A letter pushing back at lawmakers demanding an investigation into cryptomining claims that the miners themselves are not to blame for the practice’s soaring emissions.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and CEO of MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor – among others – this week signed the letter intended to serve as a rebuttal to a memo sent to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by lawmakers.
In the memo, they requested that the EPA probe crypto mining facilities to ensure they follow laws such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, as well as a more general investigation into whether or not these facilities were having a substantial effect on climate change.
The probe is aimed at mining facilities that utilise proof-of-work as a mechanism for mining as oppposed to the more climate-friendly proof-of-stake approach.
While the latter is gaining traction within the crypto ecosystem, proof-of-work is still the go-to method for cypto giants such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero.
Out of these three, Ethereum is the only one with set plans to move towards a proof-of-stake model.
The rebuttal letter claims that critics’ simply don’t understand how cryptocurrencies work though the crux of their argument lies in the fact that it’s down to the electricity companies to provide greener energy alternatives as opposed to relying on fossil fuels.
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In the letter, crypto advocates state that: “emissions are created at the power generation source upstream from the datacentres. Digital asset miners simply purchase electricity from the grid, the same as Microsoft and other datacenter operators.
“There are no pollutants, including CO2, released by digital asset mining. Bitcoin miners have no emissions whatsoever,” the letter argues.
In their memo, lawmakers claimed that the energy consumed by a single Bitcoin transaction could “power the average US home” for more than two months.
The rebuttal disputes this, saying that “Bitcoin transactions do not carry ‘energy payloads’. Bitcoin transactions cannot be ‘redeemed’ for energy.”
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