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Announcement of Bitcoin (BTC) Mining Council worries some crypto proponents

Some crypto proponents say the closed-door meeting that created the new council reminded them of the highly controversial Hong Kong and New York Agreements.

Image by Aaron Olson from Pixabay

Wed, 26 May 2021, 02:22 am UTC

The announcement of the creation of a new Bitcoin Mining Council that will promote the use of renewable energy seemed to have calmed the crypto market with BTC’s price trading between $37,000 and $39,000 lately. However, some crypto investors are worried about how the closed-door meeting would impact the industry in the future.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk first made the announcement in a Twitter post on May 25. “Spoke with North American Bitcoin miners,” Musk tweeted on Tuesday. “They committed to publish current & planned renewable usage & to ask miners WW to do so. Potentially promising”

This was followed by an announcement by MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor. “The miners have agreed to form the Bitcoin Mining Council to promote energy usage transparency & accelerate sustainability initiatives worldwide,” Saylor wrote on Twitter on the same day.

However, the announcement of the council’s creation was met with skepticism by some crypto proponents who viewed the closed-door meeting as shady and reminded them of the controversial Hong Kong and New York Agreements, according to Bitcoin.com. “Closed-door meetings do not typically have any good outcomes in Bitcoin’s history,” wrote Twitter account @documentingbtc.

The Hong Kong Agreement, titled “Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus,” took place on February 21, 2016, and sought to make changes to the Bitcoin protocol to increase the block size to “2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB.” The New York Agreement, dubbed “Bitcoin Scaling Agreement at Consensus 2017,” happened a year later and also sought to increase the block size to 2MB.

With such controversial precedents, miners are naturally cautious and skeptical at what might have transpired during the recent closed-door meeting between Musk, Saylor, and miners such as Argo Blockchain, Blockcap, Core Scientific, Galaxy Digital, Hive Blockchain, Hut8, and Marathon.

Some crypto miners are not happy with Musk and Saylor’s interference and called the announcement a mere publicity stunt while others viewed it as an attempt to throttle back the crypto’s increasing popularity. “’ Dirty energy Bitcoin’ is just Wall Street’s new way to slow bitcoin’s dominance since ‘only criminals use bitcoin’ stopped working,” one Redditor posted.

However, Argo Blockchain CEO Peter Wall gave the assurance that the council won’t tamper with Bitcoin’s system nor would it discriminate between so-called clean and dirty coins. “We’re not talking about Bitcoin code or block size or anything related to changing the nature of Bitcoin,” Wall said, according to Yahoo Finance. “We all love Bitcoin the way it is, as a decentralized, permissionless system.”

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