Crypto Twitter Slams BBC’s “Pool” Feed for Using Bitcoin Energy

Bitcoiners are blasting the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) following a recent article about blockchain network power consumption.

The public broadcaster cited research showing that each bitcoin transaction consumes a “backyard swimming pool” worth of water, although critics say the claim is based on “dirty science”.

Does Bitcoin Use Too Much Water?

According to a BBC article published on Wednesday, the BBC reports that the BBC's water consumption in “proof-of-work” mining is related to electricity sources that protect the blockchain – Bitcoin's energy-based internal mechanism for ensuring that no one can spend the same transaction twice.

This includes water consumed anywhere connected to the mining process – such as gas and coal plants, hydroelectric power plants, or used to cool the Bitcoin mining machines themselves.

According to a reference study published in Cell Reports Sustainability, this could exceed 1,600 gigaliters of water in 2021 and 2,200 gigaliters in 2022.

However, there are a few glaring issues: First, the study was written by Alex de Vries – a Dutch central banker with a history of wildly inaccurate predictions about Bitcoin's energy consumption and climate impact.

According to CH4 Capital founder Daniel Batten, de Vries estimated in 2017 that Bitcoin mining would consume 50% of the world's energy by 2020 – a forecast that missed by 2509x.

“If the BBC had done their homework, they would have aired de Vries' story on Bitcoin as a central bank lobbyist,” Batten wrote. The co-founder fund invests BTC in companies that use landfill gas for mining, which would otherwise be flared and pollute the climate with methane emissions.

And the author's figure is based on a flawed metric: Bitcoin doesn't consume energy per transaction, but instead relies on miners using the network to mine BTC.

Although some mining revenues are based on network transaction fees, most still come from a fixed block reward outside of transaction volume.

Other outlets cite de Vries as further exaggerating the claim, stating that a bitcoin “business” uses a pool. As of today, most Bitcoin transactions take place on a centralized exchange rather than directly on the blockchain, meaning they are completely removed from the mining process.

I thought Bitcoin with 16k liters of water on chain transaction was bad, but it gets worse. A single bitcoin *trade* uses the entire pool.

There are 10M swimming pools in America. By my calculations, we should be out of water by… pic.twitter.com/Vj5CU8x5uL

– That | swan.com (@skwp) November 30, 2023

Familiar FUD for Bitcoiners

Recent estimates from Bloomberg suggest that Bitcoin mining boasts a >50% green energy mix than any other industry on the planet. A survey from the Bitcoin Mining Council supports this figure, with a recent estimate as high as 59.9 percent.

However, Bitcoiners are used to bad press about the network's electricity usage. In the year In 2021, Elon Musk stopped accepting BTC for car payments at Tesla due to environmental concerns.

A year later, Ripple co-founder Chris Larson launched a $5 million public campaign to end Bitcoin mining in partnership with Greenpeace USA and the Environmental Working Group.

So far, the online Bitcoin community has laughed off lobbyist efforts to change the Bitcoin code — and they did the same with the BBC's latest piece.

“We almost had a decentralized digital currency, but it evaporated all the world's fresh water resources,” said Dylan LeClair, a bitcoin analyst at UTXO Management. “Thank goodness the BBC is sounding the alarm on this.”