Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has joined his criticism of New York State’s moratorium on carbon-based electricity mining. According to him, authorities should not choose “which specific applications” can consume energy.

“It’s a bad idea for the government to choose which specific applications can use electricity and which can’t. Better to just put a commission on carbon emissions and use some of the revenue to compensate low-income consumers,” he wrote.

On June 3, the New York State Senate approved a two-year moratorium on cryptocurrency mining using electricity generated from carbon sources.

Operating companies or those in the process of obtaining permission to issue digital assets will be able to continue operating. Authorities plan to study the potential environmental impact of Proof-of-Work (PoW) mining over a two-year period.

Earlier, Nick Carter, general partner of Castle Island Ventures and co-founder of Coin Metrics, stated that New York authorities have effectively prohibited data centers from calculating SHA-256 hash functions.

“Will they answer? [республиканские] states and ban domestically produced computers used on pornography, Netflix and Disney? Do you really want to live in a world where the government dictates what is and isn’t acceptable use of electricity?” said.

The initiative was also criticized by New Hampshire US Senate candidate and former Bitcoin Foundation executive Bruce Fenton. According to him, the legislators violated the freedom of expression.

“No government has the right to tell you what software to run. Code is speech,” he wrote.

A similar view was expressed by Bill Barhydt, the founder of the Abra crypto platform.

“By banning SHA-256 (aka PoW mining), New York set fire to existing free speech jurisprudence that is more than 200 years old. The FBI has maintained the ban on strong encryption without backdoors for generations. But the founding fathers knew better. Revolutions require confidential correspondence,” he wrote.

Recall that in June 2022, a group of technologists published an open letter in which they urged the US Congress to resist the lobbying of cryptocurrency industry participants and take action against the emerging sector.