US energy officials commit to eradicating all data collected from cryptocurrency mining survey.

An agreement has been reached between United States energy officials, the Texas Blockchain Council (TBC), and Bitcoin mining firm Riot Platforms to halt the proposed emergency survey aimed at crypto miners across the country. The U.S. Department of Energy, the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have settled with the TBC and Riot, deciding to cease the collection of information from crypto miners for the three-year emergency survey known as the “EIA-862 Emergency Collection Request.” All previously gathered data from crypto miners will be deleted, and any future data will also be discarded. As a result, the temporary restraining order, which was scheduled to remain in effect until March 8, has been effectively canceled. The court had initially suspended the U.S. energy regulators from collecting data while the lawsuit was ongoing, after the TBC and Riot argued that further data collection would cause irreversible harm. The plaintiffs claimed that the survey could result in non-recoverable compliance costs, the threat of prosecution for non-compliance, and the exposure of proprietary information. The court deemed the estimated completion time of 30 minutes provided by the EIA to be “extremely inaccurate,” a statement that was supported by the TBC and Riot, who asserted that compliance had already taken over 40 hours. However, both parties have agreed that the EIA can issue a new notice to seek public feedback for a period of two months regarding the information it is permitted to collect.