It’s midnight, and a jet-like roar is rumbling up the slopes of Poor House Mountain. Except there are no planes overhead, and the nearest commercial airport is 80 miles away. The sound is coming from a cluster of sheds at the base of the mountain housing a cryptocurrency data center, operated by the San Francisco-based firm PrimeBlock. Twenty-four hours a…
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…