A border town in the north of New York state plans to impose a 90-day moratorium on crypto mining farms while it figures out how to regulate them, reported WWNY-TV.
But it’s not because the miners suck up Massena’s cheap electricity or pollute the environment. Residents of the 12,000-strong town near the Canadian border are worried that the increasing number of crypto miners that have settled near the town are an eyesore.
Town supervisor Steve O’ Shaugnessy told WWNY-TV: “We don’t want Massena to be … littered with these trailers that are pumping out Bitcoin. We just want to make sure if they’re going to come here, that it’s a nice presentable building.”
Massena Electric, the town's utility company, is negotiating with three mining operations and has imposed a moratorium on any other miners.
One of the mining operations, Petawatt Group, bought 140 acres two years ago. Aside from mining, it plans to use some of its stretch of Massena to grow plant proteins for meat substitutes, which would create more jobs, said co-founder Jason Rappaport.
Miners across the US have filled some of the void left by China’s crypto crackdown.
The latest bout of the country's ongoing crackdown started in May but data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance shows that China’s share of the Bitcoin network’s hash rate had already dropped from 75% in September 2019 to 46% by April this year.
Over the same period, the US surged in popularity among miners. America’s share of the Bitcoin hash rate grew more than fourfold, from 4.1% to 16.8%, to become the second-largest hub for Bitcoin mining in the world.