Growth in energy use has slowed owing to efficiency gains that smart policies can help maintain in the near term

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Bitcoin mining is becoming an increasingly energy-intensive process 1,2,3 whose future implications for energy use and CO2 emissions remain poorly understood. This is in part because-like many IT systems-its computational efficiencies and service demands have been evolving rapidly. Therefore, scenario analyses that explore these implications can fill pressing knowledge gaps, but they must be approached with care. History has shown that poorly constructed scenarios of future IT energy useoften due to overly-simplistic extrapolations of early rapid growth trends-can do more harm than good by spreading misinformation and driving ill-informed decisions. 4,5,6 Indeed, the utility of an energy demand scenario is directly proportional to its credibility, which is typically demonstrated through careful attention to technology characteristics and evolution, analytical rigor and transparency, and designing scenarios that align with plausible future outcomes. Regrettably, the Bitcoin CO2 emissions scenarios presented in the recent Mora et al. article 7 lack such credibility and should not be taken seriously by the research and policy communities. We arrived at this conclusion by replicating in detail Mora et al.'s methods, which revealed numerous flaws in the design and execution of their analysis as documented in the Supplementary Information. We describe the five most significant issues below.

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