Report Slams Bitcoin Mining for PollutionBut Bitcoiners Aren’t Buying It

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Bitcoin OGs are skeptical of a report released by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) on Wednesday detailing how Bitcoin miners are polluting communities across the United States.

Working on six case studies, the nonprofit group claims to have documented how the mining industry interferes with the daily lives of Americans through air, water and noise pollution.

The incessant din created by the mining operations continues 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and drives nearby residents to despair, the report says. One of his case studies followed a married couple from Cook County, Georgia, whose hearing was allegedly damaged by one of the Blockstreams near Bitcoin mining facilities.

Another case study focused on Stronghold Digital Mining in the country of Venango, Pennsylvania. The company burns waste coal to power Bitcoin mining machines, then spreads the leftover coal ash on land for use as fertilizer. EWG argued that the toxic pollutants in this ash-based fertilizer are carried into nearby rivers and streams when it rains, polluting the water.

What these mines have in common is their use of proof-of-work, which is wasteful by design, the report argues, calling it highly inefficient for requiring a large amount of fossil fuel-generated electricity to operate.

Proof of work is a consensus mechanism used by Bitcoin and other decentralized blockchains that allows all network participants to agree on the sequential order of transactions, while issuing new coins in a non-subjective manner . Powerful computers compete in a race to build the next block of Bitcoin transactions by solving a complex math problem and are rewarded with new BTC for solving it first.

Many modern blockchains use an alternative consensus mechanism called proof-of-stake, which uses cryptocurrency rather than energy to secure the network. EWG has long called on Bitcoin developers to modify its code and reduce its power consumption in the same way, supporting another well-funded environmental campaign to do so.

However, leading Bitcoin developers are not at all interested in such a major protocol change. Blockstream CEO (and alleged Bitcoin creator) Adam Back claims that the energy costs to produce new Bitcoins are necessary for it to function like cash.

People buy digital gold to protect against inflation and currency erosion. Central banks are buying physical gold for similar reasons at a record pace, he told Decrypt via Twitter. Gold is expensive to mine in a similar way, and that’s also inherent in hard money.

When asked by EWG about noise pollution from Blockstreams, Blockstream mining manager Chris Cook described the facility as barely audible…the crickets are noticeably louder.

Long-time bitcoin developer Luke Dash Jr. has also disputed that bitcoin is a source of environmental harm, arguing that the fiat money system is far more harmful.

PoW is actually good for the environment, he told Decrypt via DM. It makes clean energy like solar energy viable on its own, whereas before it usually required fossil fuels to supplement it.

Meanwhile, the developer has dismissed proof-of-stake as a scam, referring to a 2015 trial describing the system as unworkable.

By relying only on system resources, proof-of-stake cannot be used to form distributed consensus, because it depends on the very story it is trying to form to enforce the loss of value, said l author of the report Andrew Poelstra.

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