Cryptocurrency mining has long been under close surveillance for the excessive energy consumed for these processes.
Bitcoin alone is estimated to have an annual electricity consumption of 58.7 TWh according to; https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
“Intel Corporation (also known as Intel, stylized as intel) is an American corporation and technology company making semiconductor chips. They are also the inventor of the x86 series of multiprocessors, the processors found in most personal computers (PCs). . . Intel also manufactures motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing” and now claims to have found a more reasonable and cost-effective way to mine Bitcoin. - (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel)
In September of 2016 Intel filled a submission for a patent entitled “BITCOIN MINING HARDWARE ACCELERATOR WITH OPTIMIZED MESSAGE DIGEST AND MESSAGE SCHEDULER DATAPATH” which was released on March 29th 2018.
The patent goes into vast detail stating this product can decrease energy use by up to 35% lowering financial requirements, whilst mining more coins in the process.
You can read the full patent at http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20180089642.PGNR.&OS=dn/20180089642&RS=DN/20180089642
Due to the increasing energy costs of mining cryptocurrencies, some critics have worried that the potential negative environmental impact outweighs the profits.
President of Velocity Micro and Intel partner Randy Copeland spoke with CRN stating “Once this new Intel technology comes to market, more people will mine again because it’s profitable again, driving down the market value of the coins and finding a new market balance that will again put locations with lower electricity costs back at the advantage.”
By combining a mining hardware accelerator with an optimized SHA-256 message digest and message scheduler data paths, Intel’s patent aims to achieve possible 18% improvement in the critical path of a new method of computation, another probable 31.5% improvement in the critical path of a different set of computations
“These optimizations may result in a 15% combinational area and 35% combinational power improvement in the message digest logic,” the patent states.