Marathon Digital Holdings decided to pack up its computers, known as bitcoin miners, from the grounds of a coal-fired power station in rural Montana and shift them to a wind farm in Texas. The initiative is the firm’s move to ditch fossil fuels, as the cryptocurrency sector faces rising pressure to reduce the environmental effect of its vast power use.
Ditching fossil fuels
Marathon Digital Holdings CEO Fred Thiel said that for them the simple truth is that they do not want to operate on fossil fuels anymore.
Over the past years, coal-fired power stations were thought to be the ideal site mining for cryptocurrencies.
Access to affordable and dependable power is critical in the field of bitcoin mining. However, many economists and environmentalists have cautioned that as the price of the still widely misunderstood digital currency rises — and with it, its popularity — the mining process that underpins its existence and value becomes more energy demanding and potentially unsustainable.
Energy-hungry operation
The procedure by which transactions are validated and subsequently stored on what is known as the blockchain is crucial to bitcoin’s technology. The bitcoin network’s computers compete to perform complicated mathematical equations that verify transactions, with the winner receiving newly generated bitcoins as a prize.
It was easy to solve the puzzles with a typical home computer when bitcoin was originally established, but the system was built such that issues became increasingly difficult to solve as more miners work on them. Today’s miners employ customized equipment that lack displays and resemble a high-tech fan rather than a standard computer. As more computers join the effort and challenges get more difficult, the quantity of energy consumed by computers to answer the puzzles increases.
The cryptocurrency sector, according to Anne Hedges of the Montana Environmental Information Center, “has to find a method to lower its energy usage” and “needs to be regulated,” she added. “That’s it. That’s all there is to it.” This is not a viable option.”