The Truth About Bitcoin Mining with Lane Rettig - WBD648

Lane Rettig is a core developer for Spacemesh. In this interview,
we discuss the much-criticised New York Times article that
attacked Bitcoin mining, specifically focusing on its strange
attacks on demand response and the strange use of marginal
emissions accounting. We also talk about the difficulties of
finding truth in a world with misaligned incentives.


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On April 11th, The New York Times (NYT) published a piece of
investigative journalism by Gabriel J.X. Dance entitled “The
Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin”. The piece
stated Bitcoin mines “cash in on electricity — by devouring it,
selling it, even turning it off — and they cause immense
pollution. In many cases, the public pays a price.” As Margot
Paez stated in a brilliant review of the article for the Bitcoin
Policy Institute, The NYT’s hit piece is “Absurd”.


The article had been long expected as a number of prominent
people within the community have been interviewed for it. What
transpired was that any pro-Bitcoin information provided had been
ignored. The flip side was the biased representation of Bitcoin
mining using flawed analysis, false equivalences, wild
extrapolations and incorrect deductions. It is an exemplar of
confirmation bias writ large, where the conclusions preceded the
investigation.


That Gabriel Dance has no experience of Bitcoin or crypto in any
of his previous work is neither here nor there. Any journalist
worth their salt knows the basic tenets of reporting: a clinical
gathering of evidence, cold interrogation of facts, and an
unbiased and clear interpretation of the results. The NYT put’s
it best in its mission statement: "seek the truth & help
people understand the world".


So, what has happened? A commissioning editor would have signed
this off following a modicum of independent fact checking. That
it has been published whilst being riven with distortions and
mistruths suggests either a corruption of the journalistic
practices at The NYT or that their internal systems have been
stripped to the bone and the drive for clickbait trumps
everything else. Either way, we have a problem, as mainstream
fake information spreads like a virus.