Bitcoin’s energy-hungry mining process has long faced criticism for its staggering environmental impact. Now, a relatively new cryptocurrency platform called Bitcoin.ℏ is promising cleaner, more sustainable option for crypto-savvy investors.
A recent CoinGape report calls Bitcoin.ℏ a “green, quantum-resistant replacement for Bitcoin” that aims to solve cryptocurrency’s sustainability challenges.
One of bitcoin’s biggest concerns is the environmentally taxing mining process. As Investopedia explains, bitcoin mining is how cryptocurrency transactions get added to the blockchain ledger — and how new bitcoin currency is circulated.
To put it simply, miners race to solve cryptographic puzzles using specialized computers. The first to succeed adds a block of transactions to the blockchain — and earns newly minted bitcoin as a reward.
But this “mining” is notorious for requiring massive amounts of energy, often powered by highly polluting dirty fuels. In fact, NerdWallet reports that bitcoin miners, as a group, burn through more electricity than some entire countries. Mining also releases 65 megatonnes of carbon pollution per year, per CoinGape. It’s the cost of doing business in bitcoin’s world — and it’s a big one.
To help avoid this massive energy use, Bitcoin.ℏ runs on Hedera Hashgraph, a decentralized ledger platform with an energy-efficient consensus algorithm requiring no mining. This means each transaction uses less energy, making Bitcoin.ℏ — which actually is not directly connected to the original bitcoin — a more sustainable choice in the blockchain world.
CoinGape reported Bitcoin.ℏ only consumes approximately 0.000003 kilowatt-hours of energy, compared to bitcoin’s 703 kilowatt-hours — leading it to say it’s “winning the battle for the future of crypto sustainability.” Bitcoin.ℏ also has a faster transaction speed, able to reach 10,000 transactions per second.
Bitcoin currently hovers at about 7 transactions per second, per Tokenview.io. Beyond efficiency and speed, Bitcoin.ℏ reportedly prioritizes security and quantum resistance through its architecture.
On Reddit, users discussing Bitcoin.ℏ expressed a mixture of optimism and skepticism, with some waving it away as a “meme coin” and others saying they hope it pans out.
“Would the world be better if everything used less electricity? Yes. Hedera uses the least electricity per transaction, 800 transactions can be done using the same amount of electricity Visa uses doing only one, lonely transaction,” one user wrote.
