Jack Dorsey, Michael Saylor, Fidelity Pen Letter to EPA Defending Bitcoin

A group of major Bitcoin (BTC) investors, including Microstrategy’s Michael Saylor, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, miners like Core Scientific and Riot Blockstream, asset managers like Fidelity and Galaxy Digital and venture capital player Benchmark Capital, are among the authors of a letter sent to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defending Bitcoin mining and discussing many misconceptions on Monday. 

This letter comes a couple of weeks after a previous letter was sent to the EPA on April 20 by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and 22 congress members expressing their concerns about how Bitcoin mining is polluting communities and creating more greenhouse gas emissions. 

The Congressional letter “is premised on several misperceptions about bitcoin and digital asset mining, that have previously been debunked or conflate bitcoin mining with other industries,” said Saylor, et al. in the letter. “It is clear that education is required to ensure that public officials understand that the digital asset mining sector does not contribute to the environmental issues raised in the Letter."

The authors of the new letter came out with a specific goal of debunking some of the claims made about Bitcoin mining facilities and greenhouse gas emissions. They furthered their position by stating that power generation facilities are no different than data centers owned and operated by the most prominent tech firms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft. 

“Datacenters engaged in the industrial-scale mining of digital assets do not emit CO2 or any other pollutants, like other industrial facilities do; they are merely server farms engaged in computation,” the authors wrote. "These mining data centers purchase and utilize electricity generated externally from a power station, similar to the big-tech data center operations," the letter added.

The emissions issue has been a long debated topic, with the most recent incarnation coming via U.S. policy makers. In short, the Securities Exchange Commission proposed that all publicly traded companies report their greenhouse gas emissions. 

In addition, the New York Assembly is considering putting a two-year moratorium on select proof-of-work (PoW) crypto mining operations in the state, in an effort to crackdown on the electricity crypto miners are using. 

Surely this is just the beginning in the fight between the crypto industry and Congress.  

Author: Tyler Irvin

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