MW Harvard's massive bitcoin bet is an environmental disgrace
By Brett Arends
The Ivy League school's endowment made a $443 million investment in bitcoin. The global computing network used to support the crypto uses more energy than Poland.
Environmentalism is only for the little people.
Well, well, well. It looks like Harvard University isn't quite so green after all.
Or, maybe more accurately, the "green" that the college cares about isn't the one related to the environment.
Harvard's staggering $57 billion endowment has just revealed a $443 million investment in bitcoin, the fake currency and money-laundering tool that is also an environmental catastrophe.
For illustration, the global computing network used to support bitcoin already uses more energy than Thailand or Poland - yes, really. The amount of energy used by bitcoin every year would power Great Britain or Italy for more than seven months.
We look forward with great excitement to the next pronouncement from Harvard about the global environmental crisis, the melting of the polar ice caps, the rising of the seas and the end of life as we know it.
We could all use a good laugh.
Harvard's endowment says it never comments on its investments.
I assume the philosophy here is that the peasants can bicycle everywhere and eat bugs to try to stop climate change, while the beautiful people jet around the world in private planes talking about the climate crisis - and making money from crypto, which is filthier than coal.
Bitcoin isn't just dirty. It's one of the few uses of energy that is clearly needless.
There are tons of tradeoffs involved in reducing our global carbon footprint. Should we use less air conditioning? Should we set our thermostats lower in winter and wear sweaters indoors? Should we carpool? Should we use electric cars?
"Not running crypto networks" would seem to be an easy win.
Incidentally, apologists for these cryptocurrencies sometimes claim they aren't really an environmental disaster because some or even much of the energy used by the crypto computing networks comes from renewable sources like solar power and wind.
This is a completely bogus line of reasoning.
Energy is fungible. This means that any renewable energy currently being used to power crypto networks could have been used instead for other purposes - keeping the lights on in schools and hospitals, powering cities and so on - if it wasn't being used for crypto. So even when bitcoin isn't using sulfurous coal, it's using renewable sources so somebody else has to use sulfurous coal.
It's like saying you're only eating the soup on the other side of the bowl. It makes no sense.
Harvard's massive bitcoin investment has been made through the iShares Bitcoin Trust exchange-traded fund IBIT, a mechanism that helps explain the circular-financing loop that has driven bitcoin prices through the roof (er ... until recently). Once bitcoin ETFs were approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission just under two years ago, institutions such as the Harvard endowment and your state and local pension funds could use these ETFs to buy bitcoin. Before the ETFs were launched, those entities found it almost impossible to buy into this Ponzi scheme.
Other schools like Brown University have also disclosed investments in bitcoin through the ETF.
As there is only so much bitcoin around, this extra demand drove up the price. Which, of course, drove other people to buy bitcoin.
None of this would matter so much if bitcoin was either useful or productive, but since it was launched in 2009, no one has found any use for it other than selling it to someone else. I keep asking crypto bros for an explanation and I keep hearing crickets.
The purpose of bitcoin is trading bitcoin. Enjoy.
Jennifer Rosenthal, chief communications officer at the the DeFi Education Fund, a crypto advocacy group, argues that investments such as Harvard's mean that crypto currencies have become mainstream investments. "Bitcoin has been fully embraced by traditional financial institutions, governments, and all different types of investors, including endowments," she says. "Bitcoin is one of the best performing assets of our generation, and any serious investor or advisor has a responsibility to consider it as they are building a future-proof portfolio."
The best I can say about bitcoin - and it isn't much, but it's something - is that it isn't a paper currency like the U.S. dollar. Given the monumental and insane deficits being run out of Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, and the apparent inability of anyone in power to understand basic math, it is hardly a surprise that people are worried about paper currencies and are looking for alternatives. We aren't Weimar Germany just yet, but we aren't quite as far from it as we'd like to be.
But you could argue that, say, real estate or even stocks might be a better bet than a fake currency that uses up tons of power.
But cryptocurrency has something else: A massive elitist ramp determined to drive it higher. An enthusiasm for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is one thing that apparently unites Harvard, the Trump family, Wall Street hedge funds and outright crooks in places like Russia.
Meanwhile, the crypto bros buying into this racket congratulate themselves on fighting for the little guy and sticking it to the Man.
Cue more laughter.
Yes, I've been skeptical about bitcoin for years, and yes, it's risen a long way over that time. I grossly underestimated the sheer scale of the elite ramp involved in driving this thing higher. Crypto was initially a libertarian anti-government project. Now it's being promoted by an official U.S. government crypto "reserve," backed by your dollars. You couldn't make it up.
According to Harvard's latest filing, its bitcoin stake was bigger than its investment in any other publicly traded vehicle, with Microsoft $(MSFT)$ a distant second at $323 million. The bitcoin stake was worth about 0.8% of the total endowment. (This is in keeping with the latest fashionable opinion in money circles, which is that you should have "about 1%" of your portfolio in bitcoin.)
But that was then. The latest disclosure relates to the endowment's holding as of Sept. 30. In the time it took Harvard to publish the details, bitcoin had tanked about 20%, falling from $114,000 to $92,000.
Or, to put it another way, since Sept. 30, Harvard has managed to lose about $89 million on its bitcoin stake. Oops.
-Brett Arends
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November 18, 2025 11:22 ET (16:22 GMT)
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