Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Thursday that audits of renewable energy used by large Bitcoin miners could help assuage concerns about the cryptocurrency’s environmental impact.
“Recent extreme energy usage growth could not possibly have been done so fast with renewables,” Musk said in response to a tweet from Ark Investment director of research Brett Winton about the potential that Bitcoin mining has to foster the wider use of solar and battery systems on the power grid. “This question is easily resolved if the top 10 hashing orgs just post audited numbers of renewable energy vs not.”
Bitcoin hashing (aka mining) energy usage is starting to exceed that of medium-sized countries. Almost impossible for small hashers to succeed without those massive economies of scale.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2021
Bitcoin hashing (aka mining) energy usage is starting to exceed that of medium-sized countries. Almost impossible for small hashers to succeed without those massive economies of scale.
Musk, responding to another Twitter user who asked about ideal energy usage in crypto mining, implied that even his favored Dogecoin still had some room for improvement and said he favored a ratio of 0.1kWh, “calculated as total energy used by system divided by max transaction rate.”
Previously, we demonstrated how bitcoin minting could allow solar + battery systems to economically scale to provide a larger share of grid energy.
— Brett Winton (@wintonARK) May 20, 2021
As expected (in this update) the result holds across different historical bitcoin pricing/hash timeframes https://t.co/s70jCvR5sd
Previously, we demonstrated how bitcoin minting could allow solar + battery systems to economically scale to provide a larger share of grid energy.
As expected (in this update) the result holds across different historical bitcoin pricing/hash timeframes https://t.co/s70jCvR5sd