Elon Musk, Michael Saylor Announce Bitcoin Mining Council

Elon Musk and Michael Saylor attended a private meeting with North American bitcoin miners to propel renewable energy use.

Influential CEOs Elon Musk and Michael Saylor have announced that they held a closed meeting with Bitcoin mining firms based in North America that plan to launch a group called the Bitcoin Mining Council which will provide transparency around the types of energy used in the practice and propel it toward more renewable sources.

“Yesterday I was pleased to host a meeting between Elon Musk and the leading Bitcoin miners in North America,” tweeted Saylor, CEO of software intelligence firm MicroStrategy and a strong proponent of Bitcoin. “The miners have agreed to form the Bitcoin Mining Council to promote energy usage transparency and accelerate sustainability initiatives worldwide.”

Saylor added that executives from Argo Blockchain, Blockap, Core Scientific, Galaxy Digital, Hive Blockchain, Hut 8 Mining, Marathon Digital Holdings and Riot Blockchain were in attendance and agreed to form a group that would standardize energy reporting; pursue environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) goals; and grow the marketplace.

“Spoke with North American Bitcoin miners,” Musk tweeted shortly before. “They committed to publish current and planned renewable usage and to ask miners [worldwide] to do so. Potentially promising.”

Musk reignited an old debate about Bitcoin’s energy consumption earlier this month when he announced that his electric vehicle company Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin payments over concerns “about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions.” However, many in the space believe that Bitcoin is inevitably propelling the energy grid to more renewable sources and point out the fact that its carbon emissions pale in comparison to many other industries’ own.

The decision by Saylor and Musk to hold a closed-door meeting between themselves and an elite group of mining industry leaders reminded many in the space of the infamous New York Agreement forged under similar conditions during Bitcoin’s 2017 SegWit debate.

“The bitcoin mining industry has no obligation to appease Elon Musk and other hysterical hypocrites,” as Great American Mining’s Marty Bent put it. “Bitcoiners should seek objective truth and reject faulty framing from which these hyperical hypocrites want to debate.”