The bill calls for a two-year moratorium on fossil-fueled cryptocurrency mining operations that use proof-of-work (PoW), a particularly energy-hungry method to verify transactions on the blockchain.
It also essentially caps the electrical consumption of existing mining operations at their current levels.
The bill doesn’t stop any operations that run on renewable energy though, nor does it prevent the use of less energy-intensive alternatives to proof-of-work, such as proof-of-stake (PoS), used by many other cryptocurrencies to verify transactions.
The PoW algorithm underpins the industry’s two biggest cryptocurrencies—Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Source: New York Senate Passes Two-Year Bitcoin Mining Moratorium – Decrypt
