The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin

Christian Stoll, Lena Klaaßen, Ulrich Gallersdörfer

This project provides additional information (source code, database scheme) for the article The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin by Christian Stoll, Lena Klaaßen, and Ulrich Gallersdörfer. This project consists out of two applications:

• SlushPool data generation (can be found in /SlushPool)
• BlockCypher data generation (can be found in /BlockCypher)

SlushPool

This tool crawls the hash rate per location and hash rate distribution data from Slushpool and saves it into a local folder as .csv files. The UML-model can be viewed here.

Prerequisites

• Java 8 JDK
• JavaFX (Oracle JDK has JavaFX included)
• Google GSON

Installation

• Install the Google GSON library from here

cd /cfootprint_bitcoin/SlushPool/

wget -O gson-2.8.5.jar https://search.maven.org/remotecontent?filepath=com/google/code/gson/gson/2.8.5/gson-2.8.5.jar

• Compile files

javac -cp gson-2.8.5.jar src/model/distribution/*.java src/model/location/*.java src/controller/*.java

Execution

cd src/

java -cp ../gson-2.8.5.jar:. controller.App

BlockCypher

This tool crawls blockdata from BlockCypher and stores it into a MySQL-database. It later queries IPInfo for location information about the miners.

Prerequisites

• PHP 7
• any MySQL version

Installation

• import scheme.sql into your database
• adapt settings in config.php

Execution

• use CLI (e.g. php) to execute
  • php getBlocks.php to generate block data
  • php getLocation.php to generate location data