Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of financial technology company Ripple, has once made public his dissent on the rate at which Bitcoin and ETH mining consumes electricity.
Garlinghouse on this occasion was referring to a recent report that Bitcoin has been using more electricity per transaction than a British household in two months.
The weird statistic shows a high rate of energy consumed for the process of mining Bitcoin, even though studies have shown time and again that a significant portion of bitcoin mining globally is done with renewable energy.
The report explicitly noted:
The amount of energy needed to run the cryptocurrency has soared to record annual highs of 77.78 terawatt-hours the same as the entire electrical consumption of Chile.
The carbon footprint of a single transaction is the same as 780,650 Visa transactions or spending 52,043 hours watching YouTube, according to calculations by Alex de Vries, a blockchain specialist, at PWC.
Putting those numbers into perspective, Ripple CEO Garlinghouse, pointed out that the increased electricity needed to mine bitcoin is a massive waste, and even comes off as more significant since the network doesn’t offer any incentives for users to take responsibility for the carbon footprint.
Garlinghouse and Bitcoin
While several respondents agreed with Brad’s opinion on the increased electricity consumption of Bitcoin mining, some responses to his comment say he is only spreading alarmist misinformation to try and discredit his competitor ($BTC).
Notably, too this isn’t the first time that the Ripple CEO is trying to make XRP seem more user-friendly and appealing to an investor than Bitcoin. Recently, Garlinghouse had noted that they built XRP to correct Bitcoin’s mistakes, and also that XRP has outperformed Bitcoin since the turn of the year.
