Several bitcoin advocates – including Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame, Tom Lee from Fundstrat, and Michael Saylor (the CEO of MicroStrategy) – have penned a letter to congressional democrats who are asking that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) examine the effects of crypto mining on the planet.
Crypto Mining Isn’t the Monster Everyone Thinks It Is
The letter is aimed at getting these democrats to rescind their order to have the agency look at the emissions of said mining. The idea is that crypto mining allegedly doesn’t cause all the atmospheric problems these politicians have been led to believe, and Dorsey and everyone else in the letter want to convince them otherwise.
Jared Huffman – a California democrat calling for the investigation of emissions – said in a recent statement that crypto mining poses “serious concerns,” and that the process is increasing the number of pollutants in the atmosphere. The letter takes issue with this statement and says that much of the data suggesting that crypto mining leads to heavy increases in greenhouse gases is inflated.
The document claims that mining operations are no different than the data centers employed by the world’s major tech companies including, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. According to the letter, crypto mining centers are just buildings that house computers.
It reads:
Regulating what data centers allow their computers to do would be a massive shift in policy in the United States.
Darin Feinstein – co-founder of crypto mining operator Core Scientific and one of the letter’s authors – stated that Congress is misdirecting the public and telling people incorrect information about how damaging crypto mining allegedly is. Feinstein explained:
They’re confusing the public. The pollution comes from the energy generation source, and all data centers buy electricity off-site upstream.
Castle Venture’s Nic Carter also threw his two cents into the mix, commenting:
It would be very unusual for the EPA to regulate the kind of computation that’s occurring within a data center. That’s clearly outside of their remit. It doesn’t make any sense to ask the EPA to care about what kind of computation is being done… The letter makes it sound like there’s a bunch of these vertically integrated miners like Stronghold and Greenidge… but that’s a minuscule portion of overall hash rate.
One of the big reasons there is still so much belief in crypto mining emissions is because high-ranking industry heads such as Elon Musk have gone for it. Musk stated last year that he was willing to allow customers of Tesla to pay for electric vehicles with bitcoin. However, just a few weeks later, the decision was rescinded given that he was concerned about the alleged mining implications.
Keeping Waste Blame Where It Belongs
The letter further states:
The industry needs to be held accountable for waste and discouraged from creating it.
Source: https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/dorsey-saylor-and-others-pen-letter-claiming-crypto-mining-isnt-damaging-the-planet/