THE MYTH OF “POLLUTANT BITCOIN” RESET
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There are phrases that die hard. Phrases uttered once by someone who's never been near a miner, never understood a difficulty equation, never studied how the network works, but which are then repeated endlessly until they become a kind of emotional truth. “Bitcoin pollutes,” they say, with the same confidence as those who once claimed the Earth was flat. It reassures them. It gives them the impression of mastering a subject they haven't even bothered to scratch the surface of. And in a world saturated with simplistic narratives, that's often enough.
The problem isn't that this statement is false. The problem is that it's intellectually lazy. It conflates consumption and destruction, energy and pollution, cost and externality. It avoids all nuance. It simply links two words mechanically, as if the complexity of reality could be reduced to a slogan. This is what weak narratives do: they compress reality until it becomes unrecognizable, then sell it to the public as ready-made outrage.
To understand why this myth persists, we must return to a simple truth: people don't understand energy. They don't know what it is. They don't know where it comes from. They don't know how it circulates. They consume without knowing. They live in cities powered by gigantic, invisible infrastructures whose existence they are unaware of. They rely on buttons, switches, plugs, and batteries. They press them. It turns on. They unplug it. It turns off. In their eyes, that's enough. That's all they want to know. And in this world of energy ignorance, blaming Bitcoin is easy. It's a perfect scapegoat. Visible. Concrete. Technical. Mysterious. And above all: misunderstood.
The energy reality of Bitcoin, however, is radically different from what is often portrayed. The network is not a smoke-filled factory. It is not a refinery. It is not a coal-fired power plant. It is not a massive industrial infrastructure. The network is a collection of individuals, machines, and digital farmers connected on the fringes of traditional systems. These are plug-and-play miners in garages, containers installed on exhaust gas fields, farms powered by wasted hydroelectricity, geothermal stations, solar surpluses, and underutilized dams. Bitcoin consumes what the system rejects. It feeds on waste. It converts the unused into mathematical truth.
To understand how absurd this talk about pollution is, one need only look at a simple fact: the majority of the energy used by mining isn't energy that's competing with the grid. It's wasted energy. Energy that can't be transported. Energy produced in the wrong place. Energy produced at the wrong time. Energy lost in the grid, burned for lack of consumers. We're not talking about energy competition. We're talking about energy recycling. The fiat system demands continuity. Bitcoin uses intermittency. Fiat requires centralized optimization. Bitcoin thrives on chaotic decentralization. Fiat burns en masse. Bitcoin burns at the margins.
But the media dislikes nuance. They prefer to say: “Bitcoin consumes as much as such-and-such country.” An absurd and patronizing comparison. As if a country's consumption were a moral indicator. As if energy consumption automatically meant pollution. As if economic activity had no cost. As if traditional financial infrastructure ran on solar power and magic.
Let's lay the numbers out for a moment. Banks, bank servers, towers, branches, ATMs, cash-in-transit vehicles, armored vehicles, security systems, cameras, payment networks, terminals, cloud data centers, anti-fraud infrastructure, clearing houses, SWIFT systems, Visa, Mastercard, American Express—all of this consumes energy. All of this burns energy. All of this represents a monstrous cost. But this cost is invisible because it's spread out. Psychological dilution. People see a miner. They don't see a global banking network.
And then there's the cloud. This silent monster. This energy-consuming empire that doesn't shock anyone because it's presented as a natural evolution of the modern world. Yet, the cloud's global energy expenditure far exceeds that of Bitcoin mining. Data centers consume staggering amounts of electricity, require gigantic cooling infrastructures, and demand constant redundancy. Modern digital technology is an energy guzzler. Streaming videos consume more energy per year than the entire Bitcoin network. Social networks consume more than Bitcoin. Online games consume more than Bitcoin. Generative AI, by 2025, will consume infinitely more than Bitcoin mining. But nobody says, "YouTube pollutes" or "TikTok is destroying the planet."
Why? Because these services are familiar. Useful. Convenient. We never criticize what we depend on. We criticize what we don't understand. Bitcoin doesn't pollute. Bitcoin is disruptive. That's different. The fiat network, on the other hand, actually pollutes. Not symbolically. Physically. Banknotes, materials, transportation, mining, smelting, paper, security inks, camera networks, vaults, concrete buildings. Bank servers run 24/7. Payment centers handle millions of transactions per second. Fiat consumes, burns, destroys. But fiat is normalized. Invisible.
Comparing Bitcoin to fiat currency is like comparing a lighter to a pipeline. The scale is completely different. So is the complexity. The traditional monetary system has existed for centuries. It relies on an empire of physical infrastructure, obsolete technologies, and archaic machines kept alive artificially. Bitcoin does all of this with ASICs sitting in garages.
The other lie in the equation is the confusion between consumption and pollution. The Bitcoin network consumes energy. Yes. It consumes energy, like anything that works. But consuming is not polluting. A solar panel consumes energy to be manufactured. An iPhone consumes energy. A data center consumes energy. An electric car consumes energy. And yet, they aren't accused of "pollution" simply because they consume energy. What pollutes isn't Bitcoin's energy demand. What pollutes is global energy production. What pollutes is the way some countries produce their energy. What pollutes isn't Bitcoin. It's the coal-fired power plants built by the very states that blame Bitcoin.
The myth that “Bitcoin pollutes” ignores an obvious scientific truth: Bitcoin shifts energy demand toward the most economical, and therefore cheapest, sources, which are often the most renewable or the most abundant. An oversized hydroelectric plant cannot store its surplus. A flared gas well cannot stop its outgassing. An off-grid solar farm cannot use its surplus. Bitcoin recovers what would have been lost. Bitcoin transforms losses into monetary security. Bitcoin is not competition for the electrical grid. Bitcoin is a buffer.
Honest environmentalists know this. Those who actually study the data quickly understand that Bitcoin is one of the few systems that incentivizes the production of clean energy in neglected areas. Mobile mining moves to where energy is cheapest. This energy is rarely fossil fuels. It is renewable, marginal, and lacks utility. What Bitcoin consumes was useless to no one before it. Therefore, there is no competition. There is valuation.
And beyond science, there is the philosophical dimension. Bitcoin consumes to produce truth. Fiat consumes to maintain an illusion. Bitcoin consumes to secure an incorruptible network. Fiat consumes to feed a system based on debt and dilution. Bitcoin consumes to create finality. Fiat consumes to maintain complexity.
The environmental argument against Bitcoin is therefore a lie by omission. It ignores fiat infrastructure. It ignores cloud infrastructure. It ignores digital surveillance infrastructure. It ignores the energy impact of AI, social media, streaming, video games, ad servers, and the thousands of unnecessary blockchains launched. Bitcoin is only a fraction of this consumption. A tiny fraction. But a visible fraction. And in a society where everything visible is suspect, Bitcoin has become a scapegoat.
We need to start from scratch. Not to defend Bitcoin, but to expose the indecency of the anti-Bitcoin rhetoric. A rhetoric promoted by institutions that consume a thousand times more and destroy a hundred times more. A rhetoric promoted by those who print money without regard for its true cost. A rhetoric promoted by those who use ecology as a political weapon, not as a science.
Bitcoin consumes the equivalent of a minimal nervous system. Fiat consumes the equivalent of a military empire. The cloud consumes the equivalent of a modern state. And AI will soon consume the equivalent of a continent. The myth “Bitcoin pollutes” doesn't hold up to reality. It only holds up to ignorance. Bitcoin doesn't pollute. It reveals. It reveals the wastefulness of fiat. It reveals the invisible infrastructure of the cloud. It reveals the fragility of the global energy system. It reveals the hypocrisy of its critics. It reveals the dependence of individuals on systems they don't understand.
Bitcoin consumes. Yes. But it gives something back in return: truth. Fiat consumes a thousand times more, and gives back: debt.
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