One of the biggest criticisms facing blockchain is that mining coins or tokens using PoW requires a lot of energy—some of it is dirty energy that contributes to the rising levels of carbon dioxide that help feed global warming.
As of this writing, 2,422 coins, including bitcoin, require PoW to validate transactions.1
Some government concerns are so dire that in October 2022, the European Union released draft proposals to label cryptocurrencies based on energy consumption. The EU favors energy-efficient validation such as PoS.2
In the case of bitcoin, the high use of energy is by design. In his whitepaper, Satoshi argued that the more computer power the network controlled to create unique hashes, the less likely hackers ...
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