A Bitcoin transaction uses as much water as a backyard swimming pool
It was meant to revolutionize finance, and free us all from the tyranny of centralized control of our banking. But it turns out, Bitcoin just might end up killing our planet.That’s the findings of a new study by Alex de Vries, a researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who has put forward an estimate for how much water is consumed every time someone buys, sells, or mines Bitcoin on the blockchain.Writing in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, de Vries calculated that in 2021 mining Bitcoin consumed more than…