Will blockchain's carbon footprint prevent or delay widespread adoption?
Sort by:
Every time I turn on the news or look at an article I see claims that Bitcoin is burning down the planet because it's creating carbon emissions. It's not an excuse to share those carbon emissions, but we have to consider the traditional infrastructure set up. For example, let’s say I have a Royal Bank of Canada account; they have about 70K employees and huge infrastructure in place. If I want to send any kind of transfer, there are huge carbon emissions involved in that. And that's not going away until we fully decentralize. We now have blockchains like Algorand claiming to be carbon negative because of their donations, but I’m not sure about whether we have neutral blockchains out there as proof-of-stake models.
I would agree with you about the carbon footprint. Anything that's data center- and processor-intensive consumes a lot of power. But there are some interesting comparisons you can make to alternatives that might even make it carbon positive.<br><br>I think it depends on what it is used for. When Second Life was becoming an interesting thing around 2006, if you were somebody in the United States who was big on the platform, the typical carbon footprint for your digital avatar was the equivalent of a physical person in Brazil because of the compute power required.
It’s very hard to either predict or judge one piece of technology in isolation from everything else. Carbon footprint is not just a blockchain problem, it's a compute issue. It's a graphic cards issue, but it’s also due to the way we design data centers. All those pieces are interconnected, so I'm on the fence about carbon footprint. We should always strive to make our technology more environmentally friendly and green, but to say blockchain is responsible for X amount of carbon footprint is ludicrous to me. We need to look at that in a much more holistic way.