Striving for the Impossible: Reasonable Crypto Debate

Prime example of the latter: the spoof video that Riot Platforms released in response to a New York Times piece on bitcoin mining’s environmental impact, which fed into a Biden Administration proposal to tax the industry. The clip, which showed an official in safety gear walking Riot’s Texas facility with a CO2 emissions reader to declare that Bitcoin mining released no carbon emissions, was satire. It was a way-too-smug-for-its-own-good way of saying we shouldn’t be judging choices for energy use, but rather examining the carbon output at the source of that energy – in other words, put your attention on whether a region’s grid uses either renewables or fossil fuels, not on how its electricity is being used.