Bitcoin Mining Energy Use ‘Inconsequential,’ ‘Rapidly Becoming More Efficient’ - Saylor
The total use of energy for Bitcoin (BTC) mining is “inconsequential,” and it is “rapidly becoming more efficient,” MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor said, as the mining industry is preparing for a hearing in the US House of Representatives this week.
Saylor was speaking during a quarterly briefing by the Bitcoin Mining Council (BMC) on Wednesday.
According to the CEO, the amount of energy Bitcoin is using makes up no more than “a rounding error” in other major industries, and is “negligible” when compared to total world energy usage.
“Relative to the world-wide energy usage, [bitcoin] uses about 14 basis points,” Saylor said, noting that this is up over the past quarter given that Bitcoin’s hashrate, or the computational power, has “increased dramatically.”
Further, the prominent Bitcoin bull said that mining is not only very efficient in its current state, but stressed that it also keeps getting more efficient over time.
“It’s already the most cost-efficient major industrial user of energy in the world, it’s extraordinary in its efficiency,” Saylor said, adding that “the important point is it’s getting more efficient.”
In addition to Saylor, Coin Metrics co-founder and Castle Island Ventures general partner Nic Carter also joined the briefing. In his remarks, Carter focused on the recently published misleading memo prepared for an upcoming hearing in the US House of Representatives on the impact of crypto mining, saying the memo contains figures relating to e-waste from mining that “we know to be false.”
“The claim is that Bitcoin mining generated 30,000 metric tons of e-waste in 2021,” Carter said, adding that this is based on a paper that assumes a 1.29-year depreciation cycle for ASIC Bitcoin mining machines.
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