Michael Saylor Defends Elon Musk, Bitcoin Mining Council In opposition to Centralization Criticisms

At CoinDesk‘s Consensus convention earlier right this moment, Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor defended the newly shaped Bitcoin Mining Council in opposition to criticisms that it runs counter to the “decentralized” spirit of Bitcoin.

Saylor introduced the council yesterday afternoon, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted about having met with “North American Bitcoin miners” about sustainability; Saylor described it as an “group to standardize power reporting, pursue trade ESG targets, & educate+develop {the marketplace}.”

“ESG” is an investing technique centered round “environmental, social, and governance” issues—it’s a shorthand for sustainability within the company sphere.

Crypto critics have been fast to cry hypocrisy: Saylor and his acolytes wish to say that Bitcoin is all about “decentralization”—that’s, no central governing physique, no oligarchic management over the system. How would consolidating energy over the way forward for the Bitcoin ecosystem sq. with that mission?

Musk himself has criticized Bitcoin for being too centralized, citing an incident the place a single accident in a Chinese language coal mine briefly took out round 30% of the full computing energy behind the worldwide Bitcoin community.

Saylor, who has personally invested tons of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in Bitcoin, didn’t actually tackle these issues past saying that “everyone in that assembly, together with Elon, are passionate believers in decentralization.”

He added that he hopes to wrest management of the Bitcoin narrative from “uninformed events” who do not essentially agree together with his opinion on Bitcoin and the setting.