Topic: New York State Assembly passes ban on new BTC mines that don't use green power (Read 376 times)

That's the way forward to help reduce climate change so we can have carbon free atmosphere.
Using green energy to mine is a good approach , it will not only help reduce carbon pollution but
It will also help reduce the cost of using electric in the mining of Bitcoin

What are the processes in New York that monitors bitcoin mining?
What are the consequences of breaking the law on green energy?

it seems discrimination to me as well. but maybe, these lawmakers are just influenced by these environmental activists rallying that bitcoin is consuming too much energy. so they don't want to deal with these people and not to have any problem with them, they want btc mining to use green power. in this manner, these activists will be mum when it comes to mining if they are using renewable energy sources. and yet, other industries are just continuously wasting our energy. not really fair at all.

I have to also say that New York wasn't really a perfect place to start this anyway, the rates there doesn't really justify doing it. In the USA the best place to do this is Texas because the electricity rate is so cheap there, aside from one famous winter chaos that happened about a year ago, they have the most famous cheap energy that anyone could ever have. That should be more than enough to start a new GPU or ASIC farm there and usually that is where they open up. If you want to ban crypto miners or do not put lax regulations, you will just lose those miners to Texas and that will be the end of the story, not really a big problem for the miner community.

I have been expecting people to do that for a long time. It is a vitally important thing in crypto world that you keep your decentralization, if you do not have that then you might as well use fiat. Think about it, a guy comes up one day and says that "hey I created this token, want to buy a million of them for 10k dollars and give that to me? I promise you that I will use that 10k you give me on ads and make your 1 million tokens worth more!!" and that sounds silly to you, right?

Well, right now millions of people spend billions of dollars on projects that say exactly this. I would rather trust US government over some random guy, even though us government has bad track record, at least I know what to expect from them.

This is one of the best studies that can be done probably with the data at hand, there is indeed a bit of generalization but it does cover some points, I love especially the thing about the gear that is currently running. Too many just grab the latest model, the most efficient and they think it's the one dominant, if we could only find a way to insert a better breakdown rate for each unit it would be awesome but that as the author said it's probably a near-impossible task and when you finally have the results a year has already passed.

But the main problem with this study is that it was made during an enormous movement in mining, US-based companies are setting up mines in the tens of exahashes, from when the reports end it should have been 20 and a total of 60 exa by the end of the year only from public companies. Where those settled, probably is guesswork.

Another thing is that somehow everyone has shifted from total electricity to total energy, and this shows clearly that the old comparisons are not really good anymore, just like some articles that were once heavily quoted here are now forgotten.

I don't see it this way. I see it in the way that while other industries are allowed to use whatever energy they want as long as they pay for it, bitcoin mining cannot. And that's, by any book, discrimination.
It doesn't matter one needs it or not. It matters whether he can, or not, if they want to.

It does work in a way where you could say energy companies could destroy the world and factories could pollute it, but bitcoin couldn't use energy. At this stage people need to realize that using energy is not the problem, it was never the problem, the two things about a better and cleaner world is how you produce the energy and not realizing that is beyond me.

If crypto miners uses energy and that energy comes from solar, then who cares, if it uses let's say petrol (no idea how that would work) that's bad, or coal, or anything like that. If a company manufactures something and has zero pollution that's fine, if they make 100+ billion dollars but still pollute, that's bad. So, saying that crypto miners uses a lot of energy, is something USA justice system (in this case NY) using to attack us, nothing more.

This statement had two way economic concept.Because by banning the mining, the bitcoin mining will be crashed. So no new bitcoin will be mined.So their will be little amount of bitcoin in flow. Due to heavy demand, this less bitcoin will be traded. At the end the price of bitcoin will increased to the unexpected level in a short period after the law passed. Secondly it will affected the old miners of crytocurrency.

I think that such a bill is certainly much better than banning crypto mining altogether, and it does try to account for climate change. So overall, I wouldn't oppose it. However, the real attitude to it depends on the context for me. Namely, are there other businesses with a similar level of power consumption and similar kind of non-essential activities (something the state can survive without) which, nevertheless, don't have to mind their sources of energy and can just use whatever's cheaper? I suspect that there might be. And in that case, it's unfair toward crypto miners. So targeting miners specifically and demanding them to be eco-friendly while allowing others to do business as usual is not fair, if that's what's happening.

Thanks for the link. New York state seems to be more relevant for mining than I thought (still, an exodus wouldn't drop the worldwide hashrate that much; the report claims it's ~7%). But on the other hand, it's a U.S. state where mining seems to be already pretty clean - like I wrote before, most mining activity there seems to be concentrated at the Canadian border due to hydro availability. The problem seems to be the hashrate located in other US states like Kentucky (see list on p. 24), and of course countries like Kazakhstan.

0,08% on a first glance seems low, but the problem is that it is only one coin, only mining (exchanges and other infrastructure isn't taken into account), and the number could grow if the price goes up in the future and nothing changes in terms of the share of renewable sources. Aviation, for example, also contributes "only" 1,5% of global carbon emissions, ~15-20 times the Bitcoin emissions. So it's actually not that low.

The problem is that those opposing Bitcoin question the usefulness of the mining emissions. You'll find many arguing that Bitcoin is used "only for speculation", and unfortunately parts of the Bitcoin community seem to confirm this view. If the potential of Bitcoin for the unbanked, for opposition groups of authoritarian regimes etc. was more pointed out, I guess the cricticism wasn't that loud than it's now.

So my conclusion still stands: the transition to renewables in the mining sector should be accelerated, and such regulations, at least for large-scale miners could be useful for that.

A less "harsh" alternative idea could be special, opt-in power tariffs for miners where the price depends on the availability of surplus energies from renewable sources and they're obliged to turn the equipment of in situations of scarcity.

The same with each and everyone of us, we had a limited understanding about Bitcoin, the blockchain, the importance of POW, and the incentive-structure that makes the network stick together. They too will start their path somewhere, learn the hard way, then understand the tradeoffs, and discover the importance and how truly ground breaking Bitcoin really is. Once they're ready to listen, we're here to educate/teach what we know and how we understand Bitcoin.

Everyone will support this, people that know about greenhouse gases and the negative effects of global warming will not want anything that can cause global warming. One of the reason for the global warming is the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the other main cause is deforestation, plants breath in carbon dioxide than oxygen but human activities is depleting the forest in the world. Also another cause are the industries which are not partaining to bitcoin or crypto mining that are producing greenhouse gases like methan as waste and release it to the environment. The government failed should tackle these issues but instead, they are centralizing on bitcoin mining.

According to coinshare report, bitcoin is only releasing 0.08% of the total carbon dioxide that human activities are releasing, that is a small amount.

https://coinshares.com/research/bitcoin-mining-network-2022


The latest report released by bitcoin mining cancil may not show much accuracy as it collects data directly from many miners in the world which would still show some accuracy if the miners give accurate information, the report also talks about the fact that  bitcoin is releasing only little carbon to the environment.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.59972260

I understand what you are saying, that if miners are mining using green energy, that some critics will have no excuse, but still very possible some critics will request for bitcoin mining ban, that the its electricity used for it is enough to power a country. But if bitcoin miners go using green energy, that may not be a good excuse.

But if the world want to tackle global warming, it is not about bitcoin mining, it is about how electricity is generated.

I doubt they thought too much about it, many laws should be technical by nature as there is no point in passing a law that cannot be reasonably enforced, however it is obvious that this law was passed purely by political motivations.

They want to send the message they care about the planet and at the same time try to weaken the image of bitcoin, and they can do this with this law, will they close a lot of bitcoin mining operations? I doubt it but that is not the point, they made the headlines and that is all what matters to those politicians.

Most of these 100% renewable providers rely at least partially on hydropower, but just the one I linked seems to concentrate on wind and sun which looks indeed "risky". It's however probably not locally produced, I've read they are "US-produced" so they can buy it from other coastal areas or inland areas convenient for solar energy.

Hashrate probably will not shrink (if the price does not crash hard). Even the complete China mining ban has only affected the hashrate temporarily. Concentration would be indeed a problem, but first - we lived with that from 2013 to 2021 approximately when almost all mining power was concentrated in China, and second, a concentration would happen probably gradually as not all countries will decide this issue at the same time. And once renewables see another price fall the whole thing will be a non-issue; even those allowing "green" Bitcoin mining will be considered bitcoin-friendly (as I expect there are more countries that unfortunately could follow China's example to ban mining completely, which again, would be much worse than the New York model).

This would be the case if there are normatives like the one which was proposed in the EU. If that proposal succeeded, PoW currencies would not be officially tradeable anymore on centralized exchanges, only P2P, and no professional services (e.g. wallet, trading services) could be offered by EU companies. Such a law would indeed be a big setback for Bitcoin. But a "green mining restriction" would only have an effect on miners; a slightly lower hashrate is not a problem at all.

I would even argue that - like @n0ne wrote - this is an indication politics see that Bitcoin is here to stay. If many countries followed the "green mining policy" and miners would find ways to be compliant instead of searching for another country with cheap dirty energy, then I believe this could be insanely bullish for Bitcoin - because the probability of one of the main threats to its utility as "store of value" (a PoW ban or Bitcoin ban due to "ecological concerns") would be dramatically decreasing.

I believe there are different interests behind these proposals. A part may be indeed "anti-bitcoiners" who see decentralization as a threat. Others may even believe that PoS is indeed "superior" to PoW because they don't know - or don't understand - the Nothing-at-stake problem (which is often described in a very superficial way on websites and guides).

But my point is that if these laws were successful and miners shift to renewables, the whole argument would collapse. The only one they'd have left is the "money laundering" one and this can also be debunked pretty easily as I wrote in the post from today morning.

NY is full of hippies that congregate towards the NYC area and influence the politics of the entire state. Extreme far left urban living individuals disconnected from reality with the upper elite living in the central city. NYC had the chance to elect a pro-BTC candidate, Andrew Yang, but they declined. The current governor, Eric Adams, accepted his first couple of checks in the form of BTC. Mostly just virtue signaling. I don't imagine he has much to say on this mining ban. Green energy isn't efficient enough for it to swap out traditional energy forms so this is effectively a BTC mine ban outright.

I take it on the positive note. If the State is environmental friendly and wants to safeguard the environment it should impose similar law over every sector. Maybe from then onwards this can happen. For now the governments have realised that the future of monetary system is bitcoin. So, whatever the measures taken should last for longer time period without causing any hazard to the environment. In such a note this step has been taken and this will help bitcoin network overcome the common complaint that bitcoin is not green.

+5 just for your question. They don't have any issues with other industries that leave carbon, only issues about Bitcoin mining. It's something like they hate Bitcoin actually. For a long time, we are hearing this fucking excuse to ban Bitcoin mining. To be honest they just don't like Bitcoin hence finding a way to ban it. However, it's better if we can use renewable energy for mining Bitcoin, so fuckers wouldn't prevent Bitcoin mining. But who knows if they look for another excuse.

There is some truth in what you are saying, but only bitcoin miners are being attacked and banned, other industries are fine

I believe this ESG thing is more about control than about environmental. Conveniently,  POS coins (which is not so resilient and the decentralization is questionable) are just fine. Look at world economic forum here , for example:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/what-is-ethereum-bitcoin-explainer/


We will see a lot more about "greener" bitcoin alternatives,  which are conveniently not so decentralized and uncontrollable and privacy friendly

Bitcoin remained unscratched after China kicked all miners, and at the moment China had a truly large share of hashrate, probably larger than the entire US has right now. It's just that with every ban on mining there's less and less places for miners to relocate to. And now the world is going through an energy crisis, which could make finding spare electricity even harder.

It's called trying to find somebody to blame and a way out of their own mess.

They were pretty trigger happy when signing all those acts on reducing those pesky CO2 emissions and just as happy on shutting down a nuclear plant only to find out that they can't really replace that energy without powering up 3 gas plants instead and their plans about CO2 emissions are down the drain.
So now the hunts start to shut down everyone that burns gas or coal since somebody was a moron 10 years ago and didn't realize the world can't run on unicorn farts.


It depends on the region, it's one thing to have Vermont doing this and a different beast for Texas or Georgia.
But I don't see republican states following this or at least I hope they don't.

most asic farsm want to set up in renewable area's anyway. especially hydro..

this is the point where potential asic farms approach power companies and ask them when they forecast that they will have renewable power generation in different regions/states, so that asic farms plan where to locate themselves. mainly highlighting how much revenue a power station may lose by not upgrading their section of the grid

What is with New York? They want to control how much soda you can buy and what energy type you’re allowed to use for what… Can you imagine if that government was controlling the entire country? I’m betting they’d love to get people on CBDCs that can be programmed so they can force you to spend money the way they want you to. It’s scary when you consider how they’re going to use universal income to get everyone to basically willingly walk into slavery via regular bribes under the guise of income provided to help everyone live happier lives…

Because Bitcoin is a problem that bothers many, and it doesn't have a central figure to defend it in situations like this - so it's a very easy target to attack. If they can already choose who to attack, they would rather choose weaker targets than some who would retaliate.

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It is one thing to imagine that mining can be powered by 100% green energy, and quite another to say that it is completely unrealistic that this can ever be achieved globally. Therefore, it is completely irrelevant to me whether this percentage will be 65% or 95%, there will always be those who will dispute such data because even at this time the energy consumption and environmental impact of Bitcoin mining is so small that we would never even talk about it in case Bitcoin is a centralized project.

Suddenly everyone loves green color and everyone wants to save the planet. Give me a break, this is just an agenda using puppets like Greta and people are paying the costs for it: not the governments, not the rich guys.

They didn't cared at all about it, until now, when they were all suddenly enlightened.

When it's just one region, it's no big deal, if it's a global trend, that's a problem. If Bitcoin's hashrate shrinks and gets concentrated in just a few countries, that's not good, because the risk of a large-scale attack on the network will become higher.

Also, function is not everything. If Bitcoin gets restricted or banned by influential countries, it will become far less attractive as a store of value.

Hihi, this is going to be funny
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/a7389/amendment/c
Some of the miners won't be affected, the ones in the north that have managed to get contracts for hydropower near the border or from Canadian imports might get a breather. Others are in deep trouble.

Stronghold is done for, they have just invested million to raise the production to 500 MW
Crypto Throws the Coal Industry a Lifeline
Atlas has a gas plant that is already in trouble at Finger Lakes.

Both companies are the ones signing that BMC "fact sheet"  about being 60% green, just lol.

Anyhow, it's New York, this won't be a huge problem, you can move to Texas still has 80Thw of excess power near matching what Kazakhstan produces overall.
But if Texas goes "green", it's going to stop being funny at all.


Won't work in court.
Ignoring the fact that the state has the power to suppress any activity in the state by law, the thing will start with the fact that the mining operations do not provide a direct service or product to the people of New York, and good luck convincing a judge how an individual miner is essential to validate some tx other can just as well.

I don't know either, I'd expect it to be either significantly more expensive, either have availability issues, since wind and sun are not 100% reliable, but I don't know how would that be implemented.
Moving out might be expensive, but, depending where they move, it may or may not pay off. It's clearly a risk, especially now, with so many problems with the energy (and it prices) over the world.


You do have a point here, I may have been scared for nothing and maybe indeed the hash rate of NY state is not significant.

This could be the case if the move out of New York, including the costs to move itself, is cheaper than a transition to a renewable energy tariff. There are such electricity providers in the New York State (see a list here below), but I don't know how high their rates are, and many large scale miners depend currently on custom agreements with electricity producers to lower their costs. A move outside the US for local miners however should be expensive.

I seriously doubt there's so much mining in New York that a miner exodus would cause a hashrate drop. According to the source above, it seems to be one of the more expensive states when it comes to electricity costs. There seems to be a mining hotspot in the area near the Canadian border due to cheap hydro electricity, but these miners would be mostly compliant already.

While I would like to see mining businesses not only go for regenerable electricity, but go for producing their own green electricity (see the reasons here, most important being that they won't care on long term how low will the block rewards go), I don't find this law good because it can:
* force miners move (even out of USA) instead of complying
* force miners shut down, even for a while (move out), leading to sudden drops (even if small) in the hash rate, hence to congestion on mempool

Just another example of Nee York being on a different planet when it comes to all things finance despite the fact that they are “Wall Street”. Really not much of a surprise here. I used to be an annuity product expert wholesaler for a large finance company and out of the maybe 30-40 annuities we offered they only allowed about 3 of them and they were all terrible. NY makes no sense to me.

I know I'm probably in a minority here, but I think this law is actually a good thing, and it's similar to what I'm proposing in this thread. The faster the transition to renewables goes, the better, and once it's near 100%* anti-bitcoiners will lose their main argument** against Bitcoin.

Even if you don't agree with it, a PoW ban (or better: a ban for companies to deal with PoW cryptos) like it was discussed in the EU is much, much worse.

Remember: Bitcoin is constructed in a way that such kind of regulations for miners don't affect its functioning at all. The likely result if such policies were adopted around the world is that the hashrate/difficulty increase would be simply a bit slower (because of tighter profit margins for mining), or there could even be stagnation/slight diff decrease in bear markets. There's an absolute minimal chance that an 51% attacker could get a minuscule bit more chances (e.g. if some authoritarian regime lik North Korea tried to do it) but current hashrate is so high that this is close to impossible.

*sources for current proportion of "renewable" mining at present vary in their estimations, I read between <40% and ~70%; the 58% estimation for Q4 2021 by the Bitcoin Mining Council seems a reasonable value but I wouldn't rule out the 40% due to likely greenwashing by the BMC by buying CO2 certificates. There's some way to go still, imo.

**Yeah, there's also the "criminals laundering money" FUD, but this is much less convincing as Bitcoin and cryptos in general (even Monero) are only useful in the early phases of money laundering; it doesn't seem to give any advantage for the goal to insert the money in the legal banking system.

               Well, that's just how it is. When anything blocks the personal interests of people or organisations that have power and influence (mostly wealthy people or group of people that have great influence and control over banks and governments). Heck, some great or innovative ideas that can solve critical problems of our world today are even ignored or suppressed because of these people's greed and personal interests. Disgusting.

Great. Now that raises the question about those mines which are already out there in US whose mining since decade or something? Are they going to ban the operation by searching them one by one.

What if someone is solo mining in their houses with one or two machines? Are they going to search every house and keep banning them as if they are producing the dope. Lolz.

Funny. I hope they have thought about everything or it would be chaos to sort later.

Well, this is imho a great point and, if US legislation works in the same way as my county's, this can be attacked for discrimination and get "nulled".
Hence I see it as a pointless and pure political move.

Couldn't agree more @bitmover, it is strange how the government have turned a blind eye to those companies that are not using green energy for their operations,  why aren't they place on ban or impose sanctions for not adhere to environmental law!
Clearly this is just a one sided law to put pressure on btc.
Government always expressing negativity towards btc anyway they can.

Maybe the recent calling of those scientist what contribute about this proposed law and to minimize the carbon emission it produce they start with this since this already add up to the carbon produced on their country. Maybe in next following months or year we can see them past a law towards minimizing the carbon emission on their country and they just start with small industry then slowly implement it on bigger ones.

Excelent question.

Recently there was a discussion  in EU about bitcoin migration to Pos."  If ethereum is migrating,  why can't bitcoin? "

https://netzpolitik.org/2022/climate-measures-behind-closed-doors-eu-officials-talk-about-banning-bitcoin/

So we can now clearly see that this ESG, sustainable stuff is about. Control, political correctness and centralization.

This is another hash proposal about bitcoin mining, though not in US as a whole but could be a move individual State can begin to ban bitcoin mining that are not using green energy, green energy are the electricity production that are not releasing carbon to the environment.

The bill was proposed by the New York State Assembly that was passed on 26th April, the bill was proposed to place a ban on bitcoin mining operation that do not use green energy to power their operation.

From the state assembly, the bill would be passed to Senate and if voted in support in Senate, it would be passed to the Governor Hochul for signing.


https://cointelegraph.com/news/new-york-state-assembly-passes-ban-on-new-btc-mines-that-don-t-use-green-power

I do not know why also other industries are not banned not to use electricity that produces carbon in their operation.