Industry expert says Elon Musk’s initiative is detrimental to the industry

Tech entrepreneur Ragnar Liftrasir called the creation of the Bitcoin Mining Council [Bitcoin Mining Council, BMC] a “regulatory capture” of the mining industry.

This man is an enemy of Bitcoin and the Mining Council is regulatory capture of Bitcoin at its point of production. https://t.co/qommHtiF9t

— Ragnar ☀️ (@Ragnarly) May 24, 2021

On May 23, Musk spoke with leaders of North American mining companies. Participants in the meeting, organized by Michael Saylor, agreed to form the BMC to reduce the industry’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

Liftrasir stated that members of the association could collude to censor blocks mined without using “green” energy. In his view, there is a risk that the precedent could be used to control transactions that do not align with government regulators’ interests.

“Climate change is a pretext for international control by left-wing globalists. Now they have turned on Bitcoin because of its financial power. This is money that crafty globalists do not control (yet),” he explained.

According to Liftrasir, the government does not run the node software or the Bitcoin mining algorithm. However, authorities can pressure exchanges and mining companies to prefer “green” cryptocurrency.

The entrepreneur noted that the BMC would become a “centralised point of contact” for regulators. He emphasised that centralisation of any kind is a “dangerous attack vector” for peer-to-peer networks.

Even before Musk and Saylor announced the meeting with miners on Twitter, some industry veterans compared it with the controversial New York Agreement of 2017. However, opinions in the community were divided.

In an interview with CoinDesk, the head of Argo Blockchain, a member of the BMC, Peter Wall, said that the organisation would not support discrimination against cryptocurrency mined using fossil fuels. He emphasised that the creation of the Council is not an attempt to usurp the industry.

“This is not a new OPEC. We are all independent, decentralised miners who formed a group of volunteers to influence the industry and each other,” he added.

Analyst Nic Carter also believes Musk’s initiative does not threaten the industry. In his view, many North American miners, such as Core Scientific, are already publishing energy-use data.

so core sci is a big NA miner. they were already providing basic disclosures regarding energy mix, because it’s the economically rational thing to do. is this CeNtRaLiZaTiOn? pic.twitter.com/9CutidG0ki

— nic carter (@nic__carter) May 25, 2021

“Billionaires have captured Bitcoin’s consensus through a shadowy, centralised closed community” — sounds scarier than “miners with 10% hash rate share agreed to disclose information that many of them already disclose,” Carter wrote.

Back in May 2021, Elon Musk entered debates about the scalability and energy consumption of Bitcoin. He proposed that the largest mining companies publish audit reports on the share of renewable energy in their operations.

Subscribe to ForkLog news on VK!