A recent study into the amount of energy required to ‘mine’ for cryptocurrencies found the process to be extremely energy intensive – even more so than traditional mining. The paper, titled the ‘Quantification of energy and carbon costs for mining cryptocurrencies’, reveals one dollar’s worth of bitcoin takes about 17 megajoules of energy to produce, compared with four, five and seven megajoules for copper, gold and platinum respectfully. Pictured above is a technician monitoring cryptocurrency mining rigs at a Bitfarms facility in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, Canada.