Franck Leroy
May 4, 2021

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The data of "coinshares" have proven to be wrong with the recent drop of 25% of hash rate caused by a global black-out in the province of Xijiang : a province of china running mostly (80%) on coal :

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/bitcoin-mining-hash-rate-drops-as-blackouts-instituted-in-china-2021-04-16

The data from the University of Cambridge is much more accurate and detailed : https://cbeci.org/mining_map

Based on this data of shares per region, and on a database of life cycle assessment (ecoinvent) I show that the average carbon footprint of bitcoin mining is 830g CO2 / kWh : way worse than the US mix :

https://medium.com/crypto-lucid/enough-with-bitcoins-greenwashing-bitcoin-uses-mainly-fossil-energy-b83256d693bc

With the current consumption ( 140 TWh / year), this sums to over 115 Mt CO2 / year : more than the carbon footprint of whole Belgium !

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