I've been trying to think of a way to post this article that doesn't make our American friends feel like I am picking on them, but I can't 

Maybe I shouldn't have posted it at all and just ignore what is happening but my concern for the environment and the rise in greed that we are seeing due to Bitcoin mines is a real worry to me.

First the miners buy-up all the computer graphics cards making it almost impossible to build a gaming PC unless you are extremely wealthy, now the USA have taken it to the next level:

A US company has turned a former coal plant into a gas-fired Bitcoin mine

Something has really gone wrong here, greed and a total lack of understanding of what the world is trying to do to eliminate fossil fuels has lead to this modern insanity.

Dear America - you are better than this. 

Sad 

I still don't fully understand how bitcoin works.

There is so much happening in the online sources,  I very often say how does this effect my every day life  and it has little effect so I take it as a grain of salt.
Carl2

As far as I can tell, cryptocurrencies (BitCoin being the largest) work via a block chain. This is stored on multiple computers so that everybody agrees to every transaction. This stops fraud. BitCoin rewards the owners of the computers by giving them a small amount of BitCoin per 1000 (or whatever) transactions to make it worth their while to support this currency.
Miners mine the block chain to generate more BitCoin for themselves. BitCoin doesn't want to give this away for free so make it harder to earn (maybe 10000 transactions, I loose it here) which equates to more processing power required.
I have a problem with this approach. Where does it end. Greed takes over.
BitCoin is decentralised and is more a commodity as well as a currency. This means it's value fluctuates wildly.

Banks (bank of England/America etc.) still use a fair amount of electricity to manage all their transactions but the bank's centralised system is there to stop fraud and their currency (£ - $ - etc.) is based on that countries GDP and it is a true currency (fiat?) that can also be traded as a commodity. All currencies like this want to be stable so that a £1 loaf of bread will still cost £1 next month (but inflation does happen).

Snowy, thanks for the detailed description of BitCoin mining