Fight over Greenidge miner's legal threats to activists over ‘false' claims

Greenidge has refuted the claims that it is pursuing legal action right now or “preventing anyone from sharing their position.”

Greenidge Generation LLC, an upstate New York-based Bitcoin (BTC) mining firm has reportedly threatened legal action over repeated “demonstrably false” claims from local activists.

Greenidge mines BTC at its gas-fired power plant near the Seneca Lake in Dresden and the firm has been locked in a long-running battle with activists who allege that the firm’s practices are damaging to the local environment.

Activists Yvonne Taylor and Abi Buddington claim that the Greenidge CEO Dale Irwin sent them “threatening” letters in response to their public pushback against the firm. The letters have since been shared publicly and refer to pursuing “all legal remedies available” if the activists continue to “intentionally deceive the public by outright lying about our company’s operations.”

Taylor, the co-founder of the Seneca Lake Guardian environmentalist group, has accused Greenidge of “spewing greenhouse gases and putting millions of gallons of thermal pollution back into the Seneca Lake daily.” Buddington has spoken out against the firm on multiple occasions, questioning its regulatory compliance and environmental impacts.

During an interview with Spectrum News 1’s Capital Tonight on Wednesday, Taylor was questioned on the nature of the legal threats. She claims that Greenidge had threatened to sue them if they didn’t keep “quiet” earlier this month, and suggested that the letters were a part of a scare tactic.

“Despite the fact that this has been extremely destabilizing, I fear for my safety," Taylor told Capital Tonight:

"I fear for my family’s safety. I feel that I am on the side of right and I do have a First Amendment right to freedom of speech."

Greenidge responded to Taylor’s claims, arguing that it’s not pursuing legal action or “preventing anyone from sharing their position.” A Greenidge representative told Cointelegraph:

“If you’ve read the letters they are referring to, you will see that there was absolutely no threat here. We sent respectful requests seeking an end to continued false public statements, across multiple platforms, regarding Greenidge and our team. We provided a detailed, point-by-point response to the inaccurate claims, as we have done in the past.”

Related: New York businesses ask governor to deny permits for crypto mining

In both of the letters addressed to the activists, Greenidge refutes their claims by sharing its own operational data and environmental and regulatory compliance records.