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Tackling climate change with blockchain

Nature Climate Change volume 9, pages 644–645 (2019)Cite this article

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Concern about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin is not holding back blockchain developers from leveraging the technology for action on climate change. Although blockchain technology is enabling individuals and businesses to manage their carbon emissions, the social and environmental costs and benefits of doing so remain unclear.

Bitcoin’s computationally demanding infrastructure enables digital payments to be validated by means of a decentralized, automated ‘proof of work’ (PoW) consensus protocol. For Bitcoin, the validation of transactions requires ‘miners’ using dedicated servers to solve hash puzzles in order to add valid entries to a shared database and to secure new Bitcoins as a reward. The difficulty of these puzzles adjusts regularly to account for changes in connected computing power and to maintain approximately 10 minutes between the additions of each new block3. The likely carbon footprint of this process is high, but the many unknowns are leading to wildly varying estimates. Mora et al.4 estimate that the computer processing power needed for the Bitcoin network alone could result in a global temperature rise of 2 °C by 2050. Others say such estimates are inflated, possibly by as much as 75%5, as miners increasingly flock to sources of cheap renewable energy, such as hydropower and geothermal6,7. Because of this uncertainty, it is perhaps too early to abandon Bitcoin, or at least the potential of its underlying technology.

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  1. School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Peter Howson

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Howson, P. Tackling climate change with blockchain. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 644–645 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0567-9

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