China and Musk add impetus to the Bitcoin sustainability drive

China’s war on cryptocurrency has thrust the sustainability debate to the fore once again. We’ve seen the country clamp down on crypto a number of times over the years, but its most recent attack cut the network’s hash power by 40% and the currency’s value by 50% globally. One might assume that spells catastrophe for both, but, in actual fact, Bitcoin is doing just fine—and it’s good news for a future of financial freedom.

The network is still operating as normal, instantaneous transactions are still taking place without a hitch and entire countries are adopting it as legal tender.

The sheer resilience with which Bitcoin has adapted to such a significant shift to its infrastructure is precisely why it’s a sustainable network of value for the global population. It’s built to withstand adversity, whether it concerns challenges to governmental control or threats to environmental health, so mining bans from the likes of China will only ever serve to highlight how resilient it is by design.

As we’ve seen with this story, the argument against the leading cryptoasset is typically framed around the vast amounts of energy it takes to mine it. There’s no denying that the numbers are high, but what gets overlooked is that most of that energy already comes from renewable sources like flared gas, geothermal and hydroelectric. It’s why we’re seeing “the great mining migration” to Texas as a result of the ban in China.

Bitcoin has, in fact, been growing increasingly sustainable since its inception in 2009 and it will continue as such until ~2140 when every BTC will have been mined, which presents a significant commercial opportunity for business leaders to join a financial network that offers resilience for the future.

The mining of bitcoin relies on extremely cheap energy consumption and is a bounty for the world’s cheapest energy every 10 minutes, so, by its very nature, it can incentivize sustainability for corporations. As more and more people join the Bitcoin network—indeed, it is growing at a rate quicker than that of the Internet in the late-1990s—there is an increasing amount of potential for businesses to be a part of that sustainability drive and not be left behind by it.

There is plenty of misinformation surrounding Bitcoin’s energy consumption and the activities emanating from China and Elon Musk’s Twitter account certainly don’t do much to dispel it; they do, however, give Bitcoin a bigger platform to prove that it is not a long-term threat to the planet and, at the same time, that it is an immediate and necessary threat to the centralized control of governments.