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Editor’s note: Jake Klein is a Miami-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic and other national media. He was part of the team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for his coverage of the Douglas High School shooting by Marjory Stoneman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel. The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinions on CNN.
CNN
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Miami has spent the past few years in full-blown cryptomania, thanks to bitcoin evangelism by Miami officials.
In the vision of Mayor Francis Suarez, the city’s chief digital currency cheerleader, Miami will one day become the capital of cryptocurrencies.
Two years ago, Miami published the “Bitcoin White Paper”. This is the blueprint for transforming the city into the 21st century. Around the same time, prominent cryptocurrency figures began relocating to the city, and Miami began selling its own digital currency, the Miami Coin.
As the heat grew, cryptocurrency exchanges began placing advertisements on billboards in Miami. Bitcoin ATMs have been installed at nearby gas stations and convenience stores.
And perhaps the most visible symbol that will allow Miami to flex its crypto bragging rights is Miami-Dade County’s naming of the Main Sports Arena, home to the beloved Miami Heat NBA franchise, in March 2021. It was announced that the rights had been sold to FTX. A now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange founded by disgraced crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman Freed.
The partnership, which is less than two years old, came to an unfortunate end last week. On Wednesday, the beleaguered company and the local government of Miami reached an agreement to end the deal and remove the now-discolored FTX logo from the sports venue.
Over the past few months, as the scale of the alleged Bankman-Fried fraud unfolded, some city elders and the business community began to unravel what many of us suspected from the beginning to be simply a horrifying business deal. I scrambled for it. Pleading not guilty, Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to federal fraud charges in court earlier this month in New York.
We now know how Miami’s love of cryptocurrency was a fiasco. The economic losses from last year’s cryptocurrency crash were enormous for the thousands of investors who invested.
My own reservations, however, were not rooted in any particular knowledge that cryptocurrencies would collapse.
My opposition to cryptocurrencies is based on their negative environmental impact. The fact that Miami, considered “the world’s most vulnerable major coastal city,” bets everything on a currency created by climate-destroying technology has always seemed a certain kind of insanity to me. I got
Many people do not realize how a currency that exists largely in the digital space can actually have a devastating impact on our environment. use a large amount of resources. As her Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker wrote in her April 2021 article, “Her global bitcoin mining operations now use the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of all of Sweden. increase.”
Citing data scientist Alex de Vries’ Digiconomist website, Kolbert said, “A single Bitcoin transaction uses as much electricity as an average American household consumes in a month.” I reported. Similar reports can be found in The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN.
Bitcoin mining hardware is on the rise as cryptocurrencies grow in popularity. Between 1 January 2016 and 30 June 2018, four major cryptocurrency mining operations released an estimated 3-15 million tons of carbon dioxide, according to a study in the research journal Nature Sustainability. it was done.
Even China, the world’s biggest polluter, has banned bitcoin mining in 2021, citing its high carbon emissions. ” is entering. Despite this, the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, still the world’s most valuable digital currency, is still enormous.
Last September, a report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy found that U.S. cryptocurrency mining emits as much greenhouse gas emissions as domestic railroads, citing “the energy intensity of the technology used. Depending on the climate, crypto-assets could undermine broader efforts to achieve zero net carbon pollution in line with U.S. climate commitments and targets.”
But despite all this data, Suarez believes it is possible to produce Bitcoin in an environmentally friendly way.
“I would like to dispel some myths, I think – I call them myths – [crypto] The mayor said at the Crypto Conference, a live-streaming event in June 2021, that mining is an environmentally unfriendly activity.
He also argues that South Florida has renewable energy sources, which may eventually motivate cryptocurrency miners to stop contributing to the destruction of the planet. In fact, he argues that because renewable energy sources exist, miners may choose to use them in the future. If only bitcoin miners could be interested in stopping the pursuit of cheap and dirty energy sources, it would be great.
But he’s not wrong. As Bitcoin’s main competitor Ethereum proved last year, it’s entirely possible to mine Bitcoin responsibly. Ethereum, the decentralized global network used to validate billions of dollars in cryptocurrency transactions, completed a system-wide transformation known as the Merge in September.
Essentially, Ethereum has moved to a mining process known as Proof of Stake. This requires significantly less computational power than Bitcoiner’s preferred process, Proof of Work. In doing so, Ethereum appears to have reduced global energy consumption by over 99%.
Some Bitcoin miners say they want to make the industry greener, but the majority are against calls to adopt a proof-of-stake system, fearing it will hurt their profits. resisting. Miami residents, meanwhile, seem to be torn on environmental issues. According to a study conducted by Yale University and George Mason University, they believe local and state officials, including governors, “should do more to deal with global warming.”
But Miami voters helped push a “red wave” to install a Republican supermajority in both houses of the Republican-controlled Florida legislature.
Last November, residents of Miami-Dade County voted for re-election for Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis said he doesn’t consider himself a “climate change denier,” but he doesn’t want to be mistaken for a “climate change advocate.”
And despite all that has happened with digital currencies plummeting in value, Suárez, who is also chairman of the United States Conference of Mayors, remains a bitcoin believer.
Miami-Dade County will once again host the next annual conference, Bitcoin 2023, later this year. Suarez also told a Miami TV station that he continues to receive government salaries in bitcoin, as he has since November 2021.
Some dreams, apparently, die violently.
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