NYT’s Bitcoin Mining Criticism Was ‘Junk Science,’ Daniel Batten Says

Bitcoin advocate Daniel Batten has once again taken aim at The New York Times for peddling “junk science” in order to prop up its anti-Bitcoin narrative.

“Well, the bitcoin maxis were right (again),” Batten said in a recent social media post.

Flawed methodology

Batten is referring to The New York Times article that was criticizing Bitcoin mining for its excessive energy consumption.

However, as the Bitcoin advocate points out, the methodology that the controversial article relied on is inherently flawed, given that it relied on marginal emission calculations.

Marginal emissions represent extra emissions that are created by consuming an additional unit of electricity.

A recent peer-reviewed study in Nature Climate Change shows that such an approach can actually overestimate the impact of emissions since electricity systems are dynamic.

The study, which uses rooftop solar as an example, shows that emission savings tend to be smaller due to daytime rooftop solar replacing other clean energy sources before fossil fuels.

Batten applies the same logic to Bitcoin. The CO₂ impact of mining Bitcoin is likely to be much smaller, and not every extra MWh consumed by miners is fossil-fuel-heavy.

The outdated methodology does not take into account curtailed renewable generation as well as clean energy investment.