Mining BTC and ETH is a massive waste, says Ripple CEO

Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of a crypto startup Ripple, recently criticized Bitcoin and Ethereum, claiming that they waste too much energy on mining. His statement came as a response to a study published by Alex de Vries, PWC’s blockchain expert who calculated that BTC mining consumes more energy than Chile.

The growth in consumption comes alongside the growth in hashrate, but even so, it represents quite a shocking discovery. Not only that, but the researcher also calculated that BTC creates more e-waste than Luxembourg, and that 98% of all of its miners will likely end up in a landfill.

With all of this in mind, Garlinghouse felt that it is mind-blowing that crypto mining is not a bigger priority on the global climate change agenda.

Most of the energy consumed by BTC is green

The recent data certainly indicates that BTC is quite wasteful, which is not exactly unknown before. In fact, the wastefulness of the world’s largest coin has been a concern for a long time, especially with some environmental activists, who even proposed seizing all the assets from miners in order to pay for ‘climate reparations.’

Bitcoin mining is a process that relies on high amounts of various resources, including computing power and electricity. As such, mining does consume large amounts of electricity, but it is also worth noting that over 74% of that electricity comes from green energy resources. While this does not solve the issue, it does mitigate the environmental damage of the mining process by quite a bit.

While many would say that BTC doesn’t have a real-world equivalent, the fact is that it is backed by energy, which means that it has real intrinsic value. Meanwhile, Garlinghouse’s XRP is pre-moned, as well as constantly criticized and accused of centralization, and even of being unregistered security and a scam.