“Green” Bitcoin alternatives on the rise after Musk criticism
After Tesla stopped payments with Bitcoin because of the poor carbon footprint, most crypto rates crashed sharply. “Green” Bitcoin alternatives, on the other hand, are booming now.
Last week, Tesla boss Elon Musk announced – via Twitter – that the electric car manufacturer would no longer accept Bitcoin payments in the future. Musk cited the high energy consumption for mining and transactions with Bitcoin, especially because of the use of fossil fuels, as the reason. Led by Bitcoin, whose price plummeted 15 percent within a few hours, almost the entire crypto market lost significantly. Bitcoin alternatives with a better environmental balance, on the other hand, posted strong growth.
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Bitcoin uses as much electricity as the Netherlands
The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index by digiconomist According to the Bitcoin network currently consumes an annualized 117.6 terawatt hours, which corresponds to the annual consumption of the entire Netherlands. A single Bitcoin transaction, in turn, consumes 1,123.6 kilowatt hours, which is as high as an average US household would achieve in 38.5 days. The carbon footprint of a Bitcoin transaction – 533.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide – is the same as that of 1.18 million Visa transactions.
The energy-hungry proof-of-work protocol (PoW), which Bitcoin – as well as Ethereum, Litecoin or Monero – uses, is partly responsible for this. The consensus mechanism is used to validate and generate new blocks in a blockchain. In contrast to PoW, Proof of Stake (PoS) manages without time-consuming and energy-intensive mining – and is therefore more environmentally friendly. This probably explains that the prices of PoS blockchains such as Cardano (ADA), Polkadot (DOT), Stellar (XLM) or the Kryptodino Peercoin (PPC) not only not slumped in the past few days, but even in the clear double digits Area have grown.
Green Bitcoin alternative Peercoin with a jump in price
It was launched in August 2012 gone peercoin in the past three years – after its all-time high of $ 9.92 in January 2018 – has hovered around the one dollar mark. After Elon Musk’s Bitcoin criticism, the peercoin rate rose from around two dollars to over five dollars on Sunday within a few hours. Cardano with its ADA token hit a new all-time high of $ 2.46 on Sunday. In the past few days, the ADA rate has climbed over 40 percent.
Polkadot (DOT), which hit a new all-time high of $ 49.69 on Saturday, and Stellar (XLM) also performed well. The XLM rate rose by a good 40 percent in the past two days. XRP / Ripple, which also does not rely on PoW, could not increase significantly, but remained stable, like news.bitcoin.com reported. The fact that Dogecoin developed positively against the general market trend is again due to Elon Musk. He announced on Twitter on Friday that he was working with the Dogecoin developers to drive transaction efficiency.
