Bitcoin eWaste
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Yet again many unfounded claims about Bitcoin disproved. Such as Alex de Vries (Dogdyconomists) 37,000 t of electronic waste every year.
Only 74,192 Metric Tonnes of bitcoin mining ASICs have ever been manufactured ! Approximately 65% are still in operation, 9% are idle awaiting the BTC price to rise, electricity price to fall or waiting for winter as they double up as heating. Now we have ≈ 26% or 19,286 tonnes of mining rigs at end of useful life. Of course, metals are THE most recycled materials, & Bitcoin mines are mostly metal plus they have the recycling advantage of many thousands being in the same place unlike TVs. After recycling casings, heat sinks & copper coils - (the easy bits) - we are left with roughly 2,314 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 10 yearBTCs. We are now left with 231 t/year eWaste, circuit boards and plastics that may be further recycled. We only have to compare that to 6,600,000t/y eWaste from TVs / Monitors to 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. |
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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
210 tonnes / 109,500,000 = 1.92g eWaste per transaction (on chain),
approximately the mass of 2 butterflies 🦋🦋.
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.
1.92g x 2% = 0.038g
Approximately 2 ants 🐜🐜
Let’s do the maths -
300,000 Tr per day x 365 = 109,500,000 Tr/year
210 tonnes / 109,500,000 = 1.92g eWaste per transaction (on chain),
approximately the mass of 2 butterflies 🦋🦋.
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.
1.92g x 2% = 0.038g
Approximately 2 ants 🐜🐜
However, It gets better
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Bitcoin lightning transactions are rapidly becoming 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 transaction to close then divided by number of transactions in the channel. g/Tr = ( 🐜🐜+🐜🐜) ÷ number of Lightning transactions ( 0.038 + 0.038 ) ÷ 100 = 0.00077g A very small grain of sand perhaps ? |
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Inside an ASIC
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51% of ASICs are air cooled type
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Roughly 49% ASICs are water cooled
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CONCLUSION
Bearing in mind a typical Bitcoin transaction is £50,000 -£1,000,000 Pound for Pound I’m sure the banking sector has much greater quantities of eWaste + paper, vehicle + employee waste.
