Virtual water is one of those 1990s breezy claims created by activists, just like 'it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef.'

Anyone with any middle school ability to do arithmetic knows it isn't true, or the Mid-East would have been fighting wars over water for 2,000 years, instead of fighting over everything but that. Virtual water uses estimates of all the water that goes into a process while ignoring that water is recycled. So you can believe it takes 30 gallons of water to make your cup of coffee, activists said just that and New York Times reporters repeated it as fact, but the water that went into growing coffee also went into aquifers and the sky and rained all over again. None of it disappeared.



This new claim includes cooling systems, air conditioning, and water for electricity use water - and seem to believe that water disappears. Their solutions to saving water that isn't being lost is expensive and resource-assaulting, like burying servers in ferrofluids or plastic. With all of the servers in use that would deplete the planet a lot faster than a Bitcoin conversion. 

Using virtual water, the air you breathe causes the earth's water to be depleted as well. It's nice for activists who are bored pretending K-cups are ruining the planet, but you shouldn't buy Bitcoin because it's moronic, not because servers use water.