Rebuttal of GreenpeaceUSA Report on Bitcoin

Rebuttal of GreenpeaceUSA Report on Bitcoin

Daniel Batten: in July 2023, GreenpeaceUSA published a report “Investing in Bitcoin’s Climate Pollution”. My rebuttal argues that the report recycles many already widely-debunked claims about Bitcoin, uses unsubstantiated fear about “what might happen” rather than evidence to influence readers, and repeatedly avoids important contextualizing information in order to present a skewed and in many cases false appraisal of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin’s Energy Usage Isn’t a Problem. Here’s Why.

LYN ALDEN, August 2021, updated December 2021 - Bitcoin’s energy usage is a rounding error as far as global energy usage is concerned. And I mean that literally; when scientists estimate that the world uses a certain amount of energy in a given year, they can easily be off by a couple percentage points in either direction, let alone a couple tenths of a percent. Bitcoin is estimated to use less than one tenth of one percent.

The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) 

The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) provides an up-to-date estimate of the Bitcoin network’s daily electricity load. The underlying techno-economic model is based on a bottom-up approach initially developed by Marc Bevand  in 2017 that uses the profitability threshold of different types of mining equipment as the starting point.