Right now, a massive winter storm is paralyzing the United States. In Texas, the power grid is struggling to keep the lights on, and families are facing life-threatening cold. But while citizens are being asked to conserve energy, one industry may stand to profit in millions.
As an engineer, I’ve spent years analyzing the cost structures of the crypto ecosystem. When you look past the "environmental savior" marketing, the numbers reveal a disturbing reality: Bitcoin isn't just an environmental disaster; it is a system that profits from our vulnerability.
1. The "Hostage" Economy: Profiting While Cities Are Threatened
Bitcoin miners have a unique business model: They can earn millions of dollars for turning their machines off.
In Texas, the grid operator (ERCOT) struggles with stability during extreme weather. To manage this, they use "Demand Response" programs. In 2023, during extreme heatwaves and the aftermath of grid failures that cost lives—including vulnerable residents in nursing homes—Bitcoin miners held the grid hostage!
In August 2023, Riot Platforms, a major mining company, was paid $31.7 million in energy credits simply to turn their machines off.
Let’s put that number in perspective: During life-threatening events like winter storms and heat waves, these miners earn significantly more from "curtailment credits" than they would from actually mining Bitcoin.
While your electricity bills rise and the grid nears a breaking point, your tax dollars are essentially paying a "ransom" to the crypto mining companies to stop being an energy parasite.
This raises some serious questions:
- Will we see similar windfalls in the financial reports of mining companies following the current winter storm?
- Would it make any difference if bitcoin mining were powered 100% by renewable energy? The miners would still be controlling the grid, and they'd still starve ordinary citizens from the energy they need for something as fundamental as... survival.
- And most importantly, how long will this continue?
2. The "Displacement" Fallacy
The most common defense in crypto forums is: "My Bitcoin is mined with 100% renewable energy!" This "100% clean energy" argument relies on a fundamental ignorance of how grids work.
We are in a climate emergency!
Every kilowatt-hour (kWh) of renewable energy is precious, crucial, and indispensable to decarbonize homes, businesses, hospitals, transport, and everything we need energy for.
When a Bitcoin mine monopolizes, say, a solar farm, that clean energy is subtracted from the public grid.
- The Reality: If the renewable energy goes to the miners, other consumers must continue relying on energy from coal or gas plants to keep their lights on.
- The Result: A grid that powers Bitcoin mining emits 1.6 times more CO2 than grids that don't. The net decarbonization of power grids achieved by bitcoin mining is negative.
3. "Zombie" Fossil Fuel Plants
Crypto miners don't care about the environment; their only concern is finding the cheapest kilowatt. They are no climate warriors, they're source-agnostic capitalists.
This economic reality of mining proof-of-work-based cryptocurrencies has led to all forms of energy extraction: cheap nuclear energy contracts in US, burning of cheap oil in Iran and coal and natural gas in Kazakhstan, and resurrecting dead fossil fuel plants that were slated for closure throughout the US.
- New York (Greenidge Generation): A shut-down coal plant in the Finger Lakes was revived and converted to natural gas in 2016. Since 2020, it's being used solely to mine Bitcoin. It now spews tons of CO2 and discharges hot water into the Seneca Lake, threatening local ecology.
- Montana (Hardin): A coal-fired power plant was on the brink of bankruptcy and closure 2018. In 2020, a Bitcoin mining company stepped in to buy all its power. It's funny how Bitcoin miners claim to save the planet when they consume renewable energy, while they also save the oil and coal companies by burning fossil fuel. They're just "saving" everyone! Owing to scrutiny from researchers, activists, and media, this plant was shut down in 2022.
- Pennsylvania (Scrubgrass): The Scrubgrass generation plant in Venango County (85 MW) was set to close. To date, it converts coal waste into energy for bitcoin mining. This plant can be used supply power to the grid, but since the entire power plant is owned by a bitcoin mining company, it is mainly, and increasingly, being used for crypto mining.
- Kentucky: The state passed tax breaks to attract miners, effectively subsidizing the burning of coal to a perform crypto mining. Notable miners in this region include Riot Platforms, Recently, crypto mining in this region has reduced dramatically.
4. The Water Cost: The Seneca Lake Math
A common defense in crypto mining operations is: "We don’t consume water; we just use it for cooling." This "Borrowing the Lake" justification is a myth. For example, take Seneca Lake, NY, where Greenidge Generation operates. They are permitted to discharge up to 139 million gallons (approx. 526 million liters) of hot water back into the lake daily. During summer, the temperature of this water is allowed to be 42 °C.
The "Blanket" Effect: Because hot water is lighter than cold, its mixing is minimal. It mostly sits on the top of cold water, forming a hot-water blanket about 50 cm thick—the height of a credit card. The water's average temperature drops from 42 °C to 34 °C due to factors like cooling down while spreading over the lake, evaporation, and mixing due to wind.
The Surface Area: The hot blanket of over 500 million liters of water covers 1 km2 of the lake’s surface.
The Result: On a summer day, the heat nearly doubles the evaporation rate from roughly 15 million liters per day at 22 °C to over 30 million liters per day at 34 °C. These calculations are detailed in The Bucket Water Analogy.
The Math: This forces the lake to lose an extra 15 million liters of water to the atmosphere every single day of summer. This evaporated water never returns to the local ecosystem. This is, in essence, "steaming" away of a public resource for private profit.
5. The Opportunity Cost (What we could have achieved instead?)
Consider the Bitcoin's annual power consumption. As discussed later, this value changes with BTC price. But for the sake of this discussion, we'll assume it to be roughly 200 TWh, as reported by Digiconomist. Let’s ask ourselves “What else could that power do?” to understand the opportunity cost.
If we used that energy for Green Hydrogen production (at an efficiency of 53 kWh/kg), we would produce 3.75 million tons (3.75 billion kg) of clean hydrogen as fuel.
The Transport Impact: Each kg of hydrogen can run a hydrogen fuel-cell car for over 100 km. So, 3.75 billion kg of hydrogen could power such cars to cover around 375 billion kilometers without a emitting single gram of CO2. This means it could power over a million hydrogen cars for an entire year!
The Life-Support Byproduct: For every kg of hydrogen, you get 8 kg of medical-grade oxygen. That’s roughly 30 billion kg of oxygen.
The Human Count: An ICU patient on a ventilator needs about 60 kg of oxygen per day. This means, the oxygen we "throw away" by mining Bitcoin could provide life-support for over a million people for an entire year.
We are choosing "digital hashing" instead!
Note: As detailed in The Bucket Water Analogy, the operational costs of producing green hydrogen using PEM electrolyzers is roughly the same as bitcoin mining equipment, only the storage and transportation costs for hydrogen and oxygen add up.
6. The Physical Toll: Noise and E-Waste
The damage caused by bitcoin mining isn't just atmospheric; it is also physical and local.1. Sonic Threat:
Industrial mining farms require massive cooling fans that generate a low-frequency drone likened to a jet engine idling on a runway. In Granbury, Hood County, Texas, residents living near a crypto mine report migraines, vertigo, and hearing loss. The noise is constant, ruining quality of life and depressing property values. This even forced the residents to form a city so they could have some hope for stricter noise regulations.2. Mounting E-Waste:
Mining uses specialized chips (ASICs) that run hot and burn out in roughly 1.5 years. Unlike a laptop, an ASIC cannot be repurposed. It can't be used for work, gaming, or even for tasks as simple as sending an email.- Annual Waste: Bitcoin currently generates at least 23,340 tons of e-waste annually.
- Toxicity: Using silicon and rare earth metals for bitcoin mining is like turning them into single-use lottery tickets. This only creates toxic trash that is often dumped in developing nations. The mining equipment becomes waste not because it stops working due to excessive use over many years, but because it soon becomes incompetent compared to the latest mining hardware.
7. The Miners' Justification
All of this waste gives the people worldwide a digital currency network that processes just seven transactions per second.
Crypto advocates argue that 7 transactions per second is just the Layer 1 statistics of Bitcoin, and that people also use Layer 2 solutions like Lightning Network. In simple words, they claim that the transaction speed is higher.
The Layer 2 Reality
Adoption and usage data is not publicly available for all Layer 2 solutions as these are mostly private.
One public example is the Lightning Network, which reportedly processes around 8 million of monthly transactions as of early 2025. However, this translates to only a few transactions per second. For example, 10 million monthly transactions means less than 4 transactions per second. Some say the actual transaction count is hidden due to privacy. Even if we assume 100 million monthly transactions, it still translates to less than 40 transactions per second.
In comparison, the single day transactions of India's UPI reached 741 million on January 2, 2026, and it processed 21.6 billion transactions in a single month of December 2025. This means it has processed over 8,500 transactions per second in practice. This number could be higher for other national payment systems, like that of China.
8. Why the "Price" Makes it Worse
Bitcoin’s destruction is not static. Because of the Proof-of-Work mechanism, as the profitability of bitcoin mining increases, its energy demand tends to increase over time.
When Bitcoin mining is profitable (due to high BTC prices), miners can use old, less-efficient ASICs or buy new, costlier ones. This had recently increased the average annual consumption to over 200 TWh. However, when the BTC price (and hence profitability) drops, less efficient miners tend to quit. Consequently, at current BTC prices below $90,000, the consumption has reportedly reduced to roughly 180 TWh.
The Conclusion: A "Bull Market" for Bitcoin is, by design, a "Bear Market" for the environment, and vice versa. It is the only industry in the world where higher investment doesn't reduce energy waste—it just leads to more competition, and hence more wastage.
Start the Conversation
As I argued in my previous post, Bitcoin is a mechanism that converts your capital into electricity bills and hardware waste.
Now, you have the numbers! So, next time someone tells you Bitcoin is "green," ask them:
- Is it "green" to pay a mining company $31 million to turn off its machines so citizens don’t freeze?
- Is it "sustainable" to revive dead fossil fuel plants or steam away 15 million liters of lake water every single day of summer?
- Is a digital token worth the 3.75 billion kg of green hydrogen and 30 billion kg of medical-grade oxygen we could be producing instead?
- How is it "moral" to have a crypto mining companies that demand the taxpayers to pay millions for survival?
I want to hear from you in the comments. In a world of limited resources, can we really afford to keep the machines running?
To better understand the energy waste caused by proof-of-work consensus, read The Bucket-Water Analogy.
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