We might all be worried about the energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining, but it also impacts the miners themselves, who don't want to be responsible for burning up the planet. Vitalik Buterin is personally trying to find a more efficient way of creating tokens, as he doesn't want his legacy to consist of an Ethereum-shaped hole in the earth's atmosphere. Nor does he wish his life's creation to sink the world beneath an ocean of melted ice-water created by global warming.

This is very comforting for the ethical developers and community-based spirit of many blockchain projects, but not everyone agrees. Some believe that breaking free of the banking stranglehold on society is worth the cost in energy, to implement a new kind of egalitarian financial infrastructure.

Energy consumption is rising exponentially with the success of the system and the complexity of the hashing algorithms. The more bitcoins that are mined, the more difficult the process of mining them, and the more electricity is used as each competing computer tries to verify transactions successfully.

When Sheldon and his Big Bang Theory buddies mined coins on a laptop (as many did in the early days), would they have dreamed that one day, it would take a whole warehouse-full of computing power to mine the fast dwindling supply of tokens?