Most studies of cryptocurrency’s environmental impact focus on power generation.
But new calculations published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability reveal a staggering and growing impact on water usage as well.
Crypto miners get paid by throwing gargantuan amounts of computing power at otherwise pointless puzzles called hash functions.
Cooling down the data centers that crack those codes takes water to the tune of about 350 billion-450 billion gallons per year in the U.S. alone, more than half of it guzzled by Texas.
Accounting for both direct chilling and the cooling required by the coal- and gas-fired power plants providing power, that equates to the household water consumption of Washington, D.C. — or a small tanker truck worth of water per blockchain transaction — much of it occurring in water stressed areas like Kazakhstan.
