Has Elon Musk’s Bitcoin Energy Problem Just Been Solved with Cow Poo?
Elon Musk’s eco problem might have been solved already by an ingenious entrepreneur who is generating clean energy for Bitcoin mining with cow dung in the UK! Has this met Elon Musk’s 50 percent benchmark yet?
Saving Bitcoin With Animal Waste
Tesla Founder and CEO Elon Musk famously announced his company’s decision to accept Bitcoin payments for its vehicles in February, only to infamously retract his statement weeks later. Citing environmental reasons and a sudden fondness for the ecosystem’s wellbeing, Tesla Bitcoin’s acceptance was halted, and the price of the major crypto token and other altcoins came tumbling down with it.
Last week, Musk suggested Tesla would be eager to embrace Bitcoin once again if it would be mined with at least ~50% clean energy. Bitcoin has picked up from its slump since Musk’s tweet, but it hasn’t been the only thing that has picked up. A deliberate campaign for green energy in the Bitcoin mining industry seems to have found a new verve and vigor as well.
Josh Ridett’s brilliant project is the latest in these campaigns. 30-year-old Riddett has developed Bitcoin mining machines capable of converting cow dung into sufficient electricity needed for mining processes. If you excuse the irony, there might be nothing cleaner than renewable energy. This, in fact, is Josh Riddett’s major purpose.
Riddett’s machines work by converting methane gas obtainable from animal waste through compression and other sophisticated processes, into usable electric energy.
“It’s a new way to generate money from those energy sites,” Riddett explained_, “which isn’t government-backed. It’s much more independent… Effectively, farmers are turning their barn or cattle shed into a mini-data center and getting paid for renting out their computer processing power.”_
Riddett started the Easy Crypto Hunter business in 2017, and has since worked with hundreds of farmers since then.
The young CEO is confident that farmers can be inclusive in the evolution of sophisticated tech like Bitcoin, regardless of traditional stereotypes about them.
“There’s a lot of diversification going on in farming these days and, while the average age of our agricultural customers is 58, the vast majority of farmers now can talk about technology with the same confidence they talk about cows and pigs,” Riddet said.
Riddet believes Bitcoin’s renewable energy solutions can only be scalable if there is enough discussion about incentive to farmers rather than talks focusing strictly on maximizing waste energy.
Will Musk’s Tesla Accept Bitcoin Now?
Has Musk’s 50% benchmark been met yet? There is no exact meter to gauge Bitcoin’s growing eco-friendliness, and even Musk has not revealed his metering tools to verify Bitcoin’s greeness. There are increasing suggestions that Bitcoin mining is coming closer to the 50% mark, and apart from Riddett’s project, Jiang Zhuoer’s tweet is another indication to go by. Zhuoer, CEO of mining pool BTC.TOP, thinks China’s crackdown on mining pools has firmly placed Bitcoin clean energy usage past Musk’s benchmark already.
There are no definite answers, but all indicators are lining up pretty nicely.
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