For those of you that are concerned about the environmental impact of Bitcoin, this is really really good piece of information, that clears up a lot of the confusion and most of all misinformation.
Michael Saylor, Jack Dorsey and other members of the Bitcoin Mining Council sent a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, explaining how Bitcoin works and debunking a lot of the "FUD" that's being spread about Bitcoin.
Here is the post that introduces the open letter:
And this is the actual letter if you're interested in more detail:
I'm posting this also here for myself as a bookmark to refer to it in the future.
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In Northern climates (such as here in Canada), my miners essentially heat my house. So, in my mind, I can write-off the energy usage as a heating cost. wrt pollution, 90% of our electricity is hydro-electric with the remainder being nuclear. So I personally don't see it as having any environmental issue.
In the peak of the summer, I usually power them off since the added cost of the air conditioner nullifies the gains.
If I lived in the Southern US (or any other warm climate - that I needed to cool the circuits) and was running local miners (not AWS or any other server farm) and lived in an area that was primarily coal based (or other fossil fuels) electricity ... then I would primarily agree that the electricity I was consuming on mining would be a significant contributor to CO2 emissions.
<rant>
If the EPA goes after Cryptocurrency Mining at Data Warehouses instead of strictly going after Data Warehouses as a whole for energy consumption, then I believe their motives are politically motivated.
Regardless of what they are processing, servers generate a lot of heat when they are under load. That heat needs to be removed. That requires a lot of electricity to cool the facilities. If the US is primarily powered by coal, this is generating CO2. If hydro-electric/solar/wind, then not so much. Perhaps the EPA should be mandating that all data warehouses must build the corresponding infrastructure to guarantee no CO2 generation.
</rant>
Thank you! That's a great addition.
Perhaps the EPA should be mandating that all data warehouses must build the corresponding infrastructure to guarantee no CO2 generation.
Yes, or why use coal etc. at all, when there's better energy resources available? If there's a mandate, it should go for everyone equally, instead of singling out server farms/miners, etc.