The U.S. state of North Carolina’s Buncombe County plans to enact a moratorium that would force Bitcoin (BTC) miners to halt their operations in the region for one year.
The county’s Board of Commissioners will make the final decision on the issue in a public hearing on May 2.
- If
approved, the board will use this break to develop new standards for
intensive land uses of BTC miners that could harm the environment.
- The
move came shortly after the crypto mining activity in the county faced
controversy from a neighboring county, Cherokee, especially over the
noise.
- The commissioners plan to categorize data centers and crypto-mining facilities separately.
- In
cryptocurrencies based on the proof-of-work (PoW) model like Bitcoin,
computers have to perform complex algorithms to create new coins,
requiring massive amounts of computing power and electricity that could
harm the environment.
- In November last year, New York’s governor Kathy Hochul signed a two-year moratorium on BTC mining operations.
- U.S.-based mining firms make up 37.8% of the Bitcoin network’s global hash rate used to mine new coins.
- Texas is the mining hub of the country, with more than 30 crypto-mining companies within its borders.
