Elon Musk recently sent Bitcoin’s value plummeting after voicing concerns about the cryptocurrency’s “insane” energy use. But what if there we

Why Can't Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

submited by
Style Pass
2021-06-08 18:00:12

Elon Musk recently sent Bitcoin’s value plummeting after voicing concerns about the cryptocurrency’s “insane” energy use. But what if there were a way to channel its computing power towards something more productive?

Bitcoin currently consumes as much electricity as a small country thanks to the huge amounts of processing required to verify transactions. What’s worse, the bulk of this number crunching is dedicated to churning out strings of digits with no practical use.

As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies grow, there’s been growing criticism of the huge amounts of electricity being diverted into these wasteful calculations. That’s prompted some researchers to ask if we could replace them with something more productive.

“Bitcoin is now consuming too much electricity without creating any real benefit for the world,” says Taeho Jung, an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame. “So we were wondering if we can do it better, if we can reinvest this energy consumption and computational power into something more useful.”

That’s easier said than done, says Jung. Most cryptocurrencies allow any computer connected to the network to update transaction records, so to prevent fraud they force users to solve fiendishly difficult numerical puzzles before they can make changes. In exchange these users, known as miners, are rewarded with cryptocurrency.

Leave a Comment