Fossils vs. Renewables, PoW vs. PoS: Key policy issues around crypto mining in the U.S.
On Jan. 27, a group of eight U.S. lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, sent letters to the world’s six largest Bitcoin mining companies, demanding to reveal the detailed data on their electricity consumption. This isn’t the first time Senator Warren requested this information from a mining operation — last month a similar letter was sent to Greenidge Generation, which uses a natural gas plant to power its facility.
These moves highlight the increasing regulatory pressure on crypto mining businesses in the United States. But, as last week’s Congress hearing showed, the growing scrutiny might turn out to be an opportunity to align the mining sector’s development with the broader political push for clean energy. Here are some of the key themes around crypto mining that have captured the lawmakers’ attention and that will likely inform the intensifying policy conversation.
A cornerstone of any environmental critique of Bitcoin and crypto in general, the question of how much energy cryptocurrency mining consumes was expectedly prominent at the hearing. In a 2018 paper published in the prestigious journal Nature, a group of researchers predicted that Bitcoin’s growth could singlehandedly push global emissions above 2 degrees Celsius within less than three decades — not a good look given the international community’s stated mission to prevent the planet’s temperature rise of the exactly same magnitude.
Cambridge University Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index set the tone of comparing the yearly Bitcoin-driven consumption to various nation’s levels — and as for now, with its 131.1 TWh per year the most popular cryptocurrency consumes more energy than Ukraine (124.5 TWh) or Norway (124.3), according to this source. The
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