US City of Salamanca Bans Crypto Mining in the Area of its Utility

Salamanca, a small city in upstate New York, has imposed a moratorium on the mining of cryptocurrency, using the electricity supplied by the town’s utility provider in the area.

According to a publication of the local news outlet The Salamanca Press, the city council unanimously voted last week to ban any crypto mining operations. The goal of the measure is to prevent “people of using up all the residents’ power and effectively make all of them get a price increase on their utility bills because somebody else is using up all the cheap power”, according to the council member Timothy Flanigan.

The moratorium applies to all cryptocurrency mining operations in Salamanca’s “electric service area”, which includes the towns of Great Valley and Salamanca.

Flanigan, who is a member of the city’s Board of Public Utilities (BPU) commission, said that BPU does not yet have regulations to deal with crypto mining requests and the temporary measure will buy the city time to figure out how to deal with the problem.

According to the new city law, anyone, including a person, corporation or other entity, who is caught violating the moratorium, may be penalized.

Salamanca is yet another US town that imposes a moratorium on crypto mining operations. Several weeks ago, Franklin, a city in the state of Washington imposed similar measures.

At the same time, in Canada restrictions were imposed on a provincial scale, with the province of Quebec imposing higher tariffs for the cryptocurrency mining companies who want to work there and demanding that they open new jobs for its residents.