Bitcoin’s water consumption: A new environmental threat?

December 12, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Web3 ecosystem made ‘good strides’ in changing climate narrative, exec says

September 14, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Celo CEO Marek Olszewski said that blockchains can provide transparency and real-time verification on the state of carbon credits.

While moving to proof-of-stake (PoS) contributes to changing the narrative of blockchains being harmful to the environment, there are still many things that the Web3 ecosystem can do to tackle climate change, according to Marek Olszewski, CEO of Celo — an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution.

Cointelegraph editor Zhiyuan Sun spoke with Olszewski about the threat of climate change, the benefit of using blockchain-based systems for carbon offsets, and various ways that projects can offset their carbon footprint.

According to Olszewski, as climate change remains a threat to humanity, companies and projects are steering toward becoming carbon neutral. He said:

“Climate change is still a systemic threat to our species. I think as a society, we kind of owe it to ourselves to do anything that we can. And I suspect that every project and every company in the next 10 years will probably move to be carbon neutral.”

The Celo executive believes that the broader Web3 ecosystem has been making “really good strides” in terms of being able to change the narrative around blockchain’s impact on the environment. Last year, the community celebrated the Ethereum Merge, the blockchain’s shift from the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus to the more environmentally friendly PoS mechanism.

Olszewski believes that the Merge as well as the move by various teams within Web3 to offset or commit to offsetting their carbon footprints help the space in two ways. Firstly, it attracts people who were previously put off by those who argue that blockchains are not good for the environment. Secondly, the executive highlighted that this leaves room for innovation within the regenerative finance (ReFi) ecosystem.

“At the very least, I think we’ve started to shift the narrative, which I think is both really good for the crypto industry because I think it pulls more people in [...] and it’s created a safe space to innovate within the ReFi ecosystem,” Olszewski said.

Apart from these, the executive also mentioned some benefits of having an on-chain carbon offset system compared to traditional methods. Olszewski said that traditional carbon credit systems are plagued by a lack of transparency. The executive noted that with blockchain, there can be real-time transparency and verification that the carbon offsets are still valid. He said:

“Being able to tie satellite data through an oracle on-chain, you can bring that information and see with certainty that the carbon offsets are doing what they claim they would do.”

When asked about carbon credits and how blockchain-based projects can offset their carbon footprint, the executive gave several examples. According to Olszewski, apart from planting trees, which is the most common way to offset carbon emissions, the executive mentioned restoring habitat for species, direct air capture sequestration and the use of biochar as some of the other ways to offset carbon emissions.

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Stronghold requests permission to burn tires for crypto mining in Pennsylvania

August 30, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Bitcoin mining

Company requests the use of Tire Derived Fuel, citing the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s approval to use this kind of energy source at other industrial facilities in the state.

Stronghold Digital Mining, a Pennsylvanian crypto-mining company, is currently seeking approval to produce up to 15% of its energy using shredded tires, at its Panther Creek plant in Nesquehoning. Local environmental activists are preparing to oppose the initiative.

We are calling on state regulators and DEP with @earthjustice @pennfuture to deny a permitting request from Stronghold Digital Mining to burn tires as fuel for its bitcoin mining operations.

Read the full story: https://t.co/plRqK6qucf
— Clean Air Council (@CleanAirCouncil) August 28, 2023

According to local media, Stronghold filed an application with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection in July. However, it was only last week when the information broke out in the public sphere. Officially, the company requested the use of so-called Tire Derived Fuel (TDF), citing the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) approval to use this kind of energy source at other industrial facilities in the state.

TDF has indeed been legal in the U.S. since 1991 and, in combination with other fuels, is being used at four plants in Pennsylvania. But local environment activists highlight the dubious status of the facilities, already consuming TDF and insist that the crypto mining facility shouldn't be granted such permission. Russell Zerbo, an advocate with Clean Air Council, said in the environment-focused West Pennsylvania radio show The Allegheny Front:

“Because [Panther Creek] uses the electricity it produces to generate cryptocurrency, rather than selling that electricity to the energy grid, the plant should be completely re-permitted as a solid waste incinerator that would be subject to increased air pollution monitoring requirements.”

Charles McPhedran, an attorney with a public interest environmental law organization Earthjustice, said that sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions skyrocketed after Stronghold took over the Panther Creek plant in 2021. The company didn’t shy away from using the coal to mine crypto, though consuming the supply of the waste coal, generously available in Pennsylvania. According to some estimates, there are 2 billion cubic yards of waste coal still polluting the environment throughout the state’s territory.

Recently Stronghold revealed its financial results for Q2 2023. It mined 626 Bitcoin during the second quarter of 2023, which is 43% more than in Q4 2022 and represents 1% sequential growth compared to Q1 2023, despite the Bitcoin network hash rate rise of 39% and 23% during the same periods respectively. The company generated revenue of $18.2 million and a net loss of $11.7 million

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UAE signs deal to develop carbon credit system on Venom Foundation blockchain

August 7, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

The UAE recently announced that it intends to reduce carbon emissions by 40% by 2030, a marked increase over its previous pledge.

The United Arab Emirates Ministry of Climate Change and Environment (MCCE) is developing a carbon credit system in a preliminary partnership with the Industrial Innovation Group and the Venom Foundation.

Blockchain technology is utilized by organizations and countries to track carbon credits. Due to the immutable nature of data inscribed on-chain, these credits can be securely sold or traded with total transparency for all interested parties.

This allows government organizations, such as the UAE’s MCCE, to sell or issue credits to businesses. Credit holders can either spend the credits — which allows them to emit a specific amount of carbon over a given period of time — or sell and trade them to other organizations looking to offset their own emissions.

UAE leaders recently announced changes to the country’s agenda concerning climate change and carbon offsetting. Ultimately, the goal is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

According to a local news report, UAE Minister of Climate Change and Environment Mariam Al Mheiri says this has contributed to a positive update to the country’s roadmap for reducing emissions:

“The UAE believes in its ability to make a difference in this field and has pledged, through the third update of its second Nationally Determined Contributions, to reduce its emissions by 40 per cent compared to a business-as-usual scenario, an increase of 9 per cent over its previous pledge.”

While the UAE ranks 33rd globally for total emissions, analysis from the same report shows that it ranks sixth globally per capita, according to data from 2020.

*The UAE emitted 21.79 tonnes of carbon per capita in 2021. Source: Our World In Data*

In addition to the renewed push to reduce carbon emissions at the national level, each of the UAE’s seven emirates has unveiled local programs to keep in line with the “net zero by 2050” pledge, including a comprehensive program in Abu Dhabi recently approved by the Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed.

The Agenda podcast chats with Energy Web on how to fight climate change with the help of blockchain

July 28, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Biogas

Energy Web CEO Jesse Morris explains why blockchain can make “going green” more efficient, how fighting climate change is easier, and why Energy Web is building on Polkadot.

This summer, parts of the United States are wilting under a multimonth stretch of sweltering heat, and data suggests that summer temperatures will continue to creep up in the coming years. The planet is on what seems to be a pretty clear path to soon reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming for the first time since the preindustrial era, a milestone number that the world’s countries pledged to try to remain under in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Humanity’s continued burning of fossil fuels combined with the return of the El Niño weather phenomenon has created a dangerous cocktail of rising temperatures that have been breaking records all around the world. In fact, July 6 was the world’s hottest day ever recorded — and possibly the hottest day in 100,000 years — with the month of July on track to be the hottest in recorded history.

Scientists say that short of drastic and monumental geoengineering projects, the only way to prevent the planet’s warming from remaining under 1.5 degrees Celsius is to rapidly phase out and ultimately stop the burning of fossil fuels. But modern society requires massive amounts of power to operate, so where will all that energy come from if fossil fuels are no longer practical?

The answer, according to organizations like Energy Web, lies in clean energy, or energy that does not release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

On Episode 15 of The Agenda podcast, hosts Jonathan DeYoung and Ray Salmond speak with Energy Web CEO Jesse Morris about his views on climate change, decarbonization and how blockchain technology can help facilitate the move to clean energy.

The tech is actually already built and readily available

A particular highlight from the conversation was Morris’ comment that it’s the economics of the climate change industry that need adjustment. Morris said:

“Let’s just make it so that all these technologies that can help us decarbonize are cost-effective, and businesses will just adopt them.”

Of course, it’s slightly more complex than that, but according to Morris:

“One of the big overarching challenges is we just need our electricity to be green. And one of the ways we can make the electricity to be more green, the entire electric system, is to take this concept where, let’s say we have all of these different technologies that I was talking about earlier: electric cars, batteries, solar systems, heat pumps.”

In Morris’ view, better public policy messaging couched in digestible data and a more reasonable approach to governments’ climate change and environmental preservation objectives are needed. Morris said the first step is to “electrify everything” and:

“We have all those assets out there, which is kind of a naturally decentralized, distributed landscape with all of these assets that are out there. If we can network those things together digitally and basically use those to actually balance the grid instead of these big natural gas or coal-powered facilities, that’s a really efficient way to manage the electricity system — basically telling all of those different batteries and electric cars precisely when to and when to not use electricity. It’s kind of like a big distributed, decentralized battery that’s a really efficient and incredibly economically powerful tool for balancing the grid.”

What’s blockchain got to do with it?

Given the fact that environmentally friendly solutions are already in existence and ready to roll out, both DeYoung and Salmond were curious about the actual role and need for blockchain in these technologies. Morris explained that after six years of building and trialing different solutions, Energy Web honed in on “Green Proofs’ as the primary solution with a good product-to-market fit.

Green Proofs have applications ranging from green biofuels to Bitcoin (BTC) miners using only renewable and green energy and tracing how green the materials were that came in to create a battery.

According to Morris, “Blockchain plays a pretty key role. We use blockchains to actually represent those assets.”

“So basically, if I’m a fuel producer, I log in, I register, I upload data. An on-chain representation of that data is then used and can be moved around that ecosystem to sort of track who owns the digital certificate representing that unit of green fuel, for example.”

To hear more from Morris’ conversation with The Agenda, listen to the full episode on Cointelegraph’s Podcasts page, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And don’t forget to check out Cointelegraph’s full lineup of other shows!

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This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Heating a home with a Bitcoin miner: Staying warm with sats

July 5, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Bitcoin mining

The heat generated from Bitcoin mining could make mining at home more accessible, affordable and environmentally friendly.

Bitcoin (BTC) miners emit a lot of heat.

Some miners use that heat to warm swimming pools, dehydrate meat to make beef jerky or even dry out timber at a Swedish hydropower Bitcoin farm. In Ireland, the “Bitcoin Farmer” joked that he hangs out laundry to dry in front of his Bitcoin miner.

S9 #bitcoin beef jerky pic.twitter.com/Fyc3lz98kQ
— ₿usiness Cat (@_business_cat) August 12, 2022

Miner heat is not new to the Bitcoin industry. In the early days of Bitcoin, enthusiasts would mine the cryptocurrency with their everyday computers, leading to overheating and stories of uncomfortably warm environments.

Bitcoin mining has changed since the early days. With the markedly increased difficulty of solving hash computations on the Bitcoin blockchain, miners have ditched ubiquitous graphics processing units for more powerful application specific integrated circuits, or ASICS. However, heating and cooling still remain an issue.

In a nod to the future of capturing waste heat, Satoshi Nakamoto shared a message showing precognition:

“The heat from your computer is not wasted if you need to heat your home.”

So why not take advantage of that heat and use it for productive resources? That’s exactly what I wanted to experiment with at my home near Lisbon, Portugal, this winter.

Do-it-yourself solutions that utilize Bitcoin miner “waste” heat in the home are increasingly popular. However, it can be tricky. The #mine4heat hashtag on Twitter boasts Bitcoin hobbyists who can rewire and soundproof Bitcoin miners — without electrocuting themselves.

One savvy miner heats their mobile home, an airstream, while others have found ingenious ways to mine Bitcoin and keep their homes toasty:

Proud DIY basement miner dude that exhausts his heat with trash bags taped end to end when I dont need it:) pic.twitter.com/S1XTz3T08p
— Barc (@Barcinthedark) April 21, 2023

However, for the “average Joe,” like me, it seems daunting. I’m a technologically stunted Bitcoin enthusiast who took years to run a node. So while the idea is appealing, I feared I might burn the house down.

There are several heater-cum-Bitcoin mining companies, like Heatbit and BitHeater, which are aware of Bitcoin miners’ ability to make money while heating spaces, but also that there could be pent-up demand for a plug-and-play solution.

Heatbit founder Alex Busarov told Cointelegraph that while ease of use was appealing, the environmental use case for Bitcoin miner heat drove the mission: “We want to make mining truly green,” he said.

Busarov said, “The claims that ‘xx%’ of energy used for mining comes from renewable energy’ are misleading. While the number might sound impressive, it ignores the fact that this renewable energy would have been added to the grid if not used for industrial mining.”

“Bitcoin mining is only genuinely green when combined with heating; this way, no extra energy is consumed by mining.”

Busarov referred to the statistics and claims published by Bitcoin mining advocates, including that Bitcoin is the greenest industry and that Bitcoin mining incentivizes renewable energy buildout. Nonetheless, Bitcoin miners take a lot of heat even when using waste heat for productive purposes.

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Personally, I was more focused on the power draw of the Heatbit Bitcoin miners. If it consumes less electricity than my standard electric heaters, it would be a no-brainer for use over the winter — so I got my hands on one and put it to the test.

The result: for four months, I heated my small flat in Portugal with a Heatbit.

Set up

The package arrived in mid-November during an unseasonably hot spell. I lugged it upstairs, unboxed it and scanned the instructions. It seemed too good to be true. The instructions are idiot-proof.

*Heatbit box. Cointelegraph slippers for scale.*

I connected the Heatbit to power, downloaded the Heatbit app, and it quickly found the Heatbit device and synchronized. I selected the hot setting and soon felt a warm stream of air coming from the vent at the top. I pushed my ear to it and was surprised at how quiet it was.

Bitcoin miners are very, very loud when turned up full blast. Some residents of a Norweigan town have even made noise complaints about a nearby industrial-scale Bitcoin mine, but my fridge is much louder than the Heatbit.

I waited until I had mined one satoshi — less than a penny — which took about 15 minutes. By that point, the balcony enclosure of my flat was uncomfortably warm, so I turned it off.

Over the next few months, I turned the heater on and off, moving it around the flat on its two rear wheels.

Can you make money with it?

Technically yes — but not really. I raked in 30,000 satoshis during winter, which is just over $10.

The miner was whirring away for a couple of hours most evenings and in the mornings I was at home. Sadly, I wasn’t in Portugal a great deal, with trips to Senegal, Poland and Cape Verde during the winter. Had I been home, I would have netted another roughly 50,000 sats of “heat.”

Moreover, my electricity bill was marginally lower than the previous winter, which is a minor success in light of double-digit inflation in Portugal.

However, that misses the point. The Hearbit is a heater first and a Bitcoin miner second. The heat is smoother than my regular heater and requires zero maintenance (so far). Plus, as Busarov points out:

“We want to decentralize mining. It’s unlikely that Satoshi envisioned mining to be centralized in large farms. The ideal approach is ‘everyone contributing a bit.’”

The Heatbit contributes to the Nicehash mining pool. Some critics claim that mining pools lead to mining centralization — something the Bitcoin community is attempting to overcome with upcoming Stratum V2 upgrades to the mining algorithm. Nonetheless, there have been other unexpected consequences to running a Bitcoin miner.

Living with a Bitcoin miner

In Portugal, central heating is rare. Most homes I’ve stayed in use oil heaters or electric heaters. The Heatbit quickly replaced my electric heater, which was more expensive due to its higher power draw. The miner is also quieter, and the heat emitted is consistent and less punchy. However, it’s also 10 times the price of my electric heater.

Interestingly, the Heatbit’s size and stature raise eyebrows and questions like, “What’s that?” among friends visiting my flat. Guests were surprised to learn that the white box was mining Bitcoin, as invariably, they thought that Bitcoin mining took place in giant data centers. I showed them how much I’d earned on my phone, and, in a way, the heater is an orange pilling aid.

As Busarov explains, the point of the Heatbit “is to expand the Bitcoin community.” “There are far more people using electric heaters than miners,” he said. Tools like easy-to-use at-home Bitcoin heater miners are another step toward greater adoption.

The downsides are the price tag and the size. The unit is large, heavy and costs over $1,000 brand-new. Given that in Portugal, I use a heater for four to five months a year, the Heatbit becomes a large paperweight from April to October.

Ultimately, it would take a few years to pay off at current price levels in a warm country like Portugal. Naturally, if the Bitcoin price were in the six figures, it would be a different story.

Moreover, on Reddit and YouTube reviews, some users have reported problems with use and concerns about customer service.

Plus, the mainstream and plug-and-play nature of the Heatbit is contrary to the ethos of the DIY Bitcoin miners, who see the company as making a profit on something a person could do themselves. And fundamentally, Bitcoin was first propagated by hobbyists, so it’s understandable.

*Developers working on works on the Heatbit One prototype. Source: Heatbit*

To Heatbit’s credit, it listened. The company is introducing a smaller heater, the “Heatbit Mini,” from $299, in time for the next European winter. Busarov explains:

“We also added air purifying functionality, making the device usable all year round. And, as the name suggests, the [Heatbit] Mini is smaller in size — less than 50 cm tall — making it convenient to place in any room.”

The Heatbit Mini consumes 300 watts for mining and air purification, boostable to 1,300 watts of heat in the wintertime. The 300-watt setting still contributes the full 10 terrahashes per second, while the original Heatbit hash rate drops off as it dials down.

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That should mean you can run it all year round as an air purifier and a heater. Naturally, I’ve signed up for one.

Solana launches emissions dashboard to spur blockchain carbon footprint transparency

April 21, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Bitcoin mining

The Solana Foundation has launched a real-time carbon emissions tracker to monitor the Solana blockchain.

The Solana Foundation, in collaboration with data platform Trycarbonara, announced the launch of a real-time tracking dashboard to measure carbon emissions on the Solana blockchain.

1/ Today, the Solana Foundation is leading the charge in the climate fight by making Solana one of the first blockchains to have its emissions measured in real time, thanks to a new data portal created with TryCarbonara.

Learn more: https://t.co/k4QsZmtjHn pic.twitter.com/gqPwpKtv3u
— Solana (@solana) April 21, 2023

According to a blog post from the foundation, this represents the first “major smart-contract blockchain” to measure carbon emissions in real-time. The organization hopes this will spur a trend towards carbon emissions transparency in the blockchain ecosystem:

“The Solana Foundation hopes to set a new standard for measuring emissions in blockchain by publishing this data.”

The new dashboard can be found on the Solana Climate website. Trackers there currently display the total node count, megawatt-hours, total carbon emissions average and marginal use, and numerous other indicators.

The new dashboard also contains several emissions comparison charts where users can view side-by-side conversions depicting Solana usage versus numerous other emission-producing activities.

3/ The tracker also includes comparison charts that help put the carbon footprint of the @Solana blockchain and individual interactions with the chain in perspective. pic.twitter.com/sUJlM07YI2
— Solana (@solana) April 21, 2023

Burning a gallon of gasoline, according to the chart, produces the equivalent of conducting 140,416.67 transactions on the Solana blockchain, whereas performing a Google search adds up to one and a quarter transactions.

The data used to power the Solana Foundation’s real-time carbon emissions dashboard is available open source and is modeled on the estimated carbon footprint of the Dell PowerEdge R940.

Whether other blockchain outfits will adopt similar tracking systems remains to be seen, but this move from the Solana Foundation comes amid increasing global efforts to utilize blockchain technology to monitor carbon emissions around the world.

As part of its “Shaping Europe’s digital future” initiative, the European Commission, a politically independent arm of the EU’s executive that operates in tandem with the European Council, has lauded blockchain’s ability to serve as a foundation for the accurate measurement of carbon emissions in any sector.

In an article on the EU’s digital strategy blog, the commission wrote, “blockchain can be utilised through smart contracts to better calculate, track and report on the reduction of the carbon footprint across the entire value chain.”

Meanwhile, in the U.S., President Joe Biden recently floated budget plans that would add an excise on electricity used for cryptocurrency mining in the amount of 30%.

European banks launch ‘sustainable’ blockchain platform for digital bonds

April 4, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Bond Investments

The platform makes the first use case of a so-called “Proof of Climate” blockchain protocol.

Two banks from Sweden and France announced the launch of a new digital bond platform built on blockchain technology. The platform will enable institutional clients to issue, trade, and settle bonds digitally, providing a more efficient and secure process compared to traditional methods.

The platform, a joint project of Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) and Credit Agricole Bank, is called so|bond. According to the announcement from April 3, the blockchain network will be using a validation protocol, Proof of Climate awaReness, minimizing its environmental footprint.

The Proof of Climate awaReness protocol is said to enable an energy consumption comparable to non-blockchain systems and incentivize participating nodes to improve the environmental footprint of their infrastructures.

Each node will be remunerated according to a formula linked to its climate impact: the lower the environmental footprint, the larger the reward. so|bond would become the first use case for the protocol, developed by the French-based IT provider Finaxys.

Romaric Rolleti, head of innovation and digital transformation at Crédit Agricole CIB, said that the bond blockchain platform was part of a larger plan for the bank’s digital transformation:

“The platform’s innovative approach, both to the blockchain infrastructure and to the securities market, is coupled with the strong commitment to green and sustainable finance that is at the center of our Societal Project.”

The project joins a significant amount of other efforts to explore the use of blockchain, smart contracts and the Internet of Things (IoT) for a global environment cause. For example, in October 2022, The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the United Nations Climate Change Global Innovation Hub presented the results of their Genesis 2.0 initiative — two prototypes of tokenized green bonds.