Related papers: Bitcoin's future carbon footprint
In recent years, cryptocurrencies have attracted growing attention from both private investors and institutions. Among them, Bitcoin stands out for its impressive volatility and widespread influence. This paper explores the predictability…
Modern societies have adopted government-issued fiat currencies many of which exist today mainly in the form of digits in credit and bank accounts. Fiat currencies are controlled by central banks for economic stimulation and stabilization.…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography which has recently gained excessive popularity. Scientific research on bitcoin is less abundant. A paper at Financial Cryptography 2012…
Explaining changes in bitcoin's price and predicting its future have been the foci of many research studies. In contrast, far less attention has been paid to the relationship between bitcoin's mining costs and its price. One popular notion…
Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile financial instruments with more and more new retail investors joining the scene with each passing day. Bitcoin has always proved to determine in which way the rest of the cryptocurrency market is headed…
With the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence, there are expectations for a proportional expansion of economic activity due to increased productivity, and with it energy consumption and its associated environmental consequences like…
The purpose of this paper is to review the concept of cryptocurrencies in our economy. First, Bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrencies' histories are analyzed. We then study the implementation of Bitcoin in the airline and real estate…
In this report, we examine the available evidence regarding ICT's current and projected climate impacts. We examine peer-reviewed studies which estimate ICT's current share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to be 1.8-2.8% of global…
The use of energy by cryptocurrency mining comes not just with an environmental cost but also an economic one through increases in electricity prices for other consumers. Here we investigate the increase in wholesale price on Texas ERCOT…
The distributed consensus mechanism is the backbone of the rapidly developing blockchain network. Blockchain platforms consume vast amounts of electricity based on the current consensus mechanism of Proof of Work. Here, we point out an…
Since its advent in 2009, Bitcoin, a cryptography-enabled peer-to-peer digital payment system, has been gaining increasing attention from both academia and industry. An effort designed to overcome a cluster of bottlenecks inherent in…
Based on 1-minute price changes recorded since year 2012, the fluctuation properties of the rapidly-emerging Bitcoin (BTC) market are assessed over chosen sub-periods, in terms of return distributions, volatility autocorrelation, Hurst…
The long-term dependence of Bitcoin (BTC), manifesting itself through a Hurst exponent $H>0.5$, is exploited in order to predict future BTC/USD price. A Monte Carlo simulation with $10^4$ geometric fractional Brownian motion realisations is…
The current emissions from computing are almost 4% of the world total. This is already more than emissions from the airline industry and are projected to rise steeply over the next two decades. By 2040 emissions from computing alone will…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have become an extremely important, highly-used, technology. A major criticism of cryptocurrencies, however, is their energy consumption. In May 2022 Bitcoin alone was reported to be consuming 150…
Recent estimates put the carbon footprint of Bitcoin and Ethereum at an average of 64 and 26 million tonnes of CO2 per year, respectively. To address this growing problem, several possible approaches have been proposed in the literature:…
For a given carbon budget over several decades, different transformation rates for the energy system yield starkly different results. Here we consider a budget of 33 GtCO2 for the cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from the European…
The third Bitcoin halving that took place in May 2020 cut down the mining reward from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC per block and thus slowed down the rate of issuance of new Bitcoins, making it more scarce. The fourth and most recent halving happened…
The demand for computing is continuing to grow exponentially. This growth will translate to exponential growth in computing's energy consumption unless improvements in its energy-efficiency can outpace increases in its demand. Yet, after…
The Internet of Things (IoT) can support the evolution towards a digital and green future. However, the introduction of the technology clearly has in itself a direct adverse ecological impact. This paper assesses this impact at both the…