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On January 20, 2022, the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce (the “Committee”) held a hearing on the energy consumption associated with cryptocurrency activity. In announcing the hearing on January 12, 2022, Committee Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Oversight and Investigations Chair Diana DeGette (D-CO) stated: “In just a few short years, cryptocurrency has seen a meteoric rise in popularity. It’s time to understand and address the steep energy and environmental impacts it is having on our communities and our planet.”

By the close of the hearings, committee members received a two-hour lesson about a wide range of topics: blockchain (and its varying types of consensus mechanisms) and its energy impact to the climate; how crypto mining can affect utilities’ management of energy resources and ultimately the price consumers pay for their electricity; how utilities work with energy-intensive miners; and where to strike the balance between green energy goals and the economic development of cryptocurrency. A number of members of the Committee appeared open to preserving the potential innovations and economic growth from blockchain while still improving efficiencies in power usage and achieving growth in renewables.

This is Part I of a two-part post on the issues raised by the Congressional hearing on the energy usage of blockchains. In this part, we will discuss how different blockchain consensus mechanisms impact energy usage and some potential solutions discussed at the hearing. In Part II, we will delve into some ESG considerations now affecting businesses as related to cryptocurrency investments and blockchain usage.

The tide of regulation of cryptocurrency and blockchain could be turning in the United States. Following comments by newly-confirmed Treasury Secretary (and former Federal Reserve Chair) Janet Yellen describing Bitcoin as “inefficient” and “extremely volatile,” the price of the coin dropped 10% in 24 hours. During her confirmation hearings, Yellen…

Late last year, the SEC filed a litigated action in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Ripple Labs Inc. and two of its executive officers (collectively, “Ripple”), alleging that Ripple raised over $1.3 billion in unregistered offerings of the digital asset known as XRP.…

One driver for the first widely adopted cryptocurrency Bitcoin was to create a store of value that existed outside of government control. It is therefore no surprise that attempts to regulate the rapidly developing crypto asset market have required great efforts from regulators and legislators around the world to keep apace.

In this blog, we compare key drivers and results of the regulatory approach being taken in the US and UK. While the U.S. is leading the way on the enforcement of crypto regulations, the UK has taken greater steps in relation to banking approvals. With regard to tax treatment, the position is becoming much clearer in both jurisdictions.

First though, is there even “an” approach within each country?

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin remarked before a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee three weeks ago that “significant new requirements at FinCEN” for cryptocurrencies would be introduced quickly, in response to Senator Maggie Hassan’s (D-NH) question regarding the Treasury Department’s proposed use of budget increases for anti-money laundering (AML) and…

Once purely theoretical, “majority” or “51%” attacks on public blockchains have dealt participants a reality check: The fundamental assumption of Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper (that computing power will remain sufficiently decentralized in blockchain networks that rely on a “proof-of-work” consensus mechanism) can in practice actually be exploited to enable double spending.

“The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes…. If a majority of CPU power is controlled by honest nodes, the honest chain will grow the fastest and outpace any competing chains. To modify a past block, an attacker would have to redo the proof-of-work of the block and all blocks after it and then catch up with and surpass the work of the honest nodes.” – Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

These incidents have provided opportunities for developers of both public and private blockchains, as well as operators of blockchain-based digital asset trading platforms, to learn from the first generation of blockchain deployments.