We've all heard the stories of Bitcoin millionaires.
Elon Musk is that the latest.
His electric company Tesla made a gain of quite $900m (£646m) after buying $1.5bn (£1bn) -worth of the cryptocurrency in early February.
Its status support helped pushed the worth of one Bitcoin to quite $58,000.
But it is not just the digital asset's price that has hit an all-time high. So has its energy footprint.
And that's caused blowback for Mr Musk, because the scale of the currency's environmental impact becomes clearer.
It also helped prompt a series of status critics to slate the digital currency in the week , including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
President Biden's top economic adviser described Bitcoin as "an extremely inefficient thanks to conduct transactions," saying "the amount of energy consumed in processing those transactions is staggering".
It's unclear exactly what proportion energy Bitcoin uses. Cryptocurrencies are - intentionally - hard to trace . But the consensus is that Bitcoin mining may be a very energy-intensive business.
The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) studies the burgeoning business of cryptocurrencies.
It calculates that Bitcoin's total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 annualised terawatt hours (TWh), with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours.
The UK's electricity consumption may be a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses round the same amount of power because the CCAF's best guess for Bitcoin.
And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources.
The CCAF team surveys the people that manage the Bitcoin network round the world on their energy use and located that about two-thirds of it's from fossil fuels.
Huge computing power - and thus energy use - is made into the way the blockchain technology that underpins the cryptocurrency has been designed.
It relies on a huge decentralised network of computers
These are the so-called Bitcoin "miners" who enable new Bitcoins to be created, but also independently verify and record every transaction made within the currency.
In fact, the Bitcoins are the reward miners get for maintaining this record accurately.
It works sort of a lottery that runs every 10 minutes, explains Gina Pieters, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a search fellow with the CCAF team.
Data processing centres round the world race to compile and submit this record of transactions during a way that's acceptable to the system.
They even have to guess a random number.
The first to submit the record and therefore the correct number wins the prize - this becomes subsequent block within the blockchain
At the instant , they're rewarded with six-and-a-quarter Bitcoins, valued at about $50,000 each.
As soon together lottery is over, a replacement number is generated, and therefore the whole process starts again.
The higher the worth , says Prof Pieters, the more miners want to urge into the sport .
"They want to urge that revenue," she tells me, "and that's what is going on to encourage them to introduce more and more powerful machines so as to guess this random number, and thus you'll see a rise in energy consumption," she says.
And there's another factor that drives Bitcoin's increasing energy consumption.
The software ensures it always takes 10 minutes for the puzzle to be solved, so if the amount of miners is increasing, the puzzle gets harder and therefore the more computing power must be thrown at it
Bitcoin is therefore actually designed to encourage increased computing effort.
The idea is that the more computers that compete to take care of the blockchain, the safer it becomes, because anyone who might want to undertake and undermine the currency must control and operate a minimum of the maximum amount computing power because the remainder of the miners put together.
What this suggests is that, as Bitcoin gets more valuable, the computing effort expended on creating and maintaining it - and thus the energy consumed - inevitably increases.
We can track what proportion effort miners are making to make the currency.
They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second - that's 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, just in case you were wondering.
And this vast computational effort is that the cryptocurrency's Achilles heel, says Alex de Vries, the founding father of the Digiconomy website and an expert on Bitcoin
All the many trillions of calculations it takes to stay the system running aren't really doing any useful work.
"They're computations that serve no other purpose," says de Vries, "they're just immediately discarded again. immediately we're employing a batch of energy to supply those calculations, but also the bulk of that's sourced from fossil energy."
The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues.
"If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a worldwide reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be within the millions, and people miners will have extra money than the whole [US] Federal budget to spend on electricity."
"We'd need to double our global energy production," he says with amusing . "For Bitcoin."
He says it also limits the amount of transactions the system can process to about five per second.
This doesn't bring a useful currency, he argues
And that view is echoed by many eminent figures in finance and economics.
The two essential features of a successful currency are that it's an efficient sort of exchange and a stable store useful , says Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a former chief economist at the International fund (IMF).
He says Bitcoin is neither.
"The fact is, it isn't really used much within the legal economy now. Yes, one wealthy person sells it to a different , but that's not a final use. And without that it really doesn't have a long-term future."
What he's saying is that Bitcoin exists almost exclusively as a vehicle for speculation.
So, i would like to know: is that the bubble close to burst?
"That's my guess," says Prof Rogoff and pauses.
"But i actually couldn't tell you when."
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