A new crypto mining company, focusing on ease of use and a green image, is drawing attention, but its press release to CBS reveals glaring flaws.
ZA Miner is a cloud mining company with over 100 facilities and over 100,000 machines worldwide. It allows users to invest in crypto mining without owning the equipment themselves. Unlike many crypto companies, which have been in the news for the negative environmental impact of their dirty energy use, it utilizes renewable energy sources like wind and hydropower for its mining operations, thereby avoiding air pollution.
That's the good news. Now for the bad news: one of the company's proudly advertised features is an AI assistant to advise you about what crypto to choose. AI takes an outsized amount of computing power of its own, and since the company only says renewables power its mining, the AI portion of the program may be running on ordinary, polluting grid power.
All that computing — including both crypto mining and AI — also takes a lot of cooling, which is typically done with fresh water, a wasteful use of a limited resource.
Even if the clean energy being used is less polluting, it can drive up the demand for power in the area and raise energy prices for consumers. Also, if the energy demand were lower, it would be easier to shift to new clean energy facilities and close down dirty energy sources, instead of keeping both open.
In other words, while ZA Miner uses renewable energy, treating the company as a whole as eco-friendly would be going too far.
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All of that is without taking into account the inherent instability of cryptocurrencies and the likelihood that customers who invest in this platform could lose money.
ZA Miner has seen an influx of investors in the second quarter of this year, it reported, but there are still serious flaws in its approach.
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