Bitcoin's 890% rally over the last year has reignited fears that mining the cryptocurrency is consuming a large amount of energy and harming the environment. Mining is the process by which transactions on bitcoin's public accounting ledger, called the blockchain, are verified without relying on a central authority. In order to verify new transactions, mining computers must race to solve an extremely complex problem, and those computations require a tremendous amount of energy. Once a bitcoin miner solves the problem, they're rewarded with a transaction fee and newly minted bitcoins. Exactly how much energy the ... (full story)