Bitcoin

Soundside, a daily broadcast program from Seattle’s NPR news station KUOW, breaks it down in this episode. Catch my interview about the energy and environmental costs of Bitcoin mining in the US, and the legal battle that killed the Department of Energy’s survey of miners’ electricity consumption.

Almost eight years after Wright publicly claimed to be the digital currency’s enigmatic inventor, UK Judge James Mellor has said the “overwhelming” evidence is that this isn’t the case. In a post on X Jack Dorsey, one of the backers of the organization that brought the legal challenge against Wright, quoted the judge’s verdict:

That’s the highest it’s been since 2021, before the long, cold crypto winter brought that price crashing down to less than $20,000.

A friendly reminder: the higher that price gets, the more energy Bitcoin mining typically burns through and the greater its greenhouse gas emissions.

The DOE reached a settlement with crypto miners who sued to block data collection. The agency tried to make companies disclose their energy use through an emergency data request. But a federal judge placed a temporary restraining order on it in February, saying the situation probably didn’t warrant emergency authorization. On Friday, the DOE agreed to destroy information it’s already collected. It can start over without emergency authorization, but would have to propose a new survey and give the public 60 days to comment.

Warren has been urging federal agencies to scrutinize energy-hungry Bitcoin mines. But crypto groups secured a temporary pause on the Department of Energy’s survey of their electricity consumption.

“The Department is asking cryptominers to report basic information about their energy usage—like other industries have done for decades—so the public and lawmakers better understand how cryptomining’s electricity use and carbon emissions affect the power grid and environment,” Warren said in a statement to The Verge after the news came out.

Remember when we told you how one guy lost the password to $220 million? Wired reports that hackers have finally figured out how to crack the encrypted IronKey thumbdrive where those Bitcoins are stored.

But get this: the owner doesn’t (yet) want their help. Intriguing!

David Marcus left Facebook in 2021 after the company failed to launch the cryptocurrency project he oversaw. Now he’s back with a startup called Lightspark that wants to make it easy for developers to facilitate payments through the Lighting Network, a layer-two protocol for enabling fast transactions with fractions of Bitcoins.

It’s interesting to see someone of Marcus’s stature (he was the president of PayPal before joining Facebook) launching a crypto company right now, especially one that is focused exclusively on Bitcoin. I’ll have more from my interview with him in Thursday’s edition of Command Line —you can subscribe at the link below to get it in your inbox — and a future episode of Decoder.