A group of executives from within the Bitcoin industry has written a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in an effort to debunk myths about the environmental dangers of crypto mining.
The letter was in response to a statement from Congress last month calling on the EPA to monitor crypto mining facilities for possible violations of environmental law.
Bitcoin heavyweights like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor wrote their own letter in hopes of refuting what they believe to be myths surrounding crypto mining.
Responding to the notion that it is imperative to understand the pollution associated with the mining of cryptocurrencies, the executives say that this belief is “deeply misleading.”
“There are no pollutants, including CO2, released by digital asset mining. Bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever. Associated emissions are a function of electricity generation, which is a consequence of policy choices and economic realities shaping the nature of the electrical grid.
Digital asset miners simply buy electricity that is made available to them on the open market, just the same as any industrial buyer.”
Responding to the idea that “a single Bitcoin (BTC) transaction could power the average U.S. household for a month,” the executives claim that this notion is “patently and provably false.”
“The bulk of the incentive for miners to consume energy will continue to be issuance-related for the foreseeable future, and so forecasting Bitcoin’s energy cost requires assessing the interplay between a potentially rising unit price and a declining issuance rate.
It therefore makes no sense to associate energy consumption with individual transactions, since Bitcoin’s energy usage is not related to transactions, and Bitcoin can scale arbitrarily without increasing its transaction count or energy usage.”
According to the crypto advocates, there is no real distinction between a crypto mining operation and the data centers of a technology company, and attempting to regulate such systems would set significant historical precedents.
“There is no meaningful difference between a ‘digital asset mining facility’ and datacenters run by Google, Apple, Microsoft. Each is just a building in which electricity powers IT equipment to run computing workloads. Regulating what datacenters allow their computers to do would be a massive shift in policy in the United States.”
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