Governor of New Hampshire recommends the Department of Energy to review how Bitcoin mining can help stabilize the electricity grid, build more sustainable generation projects, and lower costs for consumers

https://bit.ly/3QWcQOR report is fascinating and largely comes across as quite progressiveThe Commission heard detailed presentations from a panel of experts with experience with Blockchain mining facilities and how they use energy and interconnect with the electricity networks where they are located. These presentations focused on the “interruptible” demand capacity of Blockchain mining, and suggested that Blockchain mining operations could produce benefits for electricity grids or systems, including renewable energy projects.It highlights the difference between Bitcoin and crypto“I would define decentralization as a technical inability for any one party to perform major changes in the system. In a decentralized system, it’s impossible to change the critical parameters such as monetary policy,”For Tětek, this means there isn’t really any decentralized cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin (BTC). ‘If your favorite cryptocurrency undergoes hard forks regularly and promotes the ability to overhaul its monetary policy, it’s not decentralized,’But if one assumes for the moment that Bitcoin is the only truly decentralized Blockchain operating on the Internet, then what does that mean for the treatment of all of the other Crypto activities, including the claims that “Crypto is unique and therefore should not be subject to the traditional regulatory regimes that apply to traditional centralized financial activities”?It may well be that Blockchain applications in their ideal, fully decentralized, peer-to-peer form represent fundamentally new systems that require an entirely new set of considerations with respect to AML/BSA/KYC rules, but an intermediate, practical question is whether centralized platforms that provide financial services with respect to Crypto-assets are any different, from a policy perspective, than centralized firms that provide financial services with respect to more traditional financial assets, and now including Crypto-assets.New Hampshire policymakers and citizens need to address these questions about the impact of centralization vs. decentralization as they consider future legislative and regulatory policies.It also highlights the risks of unsecure altcoins frequently subject to fraud, hacks and exploitsWhile cryptocurrencies, digital assets, and blockchain technologies represent significant innovations with potential benefits, these technologies also pose significant potential for harm to consumers and offer significant opportunity for criminality. Indeed, as one presenter to the Commission has exhaustively chronicled, in the years since Satoshi Nakamura (sic.) published the original Bitcoin whitepaper, crypto has already been used to steal billions of dollars from the hundreds of millions of people who own cryptocurrencies worldwide via /r/Bitcoin https://bit.ly/3GUd9oH