Bitcoin mining company Riot Platform recently shared a video claiming that its crypto mining operation has “zero carbon emissions,” and if you think that’s ridiculous, wait until you see how they came to that conclusion.
A video posted on YouTube made the startling claim Twitter (opens in new tab) One that begins with a helmet and hi-vis vest walking through the thin, patchy Texas scrub as he checks the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. “We have lots of plants here,” he says, which is the first obvious lie, because there are very clearly no plants anywhere nearby. “These plants are consuming CO2 and releasing oxygen, which is fantastic. When we measure CO2 here, we’re in the green. CO2 levels are very low here.”
At that point, the man in the helmet says the test is “a great way to establish a baseline,” which will be compared to internal CO2 readings: “If the number doesn’t go up, the mining rigs aren’t emitting CO2.”
This is where I first start to feel confused. Surely the guy in the helmet wouldn’t take his tester into a mining facility and hold it against a bank of rigs to see how much carbon dioxide they’re putting out, because that wouldn’t make sense. It would barely even qualify as intelligent. Yet he does just that.
“Outside, we were at 455 parts per million of CO2,” he says, completely straight-faced, after going indoors. “Inside, we’re at 428 parts per million of CO2. So CO2 levels actually go down a bit by going into this bitcoin mining facility.”
But look! Perhaps you still have doubts. To reinforce his point, the man in the helmet moved to an air-cooled mining facility and conducted another test, finding 452 parts per million of CO2 in the air. More impressively, he conducted another experiment in the extraction zone of mining rigs and got the same result.
“I think the science is conclusive,” says the man in the helmet. “Data shows Bitcoin mining emits no CO2.”
The video is too late to be an April Fool’s gag—it was posted on April 10—and there’s nothing to suggest it’s anything but serious. It is possible that I have fallen victim to Poe’s Law (opens in new tab) Here, the famous Internet proverb states that “without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, a parodic or satirical expression of an extreme opinion may be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of that opinion.” But I can’t shake the feeling that the video was posted gratuitously, not because Riot Platforms believes all that crap, but because it wants to take advantage of viewers who don’t know any better.
The video was shared on the same day that the Riot platform posted a furious response to a New York Times report titled “The Real-World Cost of the Digital Race for Bitcoin (opens in new tab)“Which puts large-scale Bitcoin mining on the power grid and has a negative impact on the environment. Riot Platform Response (opens in new tab) labeled the report as “politically driven” and said it was “full of distortions and outright lies” while making the same ludicrous claims as the video.
“To be clear, our Bitcoin mining operations do not generate any greenhouse gas emissions like any other data center for Facebook, Amazon or Google – yet we are singled out,” Riot Platform said. “Our data center uses electricity from the Texas grid, which is the cleanest and most renewable energy-sourced grid in the United States.
“This reporting appears to be driven by political interests, but we will not detract from our core mission of helping build a global, publicly accessible network for Bitcoin and the supportive, resilient communities in which our operations are based.”
Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time Bitcoin miners have played such silly linguistic stick-and-tricks to defend their dirty pseudo-industry. in a letter (opens in new tab) In a May 2022 filing with the US Environmental Protection Agency, the heads of numerous crypto-mining companies made the same claim, stating that “Bitcoin mining has zero emissions.” That letter at least acknowledged that the emissions were generated “at power generation sources upstream from the datacenter,” but then insisted that someone was going to use that power anyway, so it might as well be crypto miners.
Nick Carter of venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures, one of the top signatories of that letter, told the New York Times that he was playing a “language game” with the EPA because — much like the Riot platform — he felt the bitcoin mining industry was hostile to the power grid. Being unfairly singled out for disgusting, and completely pointless abuse.
But playing these games in a letter to the head of the EPA, who at least theoretically knows better than to read for it, is a far cry from doing so in a statement meant for public consumption, especially when you know exactly what bitcoin is, how it’s made, Nor does most of the public understand how much energy is being used to mine it. It is grossly dishonest at a bare minimum.
Sooner or later, as this ridiculous nonsense gets more attention, I expect Riot Platform to release another statement saying the whole thing was just a joke, Obviously, and that the press is either too stupid to get it, or too ridiculous to appreciate it. My advance reaction: It’s a joke alright, but not the funny kind.