31 sats \ 1 reply \ @BTCMiner OP 2 May 2022 \ on: Letter from the Bitcoin Community to the Environmental Protection Agency | Bitcoin Mining Council bitcoin
It is imperative that elected officials in the United States recognize that bitcoin, and the innovation of Proof of Work, is the most important financial, economic, and accounting innovation in the history of humanity.
Bitcoin processes a similar number of yearly transactions to the Fedwire settlement system, which settles trillions of dollars’ worth of value daily. It is therefore eminently plausible for Bitcoin to grow into a utility-scale settlement system without changing its parameters at all.
Thus, even if the number of payments settling to Bitcoin increase by many orders of magnitude, that does not imply a commensurate increase in energy consumption.
Proof of Stake is not a ‘mining technology’, it is a technique to determine authority over a distributed ledger, but it does not achieve decentralized distribution.
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31 sats \ 0 replies \ @BTCMiner OP 2 May 2022
Conclusion:
  1. There is a difference between a datacenter and a power generation facility. This difference is material and was completely ignored by the Letter.
  2. 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.
  3. Some datacenters run only blockchain workloads. Other datacenters run none. Still other datacenters, including many owned by industry giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, run some of each. Censoring blockchain activity isn’t practical.
  4. The EPA and other regulatory and law enforcement agencies should require all power generation facilities to adhere to all applicable laws and regulations.
  5. The EPA and other regulatory and law enforcement agencies should require all datacenter facilities, which emit no pollutants, including CO2, to also adhere to all applicable laws and regulations.
  6. If a data center is violating noise ordinances, their operators should be forced to comply with local and regional noise and nuisance ordinances.
  7. If a data center is failing to dispose properly of obsolete circuit boards, whether the circuit boards contain chips that secure voice communications or chips that secure the Bitcoin blockchain, is irrelevant. The data center operator should dispose of them in an environmentally responsible manner.
  8. If a datacenter is abiding by all laws and regulations, the content or type of computational workloads should be irrelevant.
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