computer 50, 58–66 (2017).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lyon, Lyon, France

    Nicolas Houy

  2. CNRS, GATE Lyon Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, France

    Nicolas Houy

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  1. Nicolas Houy
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Correspondence to Nicolas Houy.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Supplementary Information (download PDF )

Supplementary Fig. 1, Table 1 and references.

Supplementary Code and Data (download ZIP )

Supplementary code and data: SRC Folder (C++ source code files) and IN Folder (input .csv files).

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Houy, N. Rational mining limits Bitcoin emissions. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 655 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0533-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0533-6

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