"land of the free" can't even have freedom on electricity usage
The Biden Administration Wants To Create A Registry Of Bitcoin Miners:
https://tftc.io/eia-bitcoin-mining-survey/Quote (tftc)
Upon review, it proves to be one of the more Orwellian things I've seen come out of this Administration. And that's saying a lot. If you dig into the information that the EIA is requesting, it looks as if the EIA is setting out to create a hyper-detailed registry of mining operations in the United States. Getting as granular as to request specific information about mining fleets and hashrate data. And as with any Dystopian edict put forth by a government gone mad with perceived power, the survey starts out with an overt threat.
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Not only does it start with a threat, but it requires that "ALL commercial cryptocurrency mining facilities in the United States" respond. This is utterly insane. Before we opine on the insanity, let's dive into the information the government is expecting the mining industry to fork over.
Miners will be expected to provide information about their companies, where their domiciled, and the addresses of where their operations are located. As well as a point of contact for the EIA.
The companies will also be required to identify whether they are running operations that involve Proof of Stake or Proof of Work consensus mechanisms.
They will then need to tell daddy government how many mining facilities they operate.
After that, they will be expected to disclose the location of their individual operations, including GEOGRAPHIC COORDINATES, and the amount of electricity that was consumed at the facility all together, regardless of whether or not the miner has any control of the electricity that it is not using.
From there they will have to disclose the percentage of the facility's electricity consumption that was used specifically for mining and doxx their electric service provider.
Next up, they will have to somehow come up with the average percentage of all the electricity dedicated to bitcoin mining at different energy suppliers and, again, doxx them.
And last, but certainly not least, miners will be expected to give detailed information about their mining fleets. The EIA wants to know the number of ASICs miners are running at individual facilities, the models of the miners (which will be determined by cross referencing the age of the miner with different model releases), the amount of energy needed to power those mining machines, and the maximum amount of hashrate they produced during the reporting period.
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This is one of the most egregious encroachments on privacy and free markets that I have ever seen. It is so egregious that it is hard not to believe that this survey is anything less than a first step that leads down a path toward an all out attack on the mining industry in the United States. This survey serves as a way for the federal government to tag each individual operation within the country. They are going as far as to demand geographic coordinates from companies.
Funnily enough, the only other country to request information like this from the bitcoin mining industry operating in their borders is Venezuela, and they quickly confiscated operations and began mining for themselves once they knew where all of the miners were located. It would be naive to think that a federal government drunk on debt, losing control of the narrative, desperate for a scapegoat, and cognizant of the threat to its power over the money printer posed by bitcoin's success would not resort to similar tactics.
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If you are an operator in the bitcoin mining industry in the US it is imperative that you ignore this survey and tell the EIA, the Department of Energy, and the current administration to fuck off. Bitcoin miners are law abiding electricity purchasers who are engaging in mutually beneficial economic contracts with power providers who are trying to optimize their revenue streams so that they can profit more and invest in providing more reliable services to their end customers. The continued attempts to discriminate against the bitcoin mining industry should be seen as nothing less than harassment and unconstitutional.
With that being said, this should be and has been expected for many years. What was once a hypothetical "what happens when the government begins creating a registry of miners?" is now a reality and the reaction from the industry will dictate the fate of bitcoin mining in America.
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And for your Statist friends in the mining industry, just highlight the gross lack of cybersecurity the government has when handling data. If you want your corporate secrets like this leaked in a database breach, compliance with this survey would be a good way to leak them. There are numerous examples to point to of govt IT systems being breached and leaked.