Harvard's latest study: Bitcoin mining causes environmental pollution, affecting 1.9 million people

Recently, a controversial study led by Harvard University explored the air pollution issues related to Bitcoin mining facilities in the United States. The study pointed out that Bitcoin mining in the United States has significantly increased harmful fine particulate matter across state lines, and 1.9 million Americans were exposed to higher concentrations of fine particulate matter between mid-2022 and mid-2023.

Researchers tracked the 34 largest bitcoin mining farms in the United States and said they consumed 32.3 TWh of electricity — 33% more than the city of Los Angeles — with 85% of that electricity coming from fossil fuels.

"Bitcoin mining is largely unregulated in the United States and is emerging as a major emerging challenge for environmental health and air pollution regulation in the United States," said a research team co-led by Dr. Francesca Dominici and Professor Gianluca Guidi of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The researchers noted that Bitcoin mining's "huge" energy requirements and cross-state pollution limit local regulatory powers and called on the federal government to intervene.

The study has also been criticized by energy experts in the digital asset industry, some of whom criticized the study as "deeply flawed" and believed that it exaggerates the impact of Bitcoin mining on air pollution.

Daniel Batten, an expert on energy and environmental sustainability, called the study "deeply flawed" and said it "looks like someone has concluded that 'Bitcoin mining must look bad' and then went out and found the data and methodology to support that conclusion."

Batten, a climate technology investor and co-founder and managing partner of CH4 Capital and an advisory board member of MARA, the largest public bitcoin mining company, specifically pointed out that the researchers used a marginal emissions accounting approach rather than a standard emissions accounting approach and did not disclose its limitations.

PowerBeats believes that mining, as a way to operate and maintain blockchain networks, uses traditional energy and causes environmental pollution, which is a consensus in the industry. The essential question of whether Bitcoin mining causes environmental pollution is not whether the calculation method is reasonable, but whether the pollution caused by energy consumption is minimized and whether clean energy is used to replace traditional energy - just like pure electric vehicles replace fuel vehicles.

DeCloud helps save energy and reduce emissions

DeCloud, or decentralized cloud computing power, combines blockchain technology, smart contracts, privacy technology, cryptocurrency, intelligent supercomputing, AI technology, etc. to build a decentralized computing power platform, allowing idle computing power resources to be circulated and traded on the chain, thereby maximizing the value of computing power.

DeCloud helps the environment with energy conservation and emission reduction in two main aspects: one is to make full use of idle and wasted computing resources to save energy and reduce emissions; the other is to encourage computing nodes to adopt new energy to optimize the source of computing power supply.

Make full use of idle and wasted computing resources

According to a report by Flexera, the effective utilization rate of cloud purchased by enterprises in 2022 is only 68%, which means that 32% of cloud resources are wasted. On the other hand, Gartner predicts that cloud spending will reach nearly $500 billion in 2022, which means that a rough estimate of $160 billion of cloud spending is wasted. If the 32% of computing resources that are wasted can be fully utilized, the goal of green and low-carbon will be further achieved.

DeCloud further improves the utilization rate of overall computing resources by integrating idle and wasted computing resources, thereby further saving energy and reducing emissions. For example, this means that GPUs and servers from large manufacturers can continue to provide computing power to gamers in areas with large time differences late at night, releasing idle computing resources, and then satisfying computing power demanders through on-chain automated transactions and execution.

Encourage green node participation and promote the use of renewable energy

The advantage of a decentralized cloud computing platform is that it can formulate policies and measures to encourage computing nodes to use more renewable energy, allowing players, enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises, users and other computing power demanders to use computing power provided by renewable energy, thus forming a positive circulation system of "green computing power", thereby fundamentally abandoning traditional energy that pollutes the environment and further saving energy and reducing emissions.

For example, decentralized cloud computing platform PowerVerse can encourage nodes that use green energy to join through the platform's incentive mechanism. For example, the platform can incentivize computing nodes that use renewable energy such as wind power/photovoltaic power, and provide higher weights and higher income incentives for these "green nodes", forming a positive cycle of "using green electricity to obtain higher returns", and promoting more computing node operators to switch to green energy supply, gradually replacing traditional high-carbon energy. The platform can also prioritize displaying "green nodes" to users, and issue coupons to users who use "green nodes" and formulate a series of incentives.

The mining industry and market are in urgent need of exploration

Mining is not in compliance with laws and regulations in China and is explicitly prohibited. Therefore, the issue of environmental pollution caused by mining has not formed a mainstream market in China. Since the United States has not banned the mining market, it has brought about social issues such as environmental pollution.

The Harvard University study indicates that as the demand for cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence data centers grows, the risk of environmental pollution caused by mining may further increase, causing greater public health risks. If decentralized networks are used as infrastructure for cutting-edge technologies such as AI and the Metaverse in the future, forming a "AI+Web3" and "Metaverse+Web3" pattern, then the demand for maintaining and operating distributed networks will grow strongly and form a huge market scale.

By then, if mining still uses traditional energy as a drive like it does today, it will definitely not be an ideal result. How to minimize environmental pollution and how to create greater benefits through energy conservation and emission reduction will be issues that the mining industry and the market need to think about.