🔮How are Cryptocurrencies "Carbon Neutral"?

👋 Hey!

Recently I've started to take interest in cryptocurrencies, such as ethereum & solana. During my research of how Crypto works & what not, I came across a chemical term carbon neutral. I was confused at how ethereum & bitcoin were being termed as being not environmental friendly.

Later I was acquainted with the fact that electric consumption results in carbon emission. The increasing popularity of cryptocurrency has environmentalists on edge, as the digital “mining” of it creates a massive carbon footprint due to the staggering amount of energy it requires. It is said that the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, is equivalent to that of New Zealand, with both emitting nearly 37 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.

Reason

"Mining" crypto is the single reason to why carbon is emitted. The extreme amount of electric consumption results in the emission of 🌬️Co2 into the atmosphere.

As previously said crypto is made through an intricate cycle called mining. In overgeneralized terms, particular mining PCs contend to tackle complex mathematical problems that open limited quantities of new money. These PCs, situated all over the planet, regularly work relentless and require enormous measures of power to remain running and cool.

The mining of Bitcoin expects around 91 terawatt-long periods of power yearly - that is more than nations like Finland, home to 5.5 million individuals, use in a year. As of December, approving a solitary Bitcoin exchange requires around 2,004 kilowatt-long stretches of power, enough to drive the normal U.S. family for almost 69 days. Digital currency mining tasks are ordinarily housed in business rather than in houses because of the heat produced, commotion and power expected to keep up with them. These mass-mining locales can oversee hundreds, in the event that not thousands, of PCs all at once and most don't utilize most of their energy from sustainable sources.

The carbon footprint of a single Ethereum transaction as of December 2021 was 102.38 kilograms of CO2, which is “Equivalent to the carbon footprint of 226,910 VISA transactions or 17,063 hours of watching YouTube"

Non Fungible Tokens (or NFTs) have actually been a talk of the town recently. This is arguably an improvement over the traditional art market when it comes to storing the value of the original work but is terrible for carbon emissions.

The whole story here is the more successful a certain coin gets, the higher the price goes; the higher the price goes, the more competition for bitcoin; and thus the more energy is expended to mine it.

As this has started to become an issue for most mainstream cryptocurrencies, new cryptocurrencies are being developed that are environmental friendly. Cryptocurrencies such as polkadot have started reaching the mainstream market.

Polkadot has the lowest total electricity consumption and total carbon emissions per year.

At the moment Polkadot's price is $16.55, in the market.

How does Polkadot tend to be enviornmental friendly?

The Polkadot platform works with a relay chain. It was created to be fast, reliable & eco-friendly. Polkadot connects different specialized blockchains into a single unified network. This enables them to access the Polkadot network’s proof-of-stake validation of transactions and security. This is very unlike bitcoin that runs on it's own.

The two issues blockchain-based systems most need to solve are scalability—the number of transactions per second the network can handle—and governance: how the community manages protocol upgrades and changes.

Fixing

The need to mainstream bitcoin is likely to accelerate research into reducing the cost of storing renewable energy, as well. Additionally, the tentative steps being taken by governments to turn bitcoin into legal tender could potentially lead to well-considered policies for mining cryptocurrencies and penalizing breaches of environmental norms.

A quick fix is mining with sunlight based power and other efficient power energy sources. Every day, Texas alone gets more sun oriented power than we really want to supplant each non-sunlight based power plant on the planet. There are various business administrations for controlling crypto mining on server farms that mainly utilize spotless, environmentally friendly power. Genesis Mining, for example, empowers digging for Bitcoin and Ethereum in the cloud. The Iceland-based organization utilizes 100 percent environmentally friendly power and is currently among the biggest excavators on the planet.

Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum all rely upon energy wasteful cryptographic critical thinking known as "Proof of Work"(PoW). This is very inefficient. Numerous more up to date blockchains(one being Polkadot) use "Proof of Stake" (PoS) frameworks that depend on market incentives. Server proprietors on PoS frameworks are designated "validators" - not "miners." They put down a store, or "stake" a lot of cryptographic money, in return for the option to add squares to the blockchain. In Proof of Work frameworks, miners rival each other to see who can issue address the quickest in return for an award, taking up a lot of energy. In any case, in PoS frameworks, validators are picked by a calculation that takes their "stake" into account. Eliminating the component of contest saves energy and permits each machine in a PoS framework to figure out on each issue in turn, rather than a Proof of Work framework, where a plenty of machines are hurrying to take care of a similar issue. Moreover, if a validator neglects to act sincerely, they might be taken out from the organization - which helps keep PoS frameworks exact. Developers need to take some real time to contemplate prior to making new Proof of Work blockchains in light of the fact that the more effective they become, the more regrettable environmental effect they might have.

Ethereum, the second-most famous digital currency, is changing to a 2.0 variant in 2022 that will drastically decrease its power utilization and negative natural effects. Yes, it will soon work on the PoS rather than it's former PoW.

🗣️ “Bitcoin & Ethereum 1.0 is an environmental disaster and must evolve or fade away"