Based on the Time-Spatial Power-Based Cryptocurrency Miner Driving Force Model, Establish a Global CO2 Emission Prediction Framework after China Bans Cryptocurrency

Abstract

The energy consumption and carbon footprint of cryptocurrencies have always been a popular topic. However, most of the existing studies only focus on one cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and there is a lack of long-term monitoring studies that summarize all cryptocurrencies. By constructing a time series hash rate/power model, this research obtained the 10-year time series data on energy consumption dataset of global top-25 cryptocurrencies for the first time. Both the temporal coverage and the spatiotemporal resolution of the data exceed previous studies. The results show that Bitcoin’s power consumption only accounts for 58% of the top-25 cryptocurrencies. After China bans cryptocurrencies, the conservative change in global CO2 emissions from 2020 will be between −0.4% and 4.4%, and Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan are likely to become areas of rapid growth in carbon emissions from cryptocurrencies.