Bitcoin eWaste
Yet again many unfounded claims about Bitcoin disproved. Such as Dogdyconomists 37,000t of eWaste every year.
Only 60,290 Metric Tonnes of bitcoin mining ASICs have ever been manufactured ! Approximately 65% are still in operation, 23.4% are mothballed awaiting the BTC price to rise, electricity price to fall or waiting for winter as they double up as heating.
Now we have ≈ 11.6% or 6,981 tonnes of mining rigs at end of useful life. Of course, metals are THE most recycled materials, & Bitcoin mines are mostly metal.
After recycling casings, heat sinks & copper coils - (the easy bits) - we are left with roughly 838 t eWaste. Remember this is an ALL TIME figure.
Bitcoin was created in 2009, ASICs didn’t really kick in for a few years, so let’s divide over say 9 years. We are now left with 93 t/year eWaste, circuit boards and plastics that may be further recycled.
We only have to compare that to 6,600,000t eWaste from TVs / Monitorsto see we have much bigger problems. Of course, many of these screens & computers will have come from the Banking & Finance industry - That Bitcoin is offsetting.
Only 60,290 Metric Tonnes of bitcoin mining ASICs have ever been manufactured ! Approximately 65% are still in operation, 23.4% are mothballed awaiting the BTC price to rise, electricity price to fall or waiting for winter as they double up as heating.
Now we have ≈ 11.6% or 6,981 tonnes of mining rigs at end of useful life. Of course, metals are THE most recycled materials, & Bitcoin mines are mostly metal.
After recycling casings, heat sinks & copper coils - (the easy bits) - we are left with roughly 838 t eWaste. Remember this is an ALL TIME figure.
Bitcoin was created in 2009, ASICs didn’t really kick in for a few years, so let’s divide over say 9 years. We are now left with 93 t/year eWaste, circuit boards and plastics that may be further recycled.
We only have to compare that to 6,600,000t eWaste from TVs / Monitorsto see we have much bigger problems. Of course, many of these screens & computers will have come from the Banking & Finance industry - That Bitcoin is offsetting.
Bitcoin eWaste per transaction
Some estimates put this at a ridiculous 376g per Transaction (Tr) - er no ❌
Let’s do the maths -
300,000 Tr per day x 365 = 109,500,000 Tr/year
93 tonnes / 109,500,000 = 0.85g eWaste per transaction (on chain),
approximately the mass of 1 butterfly 🦋 .
However Transactions are ≈ 2% of block rewards. So only fair to award 2% of ewaste to transactions, the other 98% being awarded to creation of new coins.
0.85g x 2% = 0.017g = 1 ant 🐜
Let’s do the maths -
300,000 Tr per day x 365 = 109,500,000 Tr/year
93 tonnes / 109,500,000 = 0.85g eWaste per transaction (on chain),
approximately the mass of 1 butterfly 🦋 .
However Transactions are ≈ 2% of block rewards. So only fair to award 2% of ewaste to transactions, the other 98% being awarded to creation of new coins.
0.85g x 2% = 0.017g = 1 ant 🐜
However, It gets better
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Ultimately Lightning transactions will be the norm, of which there may be 10s to 1000s in each channel.
Let’s do more maths - 1 transaction to open a lightning channel & 1 to close, divided by number of transactions in the channel. g/Tr = ( 🐜+🐜 ) ÷ number of Lightning transactions ( 0.017 x 2 ) ÷ 100 = 0.00034g A very small grain of sand perhaps ? |
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Bearing in mind the average Bitcoin transaction has a value is £200,0000, Pound for Pound I’m sure the banking sector has much greater quantities of eWaste.
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95% of ASICS are air cooled type
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Roughly 5% ASICS are water cooled
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