For a year and a half, the almost 20,000-resident city will not consider new applications for commercial cryptocurrency mining. And if you break the rules, you’ll owe Plattsburgh up to $1,000 for each day you violate the moratorium.

Mining, a process by which individuals or groups get paid in new Bitcoins to run complex mathematical equations on high-powered computers in order to confirm the validity of transactions, has drawn scrutiny from environmentalists who say it’s sucking up too much electricity. Some have estimated that Bitcoin miners will use more power than electric cars in the near term.