chaintimes.com
According to the CNBC report, most bitcoin miners in the USA are headed to New York, Kentucky, Georgia, and Texas. Within the U.S., 19.9% of bitcoin’s hashrate is in New York, 18.7% in Kentucky, 17.3% is in Georgia, and 14% in Texas, according to Foundry USA, which is the biggest mining pool in North America and the fifth-largest globally.
Environmental concerns of bitcoin mining remains a topic of debate.
Though the dataset only captures a portion of the country’s domestic mining market, it points to nationwide trends that reshape the debate around carbon’s footprint. The report notes that Riot Blockchain, for example, is one of the largest publicly traded mining companies in America, with a huge presence in Texas. They don’t use Foundry, so their hashrate is not accounted for in this dataset – which is part of the reason why Texas’ mining presence is understated. However, many of the states ranking the highest are epicenters of renewable energy. This fact has already begun to recast the narrative among skeptics that bitcoin is bad for the environment.
Major bitcoin mining operations are using renewable energy.
The Foundry dataset shows that the biggest bitcoin mining operations are in some states with the most renewable – a game-changer for the debate around bitcoin’s environmental impact. Because miners at scale compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy, they are incentivized to migrate to the world’s cheapest sources of power – which also tend to be renewable. Take New York, which leads Foundry’s ranking. According to the latest available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a third of its in-state generation comes from renewables.