American Bitcoin Holders Formed ‘Mining Council’ to Address Environmental Concerns and Promote Renewables
A group of notable Bitcoin holders in America has formed a ‘Mining Council’ in accordance with a decision taken during a meeting between leading miners and entrepreneur Elon Musk. This will be a council that will help promote energy usage transparency and will also encourage miners to use renewable forms of energy.
This is a topic for which Bitcoin has drawn a lot of criticism lately, with American lawmakers pushing for banning laws in states due to their worries that miners will undermine their efforts to reach environmental and emission reduction goals. There’s an absolute frenzy going on with cryptomining, and people will go as far as to repurpose old fossil fuel power stations and get petrol generators running to power up the miners.
This growing concern about Bitcoin’s emissions has taken its toll on the cryptocurrency, as a series of national bans, restricting laws, and Tesla’s move to remove the Bitcoin option from its payment system has pushed the value of the crypto tumbling.
As such, the formation of an atypical ‘council’ that will play the palliative role of connecting the community with regulators was urgently needed. The council will provide assurances in regards to the energy consumption and type of resources used by big miners, hoping to keep the criticism in check.
This is obviously not going to be easy as we’re talking about a decentralized and unregulated community, but as pressure mounts, something has to be done. And even if things go well in the U.S., in China and Russia, miners will continue using fossil fuels for their mining activities.
As such, and because Bitcoin is an international ledger, the eagerness of everyone to respond positively to the changing requirements is key, as it affects the sociopolitical acceptance of the cryptocurrency, and by extension its value.
Miners intrinsically seek the cheapest forms of energy to use for their crypto-mining, as this makes the most economical sense. Urging them to perform a sudden shift to renewables will strip large portions of the profit they make, so we wouldn’t expect to see any fundamental changes soon. The only way to address the problem is by introducing strict laws at the state/national level, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens on that front.
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