Swiss council opposes capital Bern’s motion to study BTC mining

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Lawmakers in the Swiss capital of Bern have voted in favor of a directive to study BTC block reward mining with the city’s surplus energy despite the governing council’s opposition.

The city’s Bitcoin Parliamentary Group introduced the motion earlier this year, and after over seven months of debate and amendments, lawmakers in the city’s Grand Council voted 85-46 in its favor.

The motion directs the canton’s government to explore block reward mining and how it can be used to tap into the surplus energy produced by local generators. It asserts that mining can introduce stability to the city’s electricity grid.

One local outlet reports that the motion lists Texas as a model for the city. The U.S. state has become a miners’ haven, attracting some of the world’s largest miners, from Bitmain and Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT) to Marathon Digital (NASDAQ: MARA) and Applied Digital. 

However, it fails to mention that BTC mining has proved problematic in Texas for several reasons. Last month, residents of one county in northern Texas sued Marathon Digital for “intolerably loud noise conditions” from its facilities.

Additionally, miners have flocked to the state due to an agreement with ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, which pays miners to shut down during peak demand periods. However, this arrangement has been under intense criticism in recent months, with lawmakers pushing a motion to cancel it as it disproportionately favors the miners; for instance, Riot Platforms made $13 million by shutting down its mining rigs.

Still, Bern lawmakers believe block reward mining would be a net positive for the city. In their motion, they claimed that miners would create jobs for locals and stabilize the grid. 

But even job creation has been challenged elsewhere. Take Kentucky, for example; the state has been giving tax breaks and other incentives to miners to compete with Texas. However, locals are now up in arms, claiming that while these miners gobble up their electricity, they only provide jobs to a few dozen people while minting millions of dollars for investors abroad.

“A lot of these crypto projects, they’re kind of just, ‘Plug in, you set it and forget it,’” opines Colby Kirk, the president of One East Kentucky, a local development organization. He noted that the miners do not create “substantial long-term employment.”

In Texas, Jackie Sawicky, the founder of a local lobby group against BTC mining, notes, “Even though Texas is number one in Bitcoin mining, [miners] have only created 2,000 permanent full-time jobs in all of Texas. There are 15 million working Texans, and they have only created 2,000 permanent jobs.”

Back in Bern, the governing council has opposed block reward mining, saying the city is already allocating substantial energy to other types of data centers, such as artificial intelligence (AI) facilities. Additionally, the council argued that the city exports its energy to other cities in Switzerland and beyond.

Watch: Untangling Bitcoin mining at the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream