The values of cryptocurrencies have soared higher over the past couple of weeks. That should be a cause for celebration for everyone who invests in crypto mining. However, it appears that crypto value is not the only thing that keeps on going up. Energy consumption is rising as well.
A UK-based energy comparison tariff service, PowerCompare, has conducted a study about cryptocurrency mining. As it turned out, the average power that was harnessed to mine cryptocurrencies surpassed the quantity that some 159 countries usually consume.
The aforementioned researchers would say that cryptocurrency mining is an energy black hole. The computational requirements needed for cryptocurrency mining demand an enormous amount of energy. Given the number of people using and creating cryptocurrencies around the world, cryptocurrency mining can potentially lead to drying out of energy resources.
Since most of the world’s electricity still comes from greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels, cryptocurrency mining has a big contribution to the climate change that the world is currently facing.
Despite the figures presented by PowerCompare, it is still difficult to approximate how much electricity is actually used by miners. But according to speculative analysis, the energy from crypto mining is strong enough to light up about one million American homes.
Devries Global is another researcher that found out that crypto mining also produces carbon emissions. Apart from geographical changes, carbon emissions can also affect food and water supply, as well as increase incidents of extreme weather conditions.
From the study, it was found that approximately 8,000 to 13,000 kg carbon emissions are produced per crypto transaction.
Because cryptocurrencies are currently at its climax, it is presumed that the figures above are just going to get higher. It is devastating to think what potentialities can fall upon nature.
Even if digital payments were to phase out in a few years, it is inconceivable what crypto mining can do in just a few hours.
Despite the bad news about cryptocurrencies, it is indisputable how they have become a part of people’s daily lives. It is even considered as a solution to one of the world’s problems like currency declination.
While most people are busy making money out of cryptocurrencies, Speculative.Capital is working on a project which can solve the problems presented above.
The first cryptocurrency was created in the year of 2009 using the computer processing unit (CPU) of a simple computer. However, the pace of crypto mining moved up pretty quickly. It did not take long before miners shifted from common CPUs to graphics processing units (GPUs).
A common CPU at that time could only produce 33 hashes per second, but with the rise of the graphic processing units, puzzles were solved at a much higher pace.
During the initial phase of cryptocurrency, trading for digital money was unfathomable. Miners had a better chance of earning money than if they were to trade it. Due to the growing potential for miners to earn money, shifting from a mining hardware to another went quickly than expected.
Because of the dedication of miners to solve puzzles more quickly, they figured that putting several GPUs together can pump up the hash rate for mining, or what has been referred to as a mini farm.
Miners were faced with significant problem power consumption for crypto mining, and thus they had to shift their facility to a more versatile one: gate arrays.
Gate arrays allowed miners to take advantage of nearly five times the power capacity of GPUs. Gate arrays had been a favored tool for miners until the rise of the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This hardware had proven to have tenfold the capacity of a mere GPU with 1,500 GH/s.
With the rise of cloud services, cloud mining came along, and customers no longer have to do anything but just wait for their software to produce hashes.
Despite the certain applauds crypto mining has gained, some people argue that the whole process has a bizarre environmental impact on the world. This is primarily due to the fact that to produce a decent amount of money, one has to utilize a huge amount of electricity too.
And now, Netherlands-based tech company Speculative.Capital had laid the groundwork for a project which aims to harness hashing power from the human flesh.
To initiate their project, the staff assembled body suits which can turn heat into electricity and transfer it from human counterparts to power computers which are producing cryptocurrency.
According to the tech company, they sought the help of approximately 37 subjects. What they did was pretty simple. They just had to lie down for a couple of hours while the body suits harness energy from them.
The staff was able to gather energy good for 212 hours of crypto mining. They also boasted unlocking about 16,594 coins in their venture.
The tech company chose to mine cryptocurrencies such as StartCOIN, Litecoin, Vertcoin, Lisk, Ethereum, and Dash. They admitted that the crypto with the most coins mined was StartCOIN, while Ethereum and Litecoin remained at the bottom of the list as the least mined crypto. However, they say that this is only because the demand for these cryptocurrencies has caused the high-scale difficulty in mining them.
Despite the success of their newly elected project, people are wondering why they chose to obtain energy for crypto mining from human subjects instead of getting them from the sun. To harness solar energy, one only needs the help of a solar panel, as well as a battery and converter. Because solar panels are easy to set up, some people are puzzled as to why Speculative.Capital decided using humans in the first place.
The tech company refused to say a word about it. However, it appears that it matters not what kind of method the company uses to give further improvements for crypto mining. It is imperative for crypto enthusiasts to look for a cleaner and cheaper electricity source, and Speculative.Capital has managed to provide that contribution.