Bitcoin Mining Ban Bill Makes It Out of New York State Assembly Committee
The Environmental Conservation Committee of the New York State Assembly voted on Tuesday afternoon to move along a proposed law that would ban so-called proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency mining for two years. 
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The bill was put together under the auspices of the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which mandates that New York’s greenhouse gas emissions be cut by 85% by 2050, with net emissions being slashed to zero.
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It would effectively ban PoW mining – the energy-intensive process used to secure the Bitcoin (BTC) network – for a period of two years.
Last week same thing in an EU Parliament committee vote — it failed to pass tho.
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I’m supportive of any legislation targeting specific cryptocurrencies or the Proof-of-Work mechanism, as opposed to a blanket ban on the generating blockchain backed tokens, which may have encompassed the likes of Proof-of-Stake or the process if minting NFT’s.
Although, given that Proof-of-Work has largely transitioned to renewables and almost all instances of large scale Mining Farms utilise hydroelectric, solar, or other future renewables, I’d say the problem lies with the legion of smaller scale cryptocurrencies and hobbyists or medium scale private interests utilizing their Graphics Processing Units to mine who would use traditional power providers which don’t tend to be on the cutting edge of energy generation and simply plug into a local grid.
Then there’s the building of the GPU’s themselves which demonstratably bad for the environment at all levels and is the main culprit when discussing the impact of mining on our planet, with their widespread usage for this purpose contributing to the skyrocketing prices of materials used to create them, as well as pricing out gamers from buying the best hardware that was originally built for that purpose.
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