Plattsburgh, New York has imposed an 18-month moratorium on Bitcoin mining

Basically the city gives extremely cheap power to factories and other industrial enterprises in exchange for them hiring employees and generating revenue for the city. This was written overly broad, miners moved in and took advantage of it, and now the city is realizing their mistake and temporarily changing the wording of the law while they determine how to fix it long-term. Existing operations are not impacted, just new ones.

I think the disagreement here is the headline is just super shitty. They didn't ban bitcoin mining, they stopped subsidizing extremely cheap electricity for commercial bitcoin mining operations. Big difference.

Its not a ban, its not the first time a city has temporarily refused to issue new cryptocurrency mining permits, its not on Bitcoin specifically and the city is Plattsburg, NY. Every word in this headline is misleading or wrong except the word 'passed'.

Better headline is right from the same article: 'Plattsburgh, New York has imposed an 18-month moratorium on Bitcoin mining to prevent miners from using all the city’s cheap electricity.'

The city couldn't supply enough electricity at a certain type of discounted rate so they will refuse any new permits for any cryptocurrency mining operations until they find an approach that works without driving electricity prices up during periods of high demand. There have been temporarily restricted new permits in the NW for some time now as new substations were being brought online.

I didn't know there would be places where you could be assumed to request a mining permit? What's it to anyone else what you're doing with your computers? And why would you even tell anyone?

I wonder if the mining permit applies even if you have your own solar farm to run your machines? If not, then why call it a mining permit and not "permission to buy huge amounts of electricity"?

But also electricity should be neutral just as internet should be net-neutral. It should be so that you buy electricity and then do whatever you want with it. If this causes problems it's more than fair for the city or the power company to charge progressively as a function of usage until it doesn't make any economic sense to buy more. If each 10kWh costs more than the previous 10kWh it will set some natural limits and if someone still wants that electricity badly they would be paying enough so that the power company can buy that expensive power from other networks.

It seems to me that a lot of problems were solved backwards there.

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16498776

Gives you a sense of what the mayor was thinking in the weeks leading up to this. (And makes you wonder if the NY Times reporter's prodding is what got them around to actually banning it.)

Also shouldn't the law be written to specify any electricity usage over a certain wattage? I don't know anything about Plattsburg, NY but why would a local factory that uses 100 megawatts be more "allowed" to use electricity than a bitcoin miner?

What if the bitcoin miner (or any high-wattage business) sets up their own 1 MW solar array?

If the city has power deals that is bad for itself, why punish its residents with a law like this?