Is Bitcoin Really Bad For The Environment Or Is Media Narrative Too Hostile?

There is a very long discussion to be made on whether Bitcoin is bad for the environment or not. Unfortunately, the discussion is often too passionate and it does not help that some media outlets are very anti-crypto and are ready to blame it for everything, despite lacking actual evidence sometimes.

Now, a Bitcoin analyst and crypto writer, Wes Messamore, has published an article stating that what hurts Bitcoin the most is that there are “hostile media narratives” that affirm that Bitcoin is bad and that they are “total garbage”.

Clearly, Messamore does not believe that Bitcoin spends all that much energy. You should know that right off the bat because if you disagree, you will probably not be very keen on his points.

He defends the idea that the mainstream (non-crypto) media has painted Bitcoin like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. He does not discuss the fact that Bitcoin spends as much energy in mining as a small country or that it uses more electricity than a normal Visa transaction, but he affirms that the non-crypto media often frame these facts in a very misleading way.

For instance, he bashes the industry into not making fair comparisons. Bitcoin spends a great deal of energy, but so does all the other things in the world. Cars, for instance, contribute a lot to the pollution of the world, but nobody stops using them.

Gold mining and institutional banking are also very energy insensitive and the author affirms that banks use more than 100 terawatt-hours of energy, which is not a lot less than what Bitcoin does (actually, Bitcoin uses a third of that). Also, he complains that most of the numbers used are simply out of any context for the people to actually understand what they mean.

Messamore clearly dislikes the mainstream media for having such a biased view and the environmentalists for “hating the poor”. He believes that Bitcoin can cause a financial revolution that will help the unbanked people in the world and that most of the “negative propaganda” against it is just trying to attack it in order to make people believe that Bitcoin is not good when it clearly is.

He compares the Bitcoin revolution to the Industrial Revolution. According to him, on both occasions, environmentalists are trying to stop the “progress”, which will help the poor in the end.

At the end of the day, is Wes Messamore right? That is up to you to decide. I guess that the main point here is that you should never just believe a story because someone said it is the truth. Either pro or against crypto, sometimes the reports have some veiled interests behind them and this makes it much harder to actually know the truth.

Because of this, remember to research the next time that someone affirms that Bitcoin is destroying the world without actually presenting some coherent and contextualized facts first.

Similar to Notcoin - TapSwap on Solana Airdrops In 2024

origin »

148 +