The Challenge and the Glory of Making Crypto Green

Above: A Bitcoin mining farm in an undisclosed location (source: Marko Ahtisaari, 2014)

By Rebecca Endres

Greenifying a Gray Area

Cryptocurrency, blockchain, and NFTs have exploded into the daily lexicon with a serious case of Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome. Blockchains offer an alternative to opaque financial institutions by creating a form of currency that is decentralized and strives to empower individuals through the erosion of traditional power structures. The problem is it takes a hell of a lot of energy to power them. Can naysayers handle a new technology that has, until recently, sourced its energy from low-cost, high-carbon options when climate change has already reared its destructive head? But what if instead of standing in the way of a green-energy future, blockchain technology might actually hasten us toward one? 

First, let’s acknowledge a fact: the NFT market is growing, and the criticism leveled at cryptocurrency and NFTs hasn’t deterred their growth. For many disillusioned by a society where the rich keep getting richer, the concept of a decentralized financial system is revelatory. Anyone with an internet connection can make a transaction at any time without appeasing a bank, which opens up new horizons for people worldwide. Meanwhile, NFTs offer artists a way to sell directly to collectors, rather than going through dealers or auction-houses. Thanks to Twitter, Super Bowl ads and PayPal pop-ups, an increasing number of people are being enticed into the blockchain ecosystem. Around twenty percent of American adults are invested in cryptocurrency; the figure is even higher for millennials at 36%.

Of course, the democratic nature of this new currency is the “Dr. Jekyll” of the industry. The doctor’s nefarious doppelganger, some would argue, is the computational energy needed for a network like Bitcoin, which is always running at full capacity, to validate new blocks in a blockchain, which is how transactions are registered. “Mining” is the high-energy activity required to validate and record submissions to a distributed ledger which utilizes the proof-of-work consensus mechanism (PoW). In order to submit new transactions and mine new coins in return, every computer in the network competes to solve a complex mathematical puzzle (with a hashed output) necessary to submit the winning block. If, after thousands of numerical guesses per second, a computer cracks the correct hash code, it wins the right to “mine” a block.

Anyone who has ever watched an early Bitcoin miner in action…