News in your inbox
Channels
Editorial | what does this mean?
This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.
The real price of the bitcoin gold rush
1
With international focus on sustainability sharpening, the energy consumption of the world’s first ever popular virtual currency, bitcoin, is being put under the microscope. Its most vehement detractors argue bitcoin uses an unjustifiable amount of energy, and represents a thorn in the side of the wider green transition. Bitcoin’s advocates, on the other hand, claim this is an oversimplification, and measures can be taken to ensure the blockchain network becomes sustainable long-term.
Yet Bitcoin is far from the only environmental villain in the crypto space. There are plenty of other tokens that also rely on energy-sucking proof of work (PoW) consensus mechanisms to validate transactions and mint new coins.
PoW requires a decentralised network of mining rigs – sometimes made up of thousands of computers labouring in unison – to solve complex math problems in a race to verify transactions to win new Bitcoins.
Not all virtual coins use PoW, but all of the most energy-consumptive do.
Many experts say proof of stake can offer the crypto sector a dramatically greener future. The biggest coins using that consensus mechanism which relies on larger coin owners to validate blockchain transactions are Binance Coin, Cardano, Polkadot, Stellar and Solana.
Can Elon Musk’s Bitcoin Betrayal Expose the Grift of Cryptocurrency?
The Tesla executive’s reversal affirms that Bitcoin is an environmentally wasteful multilevel marketing scheme. But the true believers won’t hear it.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
It’s a dark day on meme street. Elon Musk, one of Bitcoin’s high priests, seems to have turned against the cryptocurrency, sending its value tumbling more than 10 percent and calling into question an economic model that had depended on the public support of megamoguls to keep crypto prices frothy.
Here’s how the betrayal went down. On Wednesday evening, Musk, who in recent months has been a manicbooster of the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Dogecoin, tweeted an announcement that Tesla would no longer be accepting Bitcoin for vehicle purchases.