Bitcoin was trading at $32,125 when this panel was recorded at Mining Disrupt Miami 2021 on July 20–21, 2021; it stood at $82,531 on October 16, 2026. The question on the card was whether miners should form councils and whether doing so works for or against decentralization. Several of the people on stage belonged to the new Bitcoin Mining Council; Tone Vays came as a node operator to argue the other side.
What the council says it is
Asked to define the council, Jaime Leverton, Board Director of Synteq Digital, took the microphone first and described it as a loose affiliation of miners interested in promoting transparency and education and in talking up the benefits of Bitcoin and of mining. It was open to everybody, she said, and public.
the Bitcoin Mining Council is a loose affiliation. It's a group of miners that have come together with a common understanding
Jaime Leverton · 0:55
Taras Kulyk, Co-Founder & CEO of Synteq Digital, added the numbers: roughly 30 miners from around the world, representing about 33% of global hashrate, which he called statistically significant enough to draw conclusions about the sustainable power mix behind Bitcoin. He repeated Michael Saylor's line that being decentralized does not mean being disorganized.
Tone Vays of KeychainX spoke as a non-miner, node operator and Bitcoin user who had covered the space for seven or eight years. To people like him, he said, the council looked like a path toward strict regulation and standardization.
to people like myself, the Bitcoin Mining Council is a step towards compromising on certain issues that a lot of people in Bitcoin don't really want to compromise on
Tone Vays · 4:41
Privacy and the pressure to join
The moderator asked members what they would change about the launch. Fred Thiel, Chief Executive Officer of MARA Holdings, said he would have preferred to announce it without what he called the "Elon narrative", as a group of miners focused on renewable energy, rather than leaving people to wonder whether the council was responding to Elon or rebutting him. Another panelist said the mission, a loose organization open to all and built on education, transparency and best practices, should have gone out before the sustainability conversation, because the council is meant to be a collective voice for whatever the next FUD cycle brings.
Vays then laid out the privacy worry. The bigger issue was scale: about 30% of miners had joined voluntarily, so what happens at 70%? How much pressure would the council put on the remaining 30% to share information, when some of those miners are mining pools that should not be sharing it? Bitcoin, he said, was meant to be different from Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon on privacy.
One of the concerns is what happens when it's 70% when 70% has voluntarily joined?
Tone Vays · 9:51
One panelist answered that the blockchain is the most transparent way of sharing data there is, that most statistical work uses samples far smaller than 10%, and that nobody has to join: there is no pressure, only a wish to put a narrative about energy use into the marketplace. Another, who said he had stayed away from individual miners' submissions because of a conflict with his work at Core Scientific, said anonymity was top of mind, that a good chunk of the data went directly to Michael Saylor, who anonymized it, and that inbound requests for the list of submitters were being refused. The council, he argued, is not going to influence regulation, which securities regulators are pursuing anyway. A third added that some members submit data without their logo appearing on the site.
Drawing the line at renewable plus nuclear
The moderator asked how the council treats energy that cuts emissions without being renewable, such as mining on vented gas or flared oil in the Permian Basin. One panelist described miners as the energy consumer of last resort, always chasing the lowest-cost reliable power; methane off-gassing works at five or 20 megawatts, he said, but not at 100. Another explained why the data stopped at renewable and nuclear: the more explicit the per-miner data, the easier a leak could be traced back through the power mix, and the council needed a clean line to validate its sustainability claim. A third called it a deliberately blunt first iteration, assembled in seven weeks, leaving site-level efficiencies for individual miners to put in their own disclosures.
Fighting FUD with a common set of facts
Asked what works against energy FUD besides publishing data, Leverton said the value was having the data at everyone's fingertips as a collective, so that members become a decentralized group of ambassadors: whenever she does media she is asked about the council, and that is a chance to share the data. Another panelist offered an old expression.
faith is trust without data, and trust is faith plus data
Panelist · 21:00
FUD, that panelist said, is simply uncertainty, and the answer is certainty and data from enough people saying the same thing; public company miners already disclose their energy mix because investors require it, but a group voice makes FUD harder to spread.
ESG, the fringe and the masses
One panelist raised ESG as a further concern, describing the environmental lobby as a group for whom nothing is ever enough and pointing to politicians talking about shutting coal plants in Puerto Rico. The moderator folded in a similar question about critics such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, who treat any energy use by mining as waste. One panelist answered that 200 gigawatts is lost daily to transmission losses in this country, more than all council members consume. Kulyk said Bitcoin mining uses a tiny fraction of global energy and that the point of the council's data is not to convert the fringe but to reach the masses.
If Bitcoin mining stopped tomorrow, there would be zero impact on the planet whatsoever.
Taras Kulyk · 26:34
Electricity spent on mining, he argued, is not waste but the security of a network holding a trillion dollars of value, and the social and governance boxes are checked too. On institutional money, Leverton said her company had a head of sustainability and was building an ESG framework, yet ESG funds were not allocating to crypto miners and would not be for a while, a timing disconnect.
The contrarian's alternative
Closing, the moderator asked Vays whether anything had eased his concerns. The biggest threats, he said, were theoretical but real: the council becoming an authority figure and gatekeeper for new miners, regulatory capture, and negotiation with environmentalist expectations. He had not been a fan of miners leaving China for the more regulated West, and saw the council as a path toward rules eventually enforced on miners.
the more miners comply, the harder it is for people to trust the Bitcoin network, that it will stay as decentralized as it was
Tone Vays · 34:23
What would sit better with him was not a standing council but a rotating initiative: a company such as MicroStrategy funding a three-month snapshot of the ecosystem, then another company running the next one six months later, so that no organization with permanent members gains an incentive to persist. In reply, one panelist said any new initiative seen as threatening creates fear and doubt, but the council was not seeking more regulation, which only raises miners' costs. Another said nobody had been paid for council work and that no one gets a monetary incentive to join. Leverton closed where she began.
it's the opportunity to have a whole bunch of people with a common set of facts to counteract the tsunami of FUD that is facing our industry
Jaime Leverton · 39:41
There were, she said, no regular meetings, only an agreed quarterly data collection, and a FUD tsunami that, if mishandled, could turn into an existential threat. The session roster also lists Edward Evenson, Head of business development at Braiins.