New York Bitcoin Miners Are Buying Up Power Plants—and Communities Are Fighting Back
New York Bitcoin Miners Are Buying Up Power Plants—and Communities Are Fighting Back - Inside Climate News
Bitcoin is still a thing then?
Yep.
I put $50 of each paycheck into it and use the profits to buy myself shiny toys i otherwise couldn’t justify.
Unfortunately it is and its peak was after it faded into darkness (last december 1 bitcoin was like $100k).
It's trading at like $105K today.
One of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions are disused or decommissioned natural gas wells, which continue to leach methane into the atmosphere after being abandoned. Crypto mining has the potential to incentivize the decimation of these greenhouse outputs by using that methane to generate their power, outputting water and the much less harmful carbon dioxide as combustion product instead. But as mining is a profitability game, they won't do that if there are cheaper and readily-available power sources to tap into. That's why it's crucially important for regulators to get smart about this: setting up rules that prohibit crypto mining on public power sources, identifying sites in need of pollution management, possibly incentivizing miners willing work within a framework where they can capture and utilize that pollution and show their work.
They way to stop pollution is to stop it at source, not to provide leaky incentives to clean it up.
Bitcoin mining is fitlhy and provides nothing of value to society. Shut that shitshow down before it kills more of us.
How about you work on the blanket ban on fossil fuels / specific software computation, and I work on the low-hanging regulation that addresses two pressing issues in one go. Whoever finishes first promises to jump over and help the other finish their goal. That way we can avoid perfection being an enemy of good, while also striving toward perfection.