I definitely took this into consideration when deciding to begin mining, and participating in the bitcoin economy in general. For me, my electricity comes from a hydroelectric source and my mining rig is used as a space heater, reducing the amount of energy required to heat my house. This results in a reduced (but not zero) environmental footprint for all my digital activities, and mining in particular. When summer comes I will likely reduce or eliminate mining activity, depending on the demand for it from the network.
In the long-range perspective electricity is a very environmentally-friendly type of energy to be reliant on. As soon as direct
solar power generation gets a little more efficient (which physics leads us to believe is a likely outcome) we will have more than we need for the foreseeable future of computing, especially since computing is continually progressing with regards to electrical efficiency (and physics also leads us to believe there is plenty of room for growth here). In the long range it is also reasonable to suppose that we may harvest solar energy directly from space, with no significant environmental impact of any kind providing we either perform the computing there directly, or are able to effectively dump the heat back to space. There is also the potential for performing fission and/or fusion in regions of space where no biological organisms live--the physical density of the universe makes this latter approach arbitrarily extensible, and again physics in general leads us to believe that these technologies are all attainable provided we can live long enough to see them
.
My conclusion is that the most effective way to be environmentally responsible with any digital activity is to:
- Be careful where you source your electricity, and take action to encourage the development of more environmentally-friendly electrical generation.
- Be aware of the chemical content of your digital devices, and recycle them on disposal whether or not this recycling is immediately profitable for you or the recycler. Re-use is of course the best type of recycling.
- And, of course, be aware of the entire use lifecycle when you purchase digital devices. Devices which will retain some use over a long period of time tend to displace wasteful production of similar products while expanding the availability of technology for people with lower incomes. For example, we are at the point now where any cutting edge computer will be usable for document editting and at least basic web browsing until it dies. So choose quality devices that aren't designed to break within 3 years just because people upgrade that frequently anyways. They will cost a bit more, but they will save you more than you think in not needing to have them repaired or replaced during your own usage, and be valuable to someone else long after you're done with it. Buying cheap crap hurts everybody.
- Finally, mitigate your level of technological activity correspondent to your level of success in the above three areas
Pretty simple for most of us to do, methinks.
