From The Unhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells pg 33:
Five years ago, hardly anyone outside the darkest corners of the internet had even heard of Bitcoin; today mining it consumes more electricity than is generated by all the world’s solar panels combined, which means that in just a few years we’ve assembled, out of distrust of one another and the nations behind “fiat currencies,” a program to wipe out the gains of several long, hard generations of green energy innovation. 117 It did not have to be that way. And a simple change to the algorithm could eliminate that Bitcoin footprint entirely.
Mark Carrigan 