The bitcoin-mining arms race heats up

Devotees watch the fluctuations of Bitcoin's price with a fanaticism typically reserved for college football scores.
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After the news broke, LTC's price climbed 10 percent. In July , the Litecoin Foundation announced that it had acquired a 9. This payment method is also being developed with TokenPay, a blockchain developer. In August , the Litecoin Foundation began receiving decreased donations.

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According to Xinxi Wang, a board director at the Foundation, a number of employees volunteered to decrease their salaries in order to help the Foundation "weather the storm. News of this came a week after The Block reported that the Litecoin Foundation had depleted 75 percent of its cryptocurrency reserves since Q2 of He said that his goal is for the Litecoin Foundation to become self-sustaining from donations, partnerships, and merchandise sales.

Wang told Chinese news site XCong that the financial issues the Foundation was having were had no correlation "between donations and enthusiasm," and that the decreased price of Litecoin in Q1 had just as much to do with the Foundation's financial issues as the low volume of donations.

Charlie Lee has firmly stated that this alleged fork is not genuine and that Litecoin is not affiliated with Litecoin Cash in any way. He also issued a warning to investors that they could potentially "lose everything" by investing in LCC, implying that it is likely a scam. In December , the Litecoin network's hash rate had fallen by 70 percent, causing the mining difficulty to decrease significantly. In February , Lee predicted that Litecoin would overtake Bitcoin Cash in terms of price and market cap by the end of the year, in a phenomenon that he called "The Flappening.

According to a press release by the Foundation, MeconCash integrated Litecoin into its payment system M. In October , Lee told Coindesk that Litecoin's developers were in the process of adopting "privacy" features similar to the signature features of Zcash and Monero.

On August 5, , Litecoin halved its rewards as scheduled when the Litecoin blockchain reached the trigger block height of 1,, The price rose briefly after the halving. From CryptoMarketsWiki. Be skeptical. The cryptocurrency bitcoin has become notorious for its ravenous appetite for electricity — and its presumed massive carbon footprint. A June paper in the journal Joule estimated that annual carbon dioxide emissions from the bitcoin network are as high as It also accounts for 0. But another recent study by CoinShares , a cryptocurrency asset management and analysis firm, found that the majority of the electricity used by bitcoin actually comes from clean sources, like wind, solar, and hydropower.

Bitcoin mining: a report finds the network mostly runs on renewables - Vox

CoinShares says bitcoin network gets Analysts also warn that the same factors that pushed miners to use clean energy could one day lead them to back to dirty fuels. The CoinShares study also points to a broader problem for how renewable energy is currently deployed around the world: Many renewable power generators are so poorly located and underused that mining bitcoin has become the only viable use for that electricity.

Even though bitcoin solely exists in digital zeroes and ones, the computers that run the network are huge energy hogs. According to the bitcoin energy consumption tracker at Digiconomist , bitcoin currently consumes Since there is no central bank or authority governing the currency, the bitcoin network regulates itself through a distributed accounting system known as blockchain.

In blockchain, every bitcoin transaction is tracked in a public ledger spread across thousands of computers. These transactions are grouped into blocks. The bitcoin network creates an incentive for people to contribute computing power to verify transactions by awarding bitcoins to a miner who verifies a block currently Blocks are added to the blockchain roughly every 10 minutes. But mining is competitive, with only one miner winning the award per block.

Over time, the calculations needed to verify a block get more difficult and the bitcoin award shrinks. The price is also unstable. These factors have created an arms race to develop better computer hardware to more rapidly verify transactions and a push to devote ever-increasing amounts of electricity to the task.

Between 60 and 80 percent of bitcoin mining revenue goes straight back into paying for electricity. So miners really, really want to save as much on their electricity bills as possible.

The history of Bitcoin

The quest for the cheapest kilowatt has led miners to set up shop in remote regions of China and Mongolia. Bitcoin mines have gone up in rural Washington state. The hunt for cheap power has even led to cases of electricity theft. Since the network is spread all over the world, bitcoin miners often want to remain anonymous and keep their operations opaque. Another factor is that the computing hardware miners use, known as an application-specific integrated circuit ASIC , has been getting more energy efficient over time.

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But mining operations are continually deploying more of them. The power grids miners draw on are also changing over time and can change in their fuel sources between seasons. That means a local utility could be getting cleaner or dirtier over time, and if more fossil fuels are coming online to meet the demand, that would lead to more greenhouse gas emissions. In so doing, the CoinShares team found that bitcoin miners were using a disproportionate share of renewables.

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This is why you see miners flock to regions where high-powered renewables are abundant. Regions with high levels of renewable energy and low demand are often areas that saw local industries leave in recent years and subsequently experienced a population exodus. So bitcoin miners, who care more about electricity costs than location, happily moved into renewable-powered rust belts around the world.

Governments have had mixed reactions to the rise of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and their rapacious demand for electricity.