Bitcoin Stakeholders Defend Crypto Mining in Recent Letter Sent to EPA

On Monday, a letter was sent to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in defense of the environmental impacts of bitcoin mining. The authors of the letter consisted of major bitcoin investors such as Michael Saylor from Microstrategy (MSTR), Block’s (SQ) Jack Dorsey, miners like Core Scientific (CORE) and Riot Blockstream (RIOT), asset managers like Fidelity and Galaxy Digital, as well as venture capital players like Benchmark Capital.

The letter from the bitcoin stakeholders was sent in response to Rep. Jared Huffman’s (D-Calif.) — alongside 22 members of the Congress — letter to the same agency on April 20 tackling the “serious concerns” regarding bitcoin mining accounting for a significant contribution to pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Saylor and the other authors, the letter sent by Congress “is premised on several misperceptions about bitcoin and digital asset mining, that have previously been debunked or conflate bitcoin mining with other industries. It is clear that education is required to ensure that public officials understand that the digital asset mining sector does not contribute to the environmental issues raised in the Letter.”

Within the Congressional letter was an assertion that bitcoin mining facilities were heavily impacting communities and the environment. This has since been tackled by the bitcoin stakeholders through their letter, explaining that these facilities are not necessarily distinct from data centers of major tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.

“Datacenters engaged in the industrial-scale mining of digital assets do not emit CO2 or any other pollutants, like other industrial facilities do; they are merely server farms engaged in computation,” explained the authors. “These mining data centers purchase and utilize electricity generated externally from a power station, similar to the big-tech data center operations.”

U.S. policymakers have been keen on addressing the issue regarding emissions — with the latest action being a proposal from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suggesting that all publicly traded companies report greenhouse-gas emissions from their operations.

The New York State Assembly is also forwarding a controversial bill that is geared to implement a two-year moratorium on select proof-of-work (PoW) crypto mining operations within the state. Crypto enthusiasts worry that this particular legislation could be a stepping stone for cracking down on crypto mining.

Among the other concerns that were tackled by the recent letter include the sustainability of bitcoin mining as well as the debate surrounding proof-of-stake (PoS) and PoW systems. “Digital asset mining is a fully digital process location agnostic, meaning miners can operate from anywhere in the world and data centers are able to target stranded or abundant renewable sources of energy,” argued the authors regarding the energy mix involved in bitcoin mining.

As for the comparisons between PoS and PoW, the Congressional letter claimed that the former was superior in terms of low energy usage. The bitcoin stakeholders, however, clarified that PoS is simply “a technique to determine authority over a distributed ledger, [that] does not achieve decentralized distribution. Given that Proof of Stake and Proof of Work are qualitatively different, it’s misleading to refer to Proof of Stake as a more ‘efficient’ form of Proof of Work, since it does not achieve the same thing.”

Source: CoinDesk