Actually part of the issue is that the bill is worded such that effectively everyone involved in a cryptocurrency (including developers) would be treated as financial brokers and would be subject to all the regulations and tax compliance laws that go with that EXCEPT Proof of Work miners...

The base wording is untenable to a certain extent. The Wyden amendment is a reasonable compromise but the Warner amendment (which is the one with White House support) that came out at the last second includes absolutely everyone in the ecosystem except those that burn extraordinary amounts of power.

So if we look closer we can see that US energy companies will benefit short-term from the fact that miners are excluded from the bill.

The lobbying is strong.

You misunderstand, and should actually read the current amendment. Because it actually bans everything but miners. I.e. the electricity guzzling miners would keep running, but all the software devs trying to transition crypto networks to low resource usage consensus mechanisms would be made illegal.

If you feel that crypto is an environmental disaster, you should be vigorously opposed to the Portman-Warner amendment.

Would it change the effect much to add miners? It seems like this would tank the prospects of most mainstream crypto as is.

Funnily enough, this bill actually does more to quash next-gen green alternatives to bitcoin.

By misrepresenting validators as "brokers", cryptocurrencies such as Nano, which uses six million times less energy per transaction, are effectively outlawed in the US.

Miners, on the other hand, are not penalised by this bill whatsoever.

But the new ammendment explicitly exempts proof of work miners thereby only hindering the green creation of imaginary tokens.

Clean renewable energy is becoming cheaper and more accessible. Miners are already being incentivized because of economics to move to green energy sources up to 50 percent of mining is done with clean energy.

I've never understood this narrative. There is no narrative about other industries like gold mining that also consume exorbitant amounts of power that you could deem useless. If you do not believe in the thesis of a decentralized currency and the freedom it brings it is easy to say things like this.

> Miners are already being incentivized because of economics to move to green energy sources up to 50 percent of mining is done with clean energy.

That green energy could easily be used to take coal-fired plants offline, if it wasn’t being arbitrarily consumed for crypto. Also I seriously doubt that anywhere near 50% of mining is done with clean energy.

Miners don’t care where energy comes from as long as it’s cheap. Energy consumed for one thing is energy that can’t be used for something else.

It almost doesn’t matter which power plant they’re closest to because we have a power grid that ties everything together. This idea of miners being isolated from the grid and consuming clean energy that would otherwise go to waste is pure myth.

> I've never understood this narrative. There is no narrative about other industries like gold mining that also consume exorbitant amounts of power that you could deem useless.

Gold is extremely useful in many industrial processes and many products. It’s not even close to “useless”.

Crypto mining is literally designed to burn power. No other industrial process is literally designed to be inefficient with energy consumption. Nothing compares.

Proof of work is an algorithm that burns power as an input to the algorithm. Miners have to burn power just to continue the existence of the currency, which isn’t comparable to one-time extraction costs of resources.

Worse, proof of work is literally designed to be more inefficient with every new miner while also incentivizing new miners to join. Can you name any other industry that incentivized everyone to do things to make the system less efficient while burning more power all of the time?

> It almost doesn’t matter which power plant they’re closest to because we have a power grid that ties everything together. This idea of miners being isolated from the grid and consuming clean energy that would otherwise go to waste is pure myth.

It's not a myth it's exactly what happens. Stranded power is a real thing and not every country has the same power grid infrastructure that the US has.

As soon as China actually built out a high voltage grid that can make use of some of their stranded power they kicked out the miners, who moved to other areas with near free power.

Sure, miners definitely use up to 50% renewables, especially asian ones. Why wouldn't that green energy be used for something actually useful?

The rest: Cough whataboutism cough

Because it is in a remote location where that much energy isn’t neeedwd for daily use

Why on earth would anyone build a power plant in a remote location where no energy is needed?

so your belief is that China built a bunch of renewable power plants in the middle of nowhere with no demand for them, and generous miners stepped in to use the excess capacity?