The End Is Nigh: "What the fuck is Bitcoin, and how come it does such environmental and social damage?”

Right this moment, Bitcoin mining is devastating Iran’s electricity and water. You see, the Bitcoin gangsters are always hunting for the cheapest energy and the most corrupt states. Iran, it seems, is perfect. There, they can destroy all before them, doing what Bitcoin does best: wiping out life on earth in the service of unrelenting, bottomless greed.

The story is the same, wherever the poor can be exploited by corrupt politicians and Bitcoin gangsters. In 2021, in El Salvador, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator”, Nayib Bukele, announced that El Salvador would become the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender. The launch was a disaster, of course, and in 2025, all those delusional ambitions had to be scaled way back.

Meanwhile, the crypto cowboys are all over Paraguay, hunting down lax laws and cheap “green” hydro-generated electricity. The same is happening in Ethiopia, where instead of the electricity being made available to the poor, it’s siphoned off by the greedy Bitcoin gangsters. Desperate Bhutan also wants to get in on the crypto scam, as it offers up its “renewable” hydro power.

Pakistan’s chronic electricity shortages are being added to by the 24/7 Bitcoin surge, leading to greater use of cheap, dirty coal. Kazakhstan too offers cheap energy, while in North Korea, they’re working 24/7 on Bitcoin gangster tricks. And in China – where Bitcoin mining is officially banned – a thriving underground economy of waste hums and rattles.

MATHEMATICAL FRAMEWORK

Just what the fuck is Bitcoin, then, and how come it does such environmental and social damage? Bitcoin is a monumental scam. It’s like having a car outside your home, where the driver revs to the max all day long, all night long – and the more he revs, the more fuel he wastes, the more he burns the engine and spews out pollution, the more Bitcoin he makes. And when he’s made some Bitcoin, he goes down to his neighbour – who he knows is an alcoholic and a gambler – and convinces him to mortgage his house on this shit get-rich-quick scheme.

Take a step back. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which is a digital currency based on cryptography, a type of advanced mathematics. Bitcoin has a lot in common with gold. Both are evil. 90% of gold’s value lies in speculation and vanity. Mining for one gold ring causes 20 tons of mining waste laced with mercury, cyanide and arsenic. Mining Bitcoin is just as damaging. Like gold, Bitcoin sails on an ocean of hysteria, hype and greed, puffed by vanity and irrational exuberance.

Argo Blockchain Mirabel Bitcoin Mining Facility

You’re not supposed to understand the inner workings of Bitcoin, or of Blockchain, the technology upon which Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are built. Basically, blockchain is a slow, cumbersome, badly designed database that is incredibly energy and material intensive. It is supposed to solve a particular problem: how to live in a trust-less society, aka how to live in a criminal society.

It was supposed to be about championing the ordinary citizen.

“Bitcoin loves to spin this narrative of being for ‘the little guy’, ‘for the global majority’, ‘to bank the unbanked’,” a sociotechnologist by the name of tante told me. “It’s obviously nonsense.” Bitcoin is supposed to be decentralised. In reality, “The top 8 percent of crypto wallets own a little under 99 percent of all Bitcoin in circulation,” Joe Wilkins wrote for Futurism in 2025.

So when did it all start?

On 3 January 2009, Bitcoin was launched on the blockchain by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. It has never been established who this Satoshi is – whether it’s a single person, a group or a fictional character. Some say it was the CIA or the NSA that created Bitcoin. However, there is growing evidence that Satoshi Nakamoto is in fact Paul Le Roux, a master criminal. Here’s how Bitcoin sleuth Michel de Cryptadamus describes him:

“Le Roux was in charge of not one but many multinational criminal enterprises. The organizations the man built sold weapons to Iran and Somalia, smuggled tens of thousands of gold bars out of the Philippines, pillaged the resources of innumerable African countries, and (of course) sold hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of drugs.”

The gangsters in Silicon Valley love Bitcoin and blockchain.

“We have elected,” Tyler Winklevoss, co-creator of Facebook, rhapsodised, “to put our money and faith in a mathematical framework that is free of politics and human error.”

EXPONENTIALLY HARDER

Bitcoin is a perfect reflection of the USA-driven gangsterisation of global society, led, of course, by the Trump Mafia. The Trump presidency has been nirvana for crypto crooks. Fraud may be exploding, but on Trump’s instructions, the US Justice Department announced it was disbanding its Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has become the favourite currency of fascism. Contained in the many plans for world domination by Trump’s tech backers, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel, was one to turn Greenland into a “crypto state” – after it has been invaded and taken over.

US senator Chris Murphy described Trump’s crypto scamming as the “biggest corruption scandal in the history of the American presidency.” And he’s probably right. On being elected Trump launched $TRUMP, a meme coin, which is a type of crypto collector’s card. Rapidly, 58 “investors” made over $10 million each from it, CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reported, while 764,000 of his other fans who had “invested” in it, and who were mostly small holders, lost money.

“Donald Trump has promised to have dinner with the top holders of his cryptocurrency memecoin $TRUMP, creating a pretty clear-cut opportunity for buying access to the leader of the free world,” A.J. Dellinger wrote for Gizmodo.

It is, of course, a family affair.

“Melania Trump launched her meme coin, $MELANIA, just days after her husband’s token debuted,” Newsweek reported. It “initially soared to $13.73 per token and a market cap of $2.1 billion. Within weeks, the coin dropped nearly 90 percent to $1.50.” After it had lost 96% of its highest value, India’s Economic Times described it as “a case study in crypto red flags.”

In 2025, Rolling Stone reported that Trump’s crypto-related corruption is intensifying.

“At a crypto conference in the United Arab Emirates, Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff announced that the Trump family’s ‘stablecoin’ – World Liberty Financial’s USD1 – will be the vehicle for the state-backed Emirati investment firm MGX to invest $2 billion into Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.”

Only a few years earlier, writing for TechTarget, Amanda Hetler revealed that the US Department of Justice had announced criminal charges against Binance, claiming, among other things, that it was managing “vast flows of dirty money.”

How many cryptocurrencies are there? Thousands – but Bitcoin dominates – in every respect.

“It’s safe to say that Bitcoin represents 95%+ of the environmental impact,” crypto expert Alex de Vries told me. That’s because the “value” of Bitcoin is based on how much energy and materials you can waste. To “mine” Bitcoin, computers must participate in a mathematical lottery numbers guessing and calculation game. And because of the way Bitcoin was designed, as each year goes by, this nihilistic game becomes exponentially harder. In 2010, you could have mined Bitcoin with a desktop computer. By the 2020s, you needed a serious-sized data centre.

BITCOIN LOVES GREENWASHING

The 2025 global carbon footprint of Bitcoin mining was estimated by Digiconomist at 98 megatons of CO2, a figure that is comparable to that produced by Qatar, the world’s most unsustainable country. Its electrical energy use was estimated at 176 TWh, which is comparable to Poland. At 2,772 gigalitres, it would consume as much water as Switzerland.

Bitcoin is not simply devastating to ‘mine’. Because it works within the blockchain trustless system, transaction and verification costs are sky high too. In 2025, a single Bitcoin-based transaction caused a staggering 712 kg of CO2, which is “equivalent to the carbon footprint of 1,578,956 VISA transactions,” according to Digiconomist. It consumed 1,277 kWh of electricity, which would be enough to run an average US household for over 44 days. (Average US households are about twice as energy intensive as average European households.) It used as much water as is needed to fill a backyard swimming pool. That’s one single transaction.

What this means is that there can be no normal crypto economy where ordinary people do ordinary things like paying for their groceries, buying a coffee and croissant. In a report for the US National Bureau of Economic Research, Igor Makarov and Antoinette Schoar stated that “90% of transaction volume on the Bitcoin blockchain is not tied to economically meaningful activities.” Bitcoin is thus for speculators trading with speculators, criminals dealing with criminals. It’s an insider’s game. Legendary investor Warren Buffett described it as “rat poison squared.”

Bitcoin is built on greed and good – but utterly fake – stories. It’s the little guy against the big guy. It’s decentralized. It’s a machine that makes money out of thin air. Wrong on all counts. Bitcoin is a monumental grift.

Bitcoin loves greenwashing. One of its most insidious stories is that accelerated Bitcoin energy use will somehow force a faster “transition” to “renewable” energy. Scammers love a good scam and Bitcoin loves the “renewable” energy story because it has so successfully peddled the lie that you can use as much energy as you want, once it’s “renewable.”

Cryptocurrencies have thus become part of the “remarkable green revolution” using solar, hydro and wind power. Crypto companies are even “pioneering completely green Bitcoin mining facilities.”

Completely green?

“Using renewables for Bitcoin mining,” Molly White, a leading crypto researcher and critic, told me, “is primarily greenwashing.”

When Bitcoin’s massive energy, water and materials use is brought up, crypto-evangelists will often boost an alternative approach called “proof-of-stake”, saying that it will reduce energy consumption by over 99%. This may indeed be true. However, Bitcoin dominates the market and according to Molly White, it “will never move to proof-of-stake.” My friend tante agrees. He listed a range of reasons, including the capital invested in mining infrastructure, along with the cult belief that wasting energy is what gives Bitcoin its mythic “value”. Bitcoin lives through the destruction of our environment.

A HORROR STORY

Bitcoin always has a cover story. It is bringing clean water to poor communities, it is helping heat hot tubs. It is enabling African women to have “a future where financial self-sufficiency is attainable”. It is banking the unbanked. It is a battery. If everyone was using Bitcoin, wars would be impossible. It is nurturing the circular economy.

One example of Bitcoin’s “circularity” is that it requires highly specialised computers with customised, hardwired parts. The life of such machines is about 18 months, after which they are dumped because they have no other use. In 2025, Bitcoin mining was producing as much e-waste as the Netherlands, while each Bitcoin transaction caused the equivalent of two iPhones 12s of e-waste. So, more like Dante’s circular economy of hell.

The hilarity knows no end. Mining Bitcoin at coal plants is described as a way to reduce carbon footprints, with Bitcoin miners enthusiastically committing to 100% renewable energy as they sign coal contracts. “Bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever,” a letter from a group of leading Bitcoin visionaries stated.

When pressed by the New York Times, a spokesperson claimed they were playing a “language game”. Analysis by WattTime, a non-profit tech company, discovered that Bitcoin companies who claimed to be “uniquely beneficial and supportive of renewable energy” were using 96% fossil fuels.

Make no mistake, it’s a scam.

Eager to be first in everything, the USA became the epicentre of Bitcoin. By the early 2020s, Bitcoin mining was causing “as much carbon pollution as adding 3.5 million gas-powered cars to America’s roads,” the New York Times reported. A study published in Nature found that “from mid-2022 to mid-2023, the 34 largest mines in the USA consumed 32.3 terawatt-hours of electricity – 33% more than Los Angeles – 85% of which came from fossil fuels.”

As usual, the mining impacts were hidden in poor and Indigenous communities. In Diné Navajo nation reservations, Bitcoin data centers were set up, exploiting cheap energy deals, often involving coal, while many of the houses around them didn’t even have electricity. Diné Navajo Tyler Puenté described it as “financial colonialism … I think Bitcoin companies prey on communities like my own.”

Texas became a Mecca for Bitcoin mining, with Texans paying nearly 5% extra on their electricity bills because of it, part of a pattern where data center expansion drives up utility bills. It was also found that Bitcoin miners were able to sell back the electricity they had bought from the state at “100 times what they paid”, Ed Hirs, from the University of Houston, told the New York Times.

Living close to these Bitcoin data centres is a horror story. The noise is 24/7 and often loudest at night. Children are particularly impacted, with vertigo, cochlear implants, and a whole range of other medical issues. Adults are not immune. “Some days, I look like I’m drunk,” Virginia Browning, who lives near a Bitcoin data mine, explained to the Texas Observer. “I can’t walk and have my head up.”

OWNING THE WHITE HOUSE

Like so much of Big Tech, the Bitcoin bros hunt in poor communities, particularly f they’re going through a crisis. After Hurricane Maria devastated USA-controlled Puerto Rico in 2017, the Bitcoin bros flooded in, seeing an opportunity to create a Puertopia or Crypto Island. Others saw crypto-colonialism at play.

“Crypto-colonialism leverages existing neo-colonialist tools like economic policy,” Jillian Crandall, an architect and educator at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, told Motherboard. With their promises of a tech paradise, the Bitcoin bros swatted away such concerns, arguing that “crypto is a revolutionary equalizer for the unbanked.” According to John Reed Stark writing for the New York Times, “I believe crypto is actually the opposite and just another example of what scholars have called ‘predatory inclusion’.”

The Puerto Rico elite not only saw crypto as a way to attract the right sort of “citizen”, but also as a means to depopulate the island of the poor and useless. Which smells like fascism. They wanted to create a “visitor economy”. It would not be the first time for such white supremacist dreams, as Puerto Rico has a long history of social experiments by USA libertarians. “It’s an island, isolated, with a lot of non-valuable people,” longtime community organiser and environmentalist Juan E. Rosario told Naomi Klein and Lauren Feeney for The Intercept. “Expendable people. For many years, we have been used as guinea pigs for U.S. experiments.”

Key to Puerto Rico’ politicians’ attraction to the Bitcoin bros was its super-low tax rates.

“So, no. No, I don’t want to pay taxes,” Reeve Collins, a forty-something Bitcoin bro who had landed in Puerto Rico after the hurricane, told the New York Times. “This is the first time in human history anyone other than kings or governments or gods can create their own money.”

Data expert, Steven Gonzalez, who has family on the island, told me how the Bitcoin bros roll:

“Many of them bought up property in the wake of Hurricane Maria in 2017,” Gonzalez explained, “when residents who could not afford to repair their homes were forced to leave to the mainland. There remains a concerted effort to gentrify the north of Puerto Rico, privatize its beaches and create a white crypto tax utopia, which is displacing Puerto Ricans and ruining the environment but also the culture. Many people are calling the movement crypto colonialism. I am 100% in accord here.”

Bitcoin is a monumental, greedy scam. It is pure evil. The wilful destruction of our environment for pure greed. The whole sordid Bitcoin story is perhaps well summed up by journalist Whitney Curry Wimbish as she recounted her conversations with the Bitcoin bros:

“Fresh off buying Washington, D.C., with hundreds of millions of dollars in the last election, crypto’s elite celebrated the passage of one industry-written federal law, and two others in the works. They gloated about owning the SEC, Federal Reserve, and most of all the White House.”
Gerry McGovern’s next book, 99th Day: A Warning About Technology, will be published in February 2026

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