The Bithumb market price on the 14th, when Bitcoin exceeded 70 million won for the first time in history. Reporter Kim Beom-jun [email protected]
Should I leave this at my father’s house this winter? While mining Bitcoin, a’miner and boiler’ appeared that uses the heat generated during this process to warm the house.
According to a foreign press on the 20th, Wise Mining, a mining machine manufacturer, plans to sell a boiler named Sato, which is heated with bitcoin mining, from April. The company is taking pre-orders with a fixed quantity of 100 units. The price is 8990 dollars (about 10 million won). You can also pay with 0.15222 Bitcoin.
The reason that the industry has developed such a product is a counterattack against the’Environmental Pollution Theory’, a point where Bitcoin is always criticized. Wise Mining said, “The most controversial thing about Bitcoin is energy consumption during the mining process. Mining at home is not only economically sustainable, but it can also overshadow the environmental criticism of mining.”
In the past, experiments such as’Ethereum’, which used the heat from mining, to make distilled spirits, and’Cryptomato’, which was used to grow tomatoes, were conducted. Bitcoin.com argued that “the criticism that digital assets consume enormous electricity is overblown.”
‘Sato’ heats the house with the heat generated from the bitcoin mining process. Provided by Wise Mining
Cryptocurrency can be purchased on an exchange, but it can also be paid in exchange for performing complex computations with a computer. It is called mining because it is similar to mining precious metals in a mine. Blockchain, the underlying technology of coins, requires enormous computational power. Of course, you have to use a lot of electricity because you have to keep your computer busy.
The Alternative Finance Center at the University of Cambridge in the UK estimated the electricity consumption related to bitcoin at about 40-445 TWh (terawatt hours) per year. The median estimate is about 130 TWh. It’s about the same level as Argentina’s one-year electricity consumption. According to the researchers’ survey of Bitcoin network operators, about two-thirds of the energy consumed by Bitcoin comes from fossil fuels.
Foreign media pointed out that as the value of bitcoin increases, more miners jump in and the amount of electricity consumption increases as the computational power required to generate and maintain it increases. The BBC said, “Bitcoin mining takes about 16,000 operations per second,” and said, “These operations performed to maintain the system do not really do anything useful.” It is called’wasting electricity’.
An experiment in which the heat from cryptocurrency mining is used to make spirits. Provided by Bitcoin.com
The US Bank of America said on the 17th, “Bitcoin is a below-average asset in terms of environment, society, and governance (ESG),” in a report entitled “Bitcoin’s Little Dirty Secret”. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, also criticized “300 kg of carbon dioxide is generated per bitcoin transaction, 750,000 times more than a single scratch of a Visa card.”
As the Bitcoin bull market continues, there are cases where cryptocurrency-related companies are challenging to enter the stock market. Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, is promoting a direct listing on the NASDAQ, and Cyper Mining, a mining company, is promoting a bypass listing through SPAC (a company that aims to acquire a business). Although they are making a lot of money these days, some point out that they are counterparts to ESG, which has become a trend in the financial market.
Reporter Lim Hyun-woo [email protected]