In 1999, media attacked the internet: “a lump of coal is burnt everytime a book is ordered online”. Today the same attack has shifted towards Bitcoin.

In the early days of the internet, media hit pieces tried to blame the internet for energy consumption.

Somewhere in America, a lump of coal is burned every time a book is ordered on-line.

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=12b1b1ad2580

The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.

There are already over 17,000 pure dot-com companies (Ebay, E-Trade, etc.).

The larger ones each represent the electric load of a small village.

Media tried to gaslight and brainwash tech companies with the burning fossil fuel narrative.

Some 20 years onwards, this entire article reads like a joke.

Getting the bits from dot-com to desktop requires still more electricity. Cisco's 7500 series router, for example, keeps the Web hot by routing an impressive 400 million bits per second, but to do that it needs 1.5 kilowatts of power. The wireless Web draws even more power, because its signals are broadcast in all directions, rather than being tunneled down a wire or fiber

Just fabricating all these digital boxes requires a tremendous amount of electricity. The billion-dollar fabrication plants are packed with furnaces, pumps, dryers and ion beams, all electrically driven. It takes 9 kilowatt-hours to etch circuits onto a square inch of silicon, and about as much power to manufacture an entire PC (1,000 kilowatt-hours)as it takes to run it for a year. And there are at least 300 of these factories in the U.S. Collectively, fabs and their suppliers currently consume nearly 1% of the nation's electric output.

The global implications are enormous. Intel projects a billion people on-line worldwide. That's $1 trillion in computer sales — and another $1 trillion investment in a hard-power backbone to supply electricity. One billion PCs on the Web represent an electric demand equal to the total capacity of the U.S. today.

Does this resemble the current attacks against cryptocurrencies?

The exact same arguments are now used against bitcoin, trying to fool people into believing that bitcoin is the worst thing in the world.

Thousands of people believe what these articles at face value despite not having any understanding of the intricacies of bitcoin mining