Elaine Ou, Columnist

Elon Musk Is Pulling Bitcoin Where It Loathed to Go

In earlier days, the prospect of centralized mining would be enough to turn participants away.

June 5, 2021 at 12:00 PM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

Mining farms are electricity guzzlers.
Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

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Bitcoin uses a lot of electricity. So do electric cars, space travel and civilization in general, but few things burn energy so shamelessly.

To assuage critics, Elon Musk and Michael Saylor announced late last month that Bitcoin miners in North America had agreed to form the Bitcoin Mining Council, an organization that would promote energy transparency and sustainable mining practices.