what does pollute more: mining gold or BTC? any serious research on that?

[Borilla]

It's not the same kind of pollution. One destroys the forest, the ground, and still pollutes rivers and air with very toxic elements. The other burns energy and uses hardware. Hard to compare. But today gold mining is still a big concern and to look for more gold we have to destroy more land as you can see in the news.
Could we someday have a way to stop this crazyness by all replacing gold by BTC. Gold would be used for what it is and the pollution and land destruction would certainly decrease.
Maybe there's a way to rebuy gold with BTC according to a schedule so that it's win win win win for everybody.
Also it would probably solves many debates about the future of BTC but that's secondary.
For now a serious article in a peer reviewed journal would for sure have a huge impact and start the process of mass adoption...
And it seems the right time to do it.

[vroom]

Brazil, uncontacted indigenous people murdered by gold miners

http://www.lifegate.com/people/news/brazil-uncontacted-indigenous-people-murder-gold-miners

gold is a dirty business, it's not only polluting, it's killing.

[AT101ET]

Have you seen the extent people go to to mine gold?
Gold mines are huge and they use a wide range of machinery in the process (mining, refining, polishing, distributing etc).
All those processes use way more power and natural resources than the output of Crypto mining.
Most miners are as efficient as possible when It comes to energy consumption.
No studies exist because they're not even close in comparison so nobody has bothered to conduct a study.

[yoseph]

As far as I can tell the only thing that the mining of bitcoin does is use lots of electricity and it's noisy. So mining bitcoins only cause noise pollution which isn't that loud at all, Gold mining on the other hand causes lots of land pollution,  they destroy the landscape of the earth and more over the chemical that they use seeps into the river and pollutes it as well. Recently in my country,  the government has put a stop to mining because of immense water pollution.

[Yuhee]

It's not the same kind of pollution. One destroys the forest, the ground, and still pollutes rivers and air with very toxic elements. The other burns energy and uses hardware. Hard to compare. But today gold mining is still a big concern and to look for more gold we have to destroy more land as you can see in the news.
Could we someday have a way to stop this crazyness by all replacing gold by BTC. Gold would be used for what it is and the pollution and land destruction would certainly decrease.
Maybe there's a way to rebuy gold with BTC according to a schedule so that it's win win win win for everybody.
Also it would probably solves many debates about the future of BTC but that's secondary.
For now a serious article in a peer reviewed journal would for sure have a huge impact and start the process of mass adoption...
And it seems the right time to do it.

Well i believe that if ever gold miners would go to bitcoin. Chances are other gold miners would take opportunity to mine their own gold. Most reasons also why we are urbanized is because there are not more trees that would surround a land thus to conserve that land they would build houses around to hide the hidden agenda which is gold mining. There are many alternative energies that could be used so bitcoin is not really a threat to nature rather it uses nature for its energy. If a miner is smart enough to have those alt energies.

[alyssa85]

In theory, as solar panels get more and more efficient, you could have a mining farm linked to a solar farm and mine completely energy efficiently.

[Misshi]

It's not the same kind of pollution. One destroys the forest, the ground, and still pollutes rivers and air with very toxic elements. The other burns energy and uses hardware. Hard to compare. But today gold mining is still a big concern and to look for more gold we have to destroy more land as you can see in the news.
Could we someday have a way to stop this crazyness by all replacing gold by BTC. Gold would be used for what it is and the pollution and land destruction would certainly decrease.
Maybe there's a way to rebuy gold with BTC according to a schedule so that it's win win win win for everybody.
Also it would probably solves many debates about the future of BTC but that's secondary.
For now a serious article in a peer reviewed journal would for sure have a huge impact and start the process of mass adoption...
And it seems the right time to do it.

Both are very destructive in our environment. When we mine gold, those private owned-miners cut trees in the mountains just to let them mine their, tendency of that FLOOD. In manufacturing electronic gadgets, it also costs minerals such as gold, fossil fuels, silver, copper. Those are to be mine. So its the same process but different in output.

[Borilla]

The way I put the question was probably a little simplified maybe to emphasize the main point. But I think the way to look at the problem should be more nuanced: Switching from gold to BTC won't stop gold mining because it is usefull in the industry. However it will for sure stop this non stop crazy gold rush that destroys our planet, tribes and yeah starts wars. Now the benefits seem obvious. We just need an official publication. Most people don't even know about BTC! With such a publication you can reach tons of academics, hippies, enviromental activist, NGOs, goverments and not just geeks lol. Even if it seems so obvious to you,  making some serious research, putting numbers and publishing it would be a huge.
I am no specialist but I can imagine  many more reasons to switch to a crypto gold , starting now.