We’ve all heard the stories of Bitcoin millionaires.

Elon Musk is the latest.

His electric car company Tesla made a paper profit of more than $900m (£646m) after buying $1.5bn (£1bn) -worth of the cryptocurrency in early February.
Its high profile support helped pushed the price of a single Bitcoin to more than $58,000.

But it isn’t just the digital asset’s price that has hit an all-time high. So has its energy footprint.

And that’s caused blowback for Mr Musk, as the scale of the currency’s environmental impact becomes clearer.

It also helped prompt a series of high profile critics to slate the digital currency this week, including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

President Biden’s top economic adviser described Bitcoin as “an extremely inefficient way to conduct transactions,” saying “the amount of energy consumed in processing those transactions is staggering”.

(BBC)