According to Forexsuggest, Bitcoin was the world’s most polluting digital currency in 2022, producing almost one ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) per transaction.
According to Wallex and quoted by Forkast, the pollution of the Bitcoin network increased sharply again after decreasing in 2021. Bitcoin network activity in 2022 resulted in the release of approximately 86.3 million tons of carbon dioxide. To clean this amount of greenhouse gas, 431.6 million trees will be needed.
It should be noted that in this report, the increasing favor of miners to supply energy for mining activities from green energy sources is not taken into account. According to information Bitcoin Mining Councilnearly 60% of the energy required for Bitcoin mining has been provided from sustainable energy sources, which has increased by 3% compared to the previous year.
The consensus method of the Bitcoin network, which is based on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm, has been the main reason for opposition to this network for many years. This method requires high energy consumption. For example, when the consensus method of the Ethereum network changed to Proof of Stake (PoS) last year, the energy consumption of the network decreased by 99.95%. Unlike the PoW method, in the proof-of-stake algorithm, there is no need to solve the encryption problem by validators, and the security of the network is provided by pledging a significant amount of its native token.
Among the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, Ripple (XRP) had the lowest greenhouse gas emissions per transaction, and Polygon was the second most polluting currency after Bitcoin.
In the overall ranking, Litecoin (LTC), which is a fork of the Bitcoin network and works with a similar mechanism, was the world’s second “dirtiest” cryptocurrency, producing 525,400 tons of carbon dioxide. Bitcoin Cash (BCH), another digital currency forked from Bitcoin, ranked third with the production of 141,400 tons of CO2.
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