Following the end of February, today Bitcoin once again reached a high of $57,000. According to the encrypted digital currency market website Bit Fan, at 3 o'clock in the morning on March 11, the price of Bitcoin rushed to over 57,000 U.S. dollars, reaching a maximum of 57,277 U.S. dollars, setting a new high in the past two weeks. However, the price of Bitcoin continued to decline subsequently. As of press time, the latest price of Bitcoin is $55,908.51, a 24-hour increase of 2.15%, and the market value has returned to $1 trillion.
However, in the eyes of some financial economists, Bitcoin's skyrocketing is not something to celebrate. On March 11, financial economist Alex de Vries quantified in the journal Joule ("Joule"), a journal of Cell Press, how the soaring price of Bitcoin has exacerbated energy consumption and global chip shortages, and even threatened international security.
Alex de Vries said that from a theoretical point of view, Bitcoin "mining" is essentially a process of harvesting cryptocurrency by solving complex mathematical equations. Any computer connected to the Internet can "mining". The computing power of the device is The cost of electricity has become the key to Bitcoin's profitability. With the skyrocketing price of Bitcoin, more and more people have joined the mining army. It is estimated that starting from January 11, 2021, the number of times that all "mining" equipment solves this equation per second adds up to more than 150 million to the fifth power, which will greatly consume electricity and other energy.
According to Alex de Vries, estimated based on the Bitcoin price in January, the entire Bitcoin network may consume up to 184 TWh (1 TWh ≈ 1 billion kWh) of energy each year, which is close to the consumption of all data centers in the world. Total energy. At the same time, the energy consumed by "mining" also produces 90.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to the carbon footprint of the London metropolitan area in the United Kingdom.
In addition, due to the long-term high-load operation of "mining" equipment, its lifespan is generally short, but with the skyrocketing of Bitcoin, many people will continue to increase the investment in "mining", which will further aggravate the current global The shortage of chips will eventually lead to major shortages and price hikes of products such as automobiles, computers, and mobile phones.
Therefore, financial economist Alex de Vries called on government agencies to regulate Bitcoin trading platforms to control the value of Bitcoin.
It is worth mentioning that the reporter did notice that due to the sharp rise in the price of Bitcoin this year, mining machines and graphics cards have become "hard to find". The official website of the leading mining machine manufacturer Bitmain (which produces ant mining machines) shows that the relevant bitcoin mining machines are all sold out, and the delivery time has been postponed to October 2021. In the second-hand trading market, the mining machine can easily be resold at a price more than twice the official website. Just taking the Antminer S19 95T under Bitmain as an example, the reporter found that the price of the machine on the official website is about US $3,000 yuan, and the retail market price can easily exceed US $8,000.
The graphics card, as the "iron picks" in the hands of Bitcoin miners, is even more seriously affected. A large number of people in the industry believe that the price of graphics cards has risen in recent years, and even now that NVIDIA RTX 30 series and AMD RX 6000 series graphics cards are "hard to find", it is closely related to the huge demand for graphics cards by Bitcoin miners.
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