Bitcoiners have scored a major victory in their effort to defeat the U.S. Department of Energy’s Bureau of Statistics’ “emergency” Bitcoin mining order. The Energy Information Administration will halt mandatory surveys it had sent to hundreds of miners in favor of proper notice and comment periods required by law, according to court documents. The EIA hastily announced this order in early February, citing the data request as a matter of national importance.
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This comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the Blockchain Council of Texas, Riot Platforms, the New Civil Liberties Union, and the Digital Chamber of Commerce against the Department of Energy, which announced in February that Won a temporary restraining order restricting his abilities. The court overseeing the case said the initial emergency order request was “likely to be insufficiently justified.”
From this jump, the crypto industry was able to rally and make a case for the bill’s vague legitimacy. It was a rare moment when industry players saw the threat of unwarranted regulatory intervention and decided to fight back.
For example, Texas Blockchain Council’s Lee Bratcher wrote in a CoinDesk op-ed that data requests can be easily politicized and fuel an incomplete narrative about how the blockchain industry interacts with the national power grid. I wrote that there is. The Neo-Liberal Civil Rights Alliance said the EIA report likely would. Due to “political pressure” rather than a desire to prevent “public harm.”
The EIA will now attempt to obtain potentially useful data in a way that does not trample on people’s constitutional rights. The court will publish a notice in the Federal Register about the proposal and destroy any information already collected, according to court documents.
Notably, the initial inquiry request also included questions about how the government would protect potentially sensitive company information or if it were made public, which is standard practice for this type of data collection. There was a complete lack of information about whether it would be anonymized, said Bratcher, who worked for the DOE. .
What’s more, as Riot and the other plaintiffs argued in their lawsuit, crypto miners “suffer immediate and irreparable harm by being forced to divulge confidential, confidential, and proprietary information to EIA.” “I will accept it.” The investigation showed that criminal penalties could be imposed if miners did not comply.
Bratcher said the intelligence gathering could ultimately shed light on a sector that is becoming increasingly important. But he wants the EIA to work with industry to design more accurate and useful studies. For example, we need to understand not only how much energy miners are drawing from which suppliers, but also how their flexible electricity consumption can benefit the grid and encourage greener sources of energy production. You should also ask.
In Texas, miners are working directly with the state’s power grid operator to provide power during periods of stress on the network, such as during the 2021 winter storm that left millions without access to power. is blocking. This makes it ironic that part of the justification for the EIA emergency order was to assess how mining could lead to ‘public harm’.
The EIA will now begin a 60-day public comment period from the publication date of the new Federal Register notice.
While the investigation is likely to come back in some form, this moment is a real victory for an industry that appears to be in the crosshairs of U.S. officials. Figures like Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren not only consistently equate cryptocurrencies with fraud, they also arguably take them off the map. We are actively working to eliminate it.
It’s worth noting that Warren has called for a crackdown on the mining sector, and states including New York have passed moratoriums aimed at slowing mining development. In some cases, when cryptocurrencies fight back, as in the case of Ripple vs. SEC, there can be a fair hearing in court and the cryptocurrencies can emerge victorious.
