Other coins would adopt different authentication systems that used far less electricity, but Bitcoiners opposed any change to Nakamoto’s mining system. There was no way to reduce mining’s energy use. The difficulty of winning the guessing game—the thing that incentivizes all this energy-intensive computer use—is what kept anyone from hacking the system. Some tried to use renewable sources, but as of 2023, about 85 percent of the electricity used for Bitcoin mining came from coal and natural-gas plants. By some estimates, Bitcoin mining consumed as much energy as the entire country of
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