An article published by UK’s Telegraph stated that 1 Bitcoin transaction utilizes more energy compared to what an average British family uses in about two months. The article referred to data from Diginomist to show that Bitcoin’s energy consumption was at 77.78 terawatt hours which equals Chile’s total energy demands.

The report by Telegraph also indicated the carbon footprint was equal to what New Zealand records. It also stated that the carbon footprint was almost equal to the entire e-waste production in Luxembourg as well as the total power usage of a typical US household for more than 22 days.

Digiconomist founder, Alex DeVries, indicated that outdated mining equipment will eventually lead to huge amounts of e-waste in the near future. He explained that about 98% of the mining equipment being used to mine Bitcoin and Ethereum will be declared obsolete in the next two years.

The article prompted Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple’s CEO to come out to air his views stating that mining of both Bitcoin and Ethereum leads to major wastage and that there lacks incentives to accept the burden for such a carbon footprint, Bitcoinist reports.

However, it remains unclear why he used Ether as an example given that its annual energy consumption is only ten percent of the total Bitcoin’s use. Garlinghouse’s comments brought a heated conversation among the crypto enthusiasts with XRP worshippers defending the comments while others lambasted him.

Gabor Gurbacs, virtual assets strategist at VanEck, weighed on Garlinghouse’s comments. Though a tweet, Gurbacs stated that high energy consumption was essential as it is a necessity to ensure that networks remain secure as well as decentralized. He also explained that banks consume more energy than Bitcoin transactions.

Garlinghouse’s comments were not well received by the crypto community who in turn accused him and Ripple of making huge profits through XRP sales. However, the figures quoted by the Telegraph report could be misleading as most of Bitcoin mining activities are.

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