Environmental Consequences of Mining Bitcoin: The Carbon Emission in China

Abstract

In recent years, as cryptocurrency has been recognized by more people and the value of the cryptocurrency has increased, many people make money through mining. It leads to mining becoming popular but also creates serious environmental problems. Mining bitcoin will consume much electricity and thus emits more greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which has caused worldwide environmental issues. This paper will focus on figuring out that mining bitcoin will cause how much carbon emission damage in China during these years. The result of this research will provide the change in carbon emission with time and the prediction of the carbon emission trend caused by bitcoin mining in the future. This result of the article aims to focus the society and the government's attention on the damage mining bitcoin does to the environment and also provide suggestions on the measures the governments should take to reduce the unessential energy cost of bitcoin mining.