Quantification of energy and carbon costs for mining cryptocurrencies
@article{Krause2018QuantificationOE, title={Quantification of energy and carbon costs for mining cryptocurrencies}, author={Max J. Krause and Thabet Tolaymat}, journal={Nature Sustainability}, year={2018}, volume={1}, pages={711-718} }
There are now hundreds of cryptocurrencies in existence and the technological backbone of many of these currencies is blockchain—a digital ledger of transactions. The competitive process of adding blocks to the chain is computation-intensive and requires large energy input. Here we demonstrate a methodology for calculating the minimum power requirements of several cryptocurrency networks and the energy consumed to produce one US dollar’s (US$) worth of digital assets. From 1 January 2016 to 30…
130 Citations
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