FranckLeroy

We release a live CO2 counter of Bitcoin and show that, even if recent China's ban has cut the carbon footprint of bitcoin mining by 2, it still represents 10 times what the global fleet of Tesla "saves" each year, or 4 times the carbon footprint of Google (entire company, not only servers).

In practice, most wallets and transactions are handled off-chain by the cartel of exchange platforms.

#Bitcoin is more centralized than the banking system

Sadly the Lightning Network will not help : it does not scale either.

Looking at the blockchain, we find only 8.2 millions active users in the past year. This allows to compare the environmental footprint of Bitcoin with other activities, per active user.

This is how insanely bad Bitcoin is for the environment : If you buy a Tesla car (around 40 000 $) in Bitcoins, the impact of the mining of those bitcoins is around 80 tons of CO2. This is 4 times more than the savings of CO2 you can expect from this car (compared to a gasoline one) on its entire lifetime (around -20 tons).