Jack Dorsey, Anthony Scaramucci, Michael Saylor, and other high-profile Bitcoiners have cosigned a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) challenging House Democrats’ claims that their cryptocurrency threatens the environment.
Peter St Onge, an economist with the Heritage Foundation, voiced agreement with the letter in an interview with The Epoch Times.
“Bitcoin is orders of magnitude, probably 100 times cleaner than the legacy financial system,” St Onge said.
Francis Suarez, the Republican mayor of Miami, praised the Bitcoiners’ May 2 letter in a Tweet.
“As someone who is pro #bitcoin and cares about the environment, I urge you to read this letter that separates fact from fiction on bitcoin mining’s impact on the environment for U.S. miners,” wrote Suarez, whose city has emerged as a burgeoning tech hub at a time when Silicon Valley’s population is shrinking.
House Democrats including Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) sent their Bitcoin letter to the EPA on April 20.
“The rapidly expanding cryptocurrency industry needs to be held accountable to ensure it operates in a sustainable and just manner to protect communities,” they wrote.
They also praised President Joe Biden’s recent cryptocurrency executive order.
The House Democrats warned that Bitcoin mining is “having an outsized contribution [sic] to greenhouse gas emissions,” an assertion the Bitcoiners strongly disputed.
“The statement above unfortunately confuses datacenters with power generation facilities. Power generation facilities are not datacenters. Datacenters which contain ‘miners’ are no different than datacenters owned and operated by Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft,” they wrote, later adding that Bitcoin miners use more nuclear, wind, solar, or hydro energy than in the average U.S. energy mix.
“Miners can operate from anywhere in the world, and datacenters are able to target stranded or abundant renewable sources of energy,” they later added.
While Democrats claimed that Bitcoin mining generates over 30,000 tons of electronic waste every year, the Bitcoin advocates challenged the paper they cited, which assumed that the mining hardware Bitcoiners use depreciates in a mere 1.3 years.
“The claim that Bitcoin miners produce enormous quantities of e-waste is a purely academic fantasy,” they wrote.
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