![](/static/253f0d9b/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/c0e83ceb-b7e5-41b4-9b76-bfd152dd8d00.png)
22·
10 months agofrom the first paragraph of the article, it sounds like they share your feelings:
Battery technology is one of those areas that is getting a lot of promising research results but very little in the form of commercial products we can use to power digital devices, electric vehicles, or off-grid homes. That may soon change thanks to sodium-ion batteries that are safer, more durable, and cheaper to manufacture when compared to conventional lithium-ion batteries.
i strongly urge skepticism when reading articles about the environmental impacts of bitcoin. I am not saying that bitcoin is a sensible use of resources - rather that the claims made about the environmental impacts are often overstated and based on models extrapolated to absurdity. For example, see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0321-8 where Mora, Camilo et al suggested that “Bitcoin Emissions Alone Could Push Global Warming Above 2°C”. Then read Implausible projections overestimate near-term Bitcoin CO2 emissions by Masanet et al.
Again - the environmental impacts of cloud computing in general and bitcoin in particular are something we should be concerned about. But there are a number of researchers who have made wild claims that should be treated with a critical eye.