- The Bitcoin Mining Council wrote a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency to refute power utilization misconceptions associated to bitcoin mining.
- The BMC letter addresses issues about Bitcoin’s emissions, environmental dangers, waste, power grids, and extra.
- The BMC letter showcases and addresses academic gaps for U.S coverage makers.
Michael Saylor, Jack Dorsey, Fidelity Investments, and others belonging to the Bitcoin Mining Council (BMC) gathered to creator an open-letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refuting misconceptions of bitcoin power consumption because it relates to mining.
The letter penned by the BMC is a response to one other letter despatched on April 20, 2022 that states a necessity for regulatory actions towards bitcoin mining and different cryptocurrencies that use proof-of-work consensus fashions. The main signatory for the letter despatched on April 20 was Jared Huffman and was signed by one other 22 sitting members of congress.
The letter from the BMC outlined many misconceptions that had been detailed in Huffman’s letter, the primary of which is:
“We have serious concerns regarding reports that bitcoin mining facilities across the country are polluting communities and are having an outsized contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.”
The BMC letter responds to this accusation by explaining that authors of the Huffman letter are complicated information facilities with energy technology amenities noting that: “Data centers 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.”
The BMC letter continues to clarify that some mining machines double as high-performance computation (HPC) machines that carry out actions akin to climate modeling, monetary market modeling, medical diagnostics, artificial biology, pharmaceutical analysis & growth, information analytics, and animation. As information facilities for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and different massive corporations home the computational assets for a plethora of wants, so do the info facilities operated by bitcoin miners.
Assigning all the power-usage related information facilities to one job is nonsensical, particularly when one considers the quantity of sustainable power utilized by these information facilities. According to a BMC Q1 survey of bitcoin miners, 58.4% of the worldwide distribution of bitcoin mining is achieved by means of sustainable power, which is notably increased than the common industrial sustainable power usage within the U.S sitting at 21%.
Another level the Huffman letter asserted was:
“As digital assets gain popularity, it is essential to understand the environmental risks and pollution associated with this industry.”
The BMC addressed this false declare noting that bitcoin miners don’t have any emissions, interval.
The assertion units blame for the failure of the power grid to function in an environment friendly method on bitcoin miners. The emissions are the fault of energy mills. Bitcoin miners merely buy the power after its technology.
Another conflation from the Huffman letter claimed:
“A single Bitcoin transaction could power the average U.S. household for a month.”
The BMC refutes this declare fervently by explaining that “Broadcasting a transaction requires no more energy than a tweet or a Google search.”
The BMC means to clarify that Bitcoin transactions eat little-to-no power. The power consumption attributed to bitcoin comes from miners competing for issuance and costs related to transactions, which by design will drastically fall. In two years, issuance will drop 50% and 90% of the entire bitcoin that can ever exist has already been issued.
The BCM continued to clarify that issues for the scaling of bitcoin as a worldwide cost main to rising power consumption are additionally constructed on a false basis, as layer-two protocols just like the Lightning Network require little or no power, permitting Bitcoin to scale off-chain with out incurring increased power prices.
“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,” the BMC acknowledged within the letter.
The BMC letter continues to refute the conflation between proof-of-stake (PoS) versus proof-of-work (PoW) consensus fashions, explaining that one can’t examine the 2 since PoS is not “mining technology,” reasonably it is a way to obfuscate authority by giving energy to stakeholders with the very best quantity of capital.
One of the ultimate claims refuted by the BMC issues the accusation in direction of huge quantities of e-waste within the trade. This declare was backed up within the Huffman letter with one, debunked, non-academic quotation. The BMC acknowledged:
“The Bitcoin e-waste claim is not based on evidence of huge quantities of miners in junkyards. These simply do not exist. It is a chimera derived from an idle academic fantasy which failed to incorporate any relevant industry data.”
