Dan Held, head of growth marketing at cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, is concerned about this factor. The day before, Held was a guest on the gm podcast from news outlet Decrypt, in which he spoke about the potential increase in pressure on the Bitcoin community from environmentalists.

The fact is that after the transition of Ether to PoS, Bitcoin will remain the only popular cryptocurrency with huge energy consumption, much of which on top of that comes from environmentally damaging power plants. Consequently, the BTC community could face new problems.


It should be noted that previously significant energy costs of BTC mining were the reason for Tesla to refuse to engage with the cryptocurrency. In particular, in the spring of 2021, the company refused to accept bitcoins as payment for its own cars. However, company CEO Ilon Musk has promised to restore this payment option when the BTC mining industry is more "green".


Selling Tesla for bitcoins

By the way, Bitcoin miner activity is not decreasing right now, which is an extremely interesting trend for the bear market. Moreover, on Sunday the fourth of September, the BTC network set a record for hash rate, i.e. total processing power of the blockchain. At that time, the figure was 295 hashes per second.

Bitcoin network hash rate graph

And further, such activity can have a negative impact on BTC’s reputation.

How does Bitcoin mining affect the environment?

Held’s message is simple: after the merger, i.e. the full transition of Etherium to PoS, Bitcoin could be the focus of many industry critics. Here’s his rejoinder to that.

I do think the merger will put pressure on the fact of Bitcoin’s energy consumption. Ordinary people will just start pointing to Etherium and claiming that BTC consumes too much power compared to it. And that’s it. Critics won’t understand the difference between Proof-of-Stake and Proof-of-Work.

Dan Held, head of growth marketing at cryptocurrency exchange Kraken

To understand the scale of what’s going on, let’s turn to data from Digiconomist. It shows that Bitcoin consumes around 128.61 terawatt hours of electricity per year, which compares to Norway’s consumption of the resource over the same period. At the same time, providing BTC mining through different types of power plants results in 71.73 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

Energy consumption and emissions from Bitcoin mining

A similar figure for Etherium can be seen in the screenshot below. This is an energy consumption of 77.53 terawatt hours per year and an emission of 43.24 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Energy consumption and waste emissions from Etherium mining

However, Held still doesn’t see enough incentive to change Bitcoin’s consensus algorithm. On the podcast, he mentioned that after the move to PoS in the Etherium network, the dominance of a few key steaming pools will be relevant. They could become vulnerable links in the system that could realistically be subject to government sanctions. Something similar has already happened to cryptomixer Tornado Cash. Here’s Dan’s quote.

If there is a catastrophic failure in the Etherium protocol due to such compromises, well, yes, sure, there will be a 99 percent reduction in power consumption, but the protocol will come under attack. I’m not saying it will, I’m saying it opens up the system to some technical attack vectors that the Bitcoin community doesn’t want to take on. And that’s why it has a consensus to maintain the current Proof-of-Work algorithm.

Countdown to the merger procedure on the Etherium network

Bitcoin could benefit from a sudden revision of ESG policies in the European Union, an expert said. Due to a sudden reduction in energy supplies from Russia, Europe has been forced to abandon “greening everything” in favour of hoarding as much of that very energy as possible.

I really think we are seeing a kind of global countervailing wokism. So it’s a very, very good time for Bitcoin when Europe is about to freeze over its blatantly stupid ESG policies.

Immediately after the merger, forks may appear on the Etherium network as some miners won’t want to leave their ETH mining business. That said, we wrote earlier that even ETH has decent alternatives for mining like ETC, RVN and ERG. If needed, all listed coins can be mined from 2Miners pool.

It is fair to say, though, that Bitcoin mining costs are much lower than, for example, gold mining and even more so, paper production. Here is the relevant graph from Arcane Research analysts.

Comparing Bitcoin miners’ electricity consumption to other industries


We believe that Etherium's move to PoS may indeed affect Bitcoin, but not other popular PoW cryptocurrencies. As the events of last spring showed, large companies like Tesla are quite able to stop interacting with BTC due to the energy costs of mining the cryptocurrency, and this could lead to a market collapse. Therefore, the example of Eth's network will clearly force regulators to reconsider the norms of big miners' activity. Then again, expecting something similar for other coins is unlikely, as their mining costs are disproportionately lower.


If you still have questions about cryptocurrencies, ask them in our Millionaire Cryptochat. There we will discuss other important developments in the world of blockchain and decentralisation.