Lane Rettig is a core developer for Spacemesh. In this interview, we discuss the much-criticised New York Times article that attacked Bitcoin mining, specifically focusing on its strange attacks on demand response and the use of marginal emissions accounting. We also talk about the difficulties of finding truth in a world with misaligned incentives.
TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 Bedford, Football, Bitcoin & Keith Levene 00:12:04 The New York Times & mainstream bias 00:28:37 NYT Bitcoin mining article 00:34:56 Demand response; energy policy; central planning 00:54:21 Bitcoin mining emissions; marginal emissions accounting 01:12:12 Breaking the incentives of journalism; Twitter 01:28:17 Going back to your roots
“All this article serves to do is force you to one side or the other. Either you kind of go into this sceptical about Bitcoin or maybe not knowing much about it and come out of it feeling very strongly that Bitcoin is evil, and Bitcoin miners are evil, and they’re literally killing people… Or you’re on our side of the aisle so to speak, and you roll your eyes and you’re like this is biased and the New York Times is a fucking joke.” — Lane Rettig
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On April 11th, The New York Times (NYT) published a piece of investigative journalism by Gabriel J.X. Dance entitled “The Real-World Costs of the Digital Race for Bitcoin”. The piece stated Bitcoin mines “cash in on electricity — by devouring it, selling it, even turning it off — and they cause immense pollution. In many cases, the public pays a price.” As Margot Paez stated in a brilliant review of the article for the Bitcoin Policy Institute, The NYT’s hit piece is “Absurd”.
The article had been long expected as a number of prominent people within the community have been interviewed for it. What transpired was that any pro-Bitcoin information provided had been ignored. The flip side was the biased representation of Bitcoin mining using flawed analysis, false equivalences, wild extrapolations and incorrect deductions. It is an exemplar of confirmation bias writ large, where the conclusions preceded the investigation.
That Gabriel Dance has no experience of Bitcoin or crypto in any of his previous work is neither here nor there. Any journalist worth their salt knows the basic tenets of reporting: a clinical gathering of evidence, cold interrogation of facts, and an unbiased and clear interpretation of the results. The NYT put’s it best in its mission statement: "seek the truth & help people understand the world".
So, what has happened? A commissioning editor would have signed this off following a modicum of independent fact checking. That it has been published whilst being riven with distortions and mistruths suggests either a corruption of the journalistic practices at The NYT or that their internal systems have been stripped to the bone and the drive for clickbait trumps everything else. Either way, we have a problem, as mainstream fake information spreads like a virus.
