Earth Hour, a grassroots movement within the World Wildlife Fund to turn off all electricity for a single hour once a year as a way to draw attention to energy consumption, will be celebrated by Russian miners this year as well with the creation of “Crypto Hour,” local news outlet Rambler reported March 15.
In order to remind the crypto sphere of the need for more ecologically friendly Blockchain technologies, Russian crypto miners have asked all miners internationally to turn off their mining equipment on March 24, from 20:30 – 21:30 (local time).
The Crypto Hour campaign is led by Peter Dvoryankin, the founder of international investor network CryptoLife and a member of the Russian Duma’s expert council for fintech development. Dvoryankin told Rambler that the goal of the campaign is to create “ecological mining” maps that will show the most ecologically-friendly places for crypto mining due to their proximity to renewable energy sources in areas with the right temperatures.
Dvoryankin added that the campaigns also calls for “the creation of systems to use the heat generated in the process of mining and develop less energy-intensive distributed ledger technologies.”
Rambler notes that the Bitcoin (BTC) network already uses more than 50 terawatt hours of energy a year, adding that if the usage continues at the current rate then BTC mining will use as much electricity as the rest of the world combined by 2020.
It was reported already in February that crypto mining in Iceland will be using more energy than all of the households in the country in 2018.
The Russian site for Earth Hour shows that over 50,000 people have promised online to participate in the hour-long blackout, whose motto is “Vote for Nature,” while Rambler cites the number of Russians planning to participate as over 30 mln. The website also allows participants to vote for protecting natural land reserves, using green energy and recycling, with their votes sent to the future president of Russia.
The problem of what to do with the excess energy made by mining has been solved in an innovative way by one Czech Blockchain startup that plans to use this surplus to heat greenhouses to grow edible crops.
However, one clean energy mining initiative was blocked in Europe after one of Europe’s largest power utility companies refused to sell renewable energy to crypto mining company Envion this February.
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