Sam Bankman-Fried: It Should Be Easy for BTC Miners to Resort to Clean Energy.
21 Jun 2021, 08:00
Sam Bankman-Fried: It Should Be Easy for BTC Miners to Resort to Clean Energy
29-year-old crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried believes that it would be rather easy for crypto miners to resort to green energy to potentially extract new coins from the blockchain.
Sam Bankman-Fried: Miners Can Turn to Green Energy without Hurting Their IndustryOne of the big arguments hitting the crypto industry as of late is that crypto mining is somehow harmful to the planet. There are reports strewn about suggesting that bitcoin mining requires more energy than specific countries such as Argentina and Iceland, while others suggest that the carbon footprint of bitcoin mining is as big as the one produced by Las Vegas, Nevada.
Many institutional traders have also gotten involved and cited concerns regarding the mining process. Elon Musk, for example, has stated that his company Tesla will not be accepting any further bitcoin payments for goods and services until miners can cut their emissions down, while Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame says he will not buy any more bitcoin mined in China given that the country still utilizes coal to run its mining firms.
The idea is that bitcoin mining does not serve a strong environmental purpose, but according to Bankman-Fried, this can all change with ease, and mining can maneuver into cleaner energy routes without hurting the industry in any way. In a recent interview, he said that miners need to begin taking the problems associated with coin extraction seriously, commenting:
It is not at all reasonable for bitcoin forces to decry it as sort of a witch hunt to bring up this question because there is substantial energy usage happening because of bitcoin mining right now. The answer is that it is not free to mitigate, but it is not that expensive. It is something the industry could pay without really setting itself back that much.
One of his recommended solutions is that bitcoin miners use carbon offsets to lessen the atmospheric damage operations can do. Either way, he believes green energy is a relatively cheap alternative to fossil fuels that many traders and miners can implement without too much trouble.
In the interview, he also discussed taking his crypto exchange – known as FTX – public, saying that he has been approached by several SPACs to do so. Should this occur, his company would be taking a page right out of Coinbase’s book. Two months ago, Coinbase became the first crypto exchange to ever be publicly traded on the Nasdaq. The move sent the price of bitcoin skyrocketing, with the digital asset peaking at roughly $64,000 per unit.
No Plans Yet…Right now, Bankman-Fried comments that there are no specific plans to go public with his firm, though he is open to the idea and further stated:
If we did want to go public via [a] SPAC, I do not think finding the SPAC would be the limiting factor.