While Vancouver’s City Council has handed a movement to discover changing into a ‘bitcoin-friendly metropolis’, British Columbia nonetheless has a province-wide ban on mining BTC till December 2025.
B.C.’s bitcoin mining ban started in December 2022 to deal with vitality considerations, and it confronted a authorized problem from Conifex Timber, which the B.C. Supreme Court upheld in early 2024, citing the coverage’s reasonableness and alignment with public utility rules.
BC Hydro, the most important electrical energy utility within the province, depends closely on hydroelectric energy, which generates over 90% of its electrical energy.
Vancouver’s movement – launched to the council by Mayor Ken Sim – focuses on bitcoin’s monetary advantages and mentions the advantages of bitcoin mining, however it might probably’t affect mining due to electrical energy regulation and BC Hydro’s operations fall beneath provincial jurisdiction.
“The Province still has a ban on cryptocurrency mining and is continuing its work towards a permanent cryptocurrency mining policy,” a spokesperson for BC Hydro stated.
Earlier this 12 months, B.C.’s legislature handed an up to date model of the Energy Statutes Amendment Act, which was first drafted following B.C. Hydro’s non permanent suspension of bitcoin mining connections to the provincial grid.
The up to date Act particularly allows the provincial authorities to bypass the BC Utilities Commission, the Provincial electrical energy regulator, giving it direct authority to manage electrical energy service particularly for crypto.
Conifex Timber, which had bitcoin mining farms within the province scheduled for connection to the grid, argued in court docket that these circumstances had been “unduly discriminatory and unreasonable,” however finally, a Provincial decide disagreed.
“One question arising out of the move towards regulating electricity with respect to crypto-mining projects is whether the Province could begin to regulate the availability of electricity for other industries in a similar manner,” attorneys at McCarthy Tetrault, a Canadian regulation agency, wrote in a May 2024 put up.
During the controversy over the up to date Act, attorneys from McCarthy Tetrault famous that the chief of the provincial Green Party argued within the legislature that Liquified Natural Gas and rising applied sciences like AI ought to face comparable vitality rules as bitcoin mining as a result of, what the social gathering views as their excessive vitality use and restricted financial advantages.
Local bitcoin mining bans usually are not distinctive. New York State has a moratorium, with an exception for renewable vitality. However, some states, like Arkansas and Montana, have payments that shield bitcoin miners from what they name “discrimination.”
Pennsylvania lately scrapped its mining ban to advance different vitality conservation payments.
