The much-discussed Bitcoin Mining Council is finally born.
It all started with Elon Musk’s strong criticism of the energy consumption of bitcoin mining. Indeed, bitcoin mining does consume a lot of electricity, a significant part of which is produced from non-renewable sources.
As a consequence of this, the CEO of MicroStrategy Michael Saylor organized a meeting with the main bitcoin miners of North America, and Elon Musk himself.
The idea that emerged from this meeting was to create a sort of alliance, or consortium, called the “Bitcoin Mining Council” that would aim to promote transparency in the use of energy for bitcoin mining, and to accelerate environmental sustainability initiatives around the world.
Yesterday, during his keynote address at Consensus 2021, Saylor confirmed that the Bitcoin Mining Council has effectively come into existence.
The tasks of the Bitcoin Mining Council
The task of this new alliance will be to manage concerns about Bitcoin’s energy use, and help shape a new narrative about its energy consumption.
Saylor also confirmed that for the creation of the Bitcoin Mining Council he worked with Elon Musk and eight North American miners, with whom he created an organization that could publish energy usage data from miners.
The founding members of the Bitcoin Mining Council account for about 10% of the total Bitcoin hashrate, while the majority comes from machines installed and operated in China.
Criticism
Criticism of this initiative has been raised in recent days, basically because the Bitcoin protocol is not based on centralization, but on decentralization. The doubts concern in particular the power that such a concentration could exert on the future developments of the Bitcoin project.
However, it must be said that, on the one hand, 10% of hashrate does not even remotely allow for the acquisition of power over the development of Bitcoin, and on the other hand, the CEO of Argo Blockchain, Peter Wall, has already stated that the new group has no plans to change any aspect of the bitcoin ecosystem, but only to address concerns related to the energy consumption of miners. Moreover, for now there seems to be no intention to expand the group to other large entities outside the US.
Moreover, those who accuse the group of attempting to secretly control Bitcoin forget that it was its creators who publicly announced its existence.
Therefore, for the time being, there does not seem to be any real risk related to the decentralization of Bitcoin due to this initiative, but developments will have to be monitored. Moreover, the problem of possible pollution caused by bitcoin mining can no longer be ignored. The fact that there are already solutions that can be applied without great difficulty, and which can for instance drastically reduce the consumption of energy from non-renewable and polluting sources, shows that it would not make sense not to even attempt to go down this road.
