In just one year – between July 2020 and June 2021 – the global adoption of cryptocurrency surged by more than 880% .
The market price of a single bitcoin plunged below $30,000 in June 2021 for the first time since January 2021, falling by more than half from its April peak of around $65,000.
In September, El Salvador became the first country to make bitcoin legal tender .
This is arguably an improvement over the traditional art market when it comes to storing the value of the original work but is terrible for carbon emissions.
In March 2021, Austrian architect Chris Precht announced that he was abandoning“plans to sell digital artworks backed by NFTs due to the environmental impact of mining the digital tokens,” according to Dezeen magazine.
Another crucial aspect of cryptocurrency is that there is only a limited supply available.
The system is designed this way so that each digital token that gets issued contains its own unique cryptographic reference to the blockchain, ensuring its security.
According to December 2021 figures from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, Bitcoin makes up around 0.52% of the total global electricity consumption .
A better indicator of Bitcoin’s electricity source is not how it is powered but where its power comes from.
“What we have here is people trying to decide what is or is not a good use of energy,” Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer of CoinShares, told CNBC.
Even if cryptocurrency finds a way to co-exist with a fossil-free future, critics point out that the majority of the wealth created by Bitcoin goes to a disproportionately small number of investors.
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