The new report shows that the Bitcoin boom is becoming a bigger problem for the world’s efforts to eliminate fossil fuel pollution. Mining bans, like the one China put in place last year, don’t seem to be very effective in curbing emissions, de Vries points out, because miners can easily find cheap, dirty energy elsewhere. The difficulty factor is strongly related to the hash rate of Bitcoin as it measures the transaction validation in hashes per second. The network is designed to produce a certain number of bitcoins per second, and when there are more active miners, the difficulty increases to ensure that the level of distribution is static. Mining is a process that involves using powerful computers to solve complex mathematical problems, which are used to verify and add new poker en crypto transactions to the Bitcoin Blockchain. When a miner successfully solves a problem, they are rewarded with a certain number of bitcoins, which are added to the Bitcoin supply. The reward for mining a block of Bitcoin transactions started at 50 bitcoins and is halved approximately every four years through a process called Bitcoin halving.