Joel Katz, Ripple CTO, in the recent Blockstars podcast spoke about how energy consumption is a critical side effect of blockchain technology.  And, as you see greater adoption of this new technology across the global financial system, it is one topic that needs to be addressed to help ensure sustainable future for our planet and for the global economy.

Sid John Leopold, in the recent Blockstars Episode was with Joel Katz. Sid John Leopold is a young entrepreneur and author of the scientific article, “How eco-friendly is our money and is there an alternative.”

When asked, discussing about the carbon footprint of money, tell us about the sustainability of the currency today. What currencies did you analyze and compare?

Sid John Leopold stated:  In the scientific article, I compared Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, and the USD on the VISA network.

Bitcoin and Ether will be using far more energy than the other two. But what surprised me is that XRP as a blockchain is more efficient than the USD in the Visa Network. Visa is built only for efficiency I would say. Of course, there are some security parts there, but they are a centralized company that has a centralized server that handles transactions.  Still the XRP uses less energy than the VISA network.

So, how much of a problem is this? Are we talking about a tiny blip in the energy landscape total or are we talking about something that is important today. Is there something that might become important in the future and expand, put it in some kind of context.

If you look at Bitcoin, it actually uses more energy than whole countries for example, Iceland and Syria. So, this is not like a miniscule, like the blip on the radar that people are talking about.  Bitcoin uses a lot of energy.  We are talking about massive amounts of energy.

And, compared to some of the biggest companies around the world that are technology only basically and have hundreds and thousands of services around the globe. They are not even using 1% of Bitcoin’s when it comes to the electricity part. So, the Bitcoin – the design behind it is designed to secure the network by using energy, and therefore this is something if I envision like going forward that Bitcoin is just going to be more and more energy intensive. So, it is very important to be focused on this topic and to look at how we can make this work in a better way. Either by making use of some alternative consensus mechanics in XRP or proof of stake (PoS) or if we should use something else.