Saturday, 2 April 2022

The carbon footprint of Bitcoin and miners is decreasing

All the attention and reprimanding from mass media has finally gotten to Bitcoin miners it seems and many are trying to make a greener world and attempting to decrease their carbon footprint.

CoinDesk recently run a report on a Northern Italian small municipality using hydropower to mine Bitcoin.

“The northern Italian regions bordering the snowy Alps are home to dozens of hydroelectric power plants in a range of sizes, thanks to the abundance of water and varying altitudes. TRENTINO, ITALY – Daniele Graziadei, the 37-year-old mayor of Borgo d’Anaunia, a small municipality in the northern Italian region of Trentino-Alto Adige, entered the 100-year-old Alta Novella hydropower plant with familiar ease.

This year, under the leadership of Graziadei, Borgo d’Anaunia, home to around 2,500 people, became Italy’s first municipality to run a crypto data center.”

In fact, this is not the only case of its kind. Another Swedish village has been using mining rigs to power the electrical rig too.

“Around 15,000 cryptocurrency mining rigs are humming away at HIVE Blockchain’s (HIVE) 30 megawatt (MW) data center in Boden, Sweden. But not all the time. Sometimes, the facility powers down to help the local grid. The data center, drawing cheap energy from local hydropower producers, acts as one of the largest, if not the largest, active energy reserves the Swedish grid can call upon whenever there are major disturbances to the local power supply. The facility can shut down its machines almost instantaneously so that energy can quickly be diverted to public use.”

It now seems to be the case that Bitcoin and Bitcoin miners are not just decreasing their carbon footprint, but make the world greener too.

Full disclosure, this could be even easier with the advent of DeFi into the scene. Once community-run DAOs get the upper hand in rule, people could actually vote for what comes to benefit them, rather than be bound by the choices of centralized corportations. Some DAOs like the Alps foundation, or Hive or even Aloha DeFi provide a new world for users all around trying to get the best of all these worlds. DeFi DAOs, NFTs and everything that will make the future cleaner, greener and better.

The incentives between energy producers and miners are so aligned that soon it might be difficult to draw a line between the two. More energy firms are entering mining, while miners are accumulating their own energy supply. Voltus has created models to determine exactly how much flexibility is worth to crypto miners: in Texas, $37.53 per megawatt hour, whereas in New England, it’s $6.69. per MWh.

Energy companies that stay out of bitcoin mining will leave money on the table, “because mining most of the time is much more profitable than selling the energy to the grid.”

submitted by /u/Glass_Agent4495
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