What was your reaction to the European Union’s attempt to ban proof of work (PoW) across the EU? https://blockworks.co/eu-committee-votes-down-anti-proof-of-work-clause-in-crypto-bill/
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While I agree with you, I think it's hard to say, especially when we expand the scope to data sovereignty. Data needs to be within a particular location for privacy reasons, but there are still movements around data sovereignty that have occurred in a wide variety of countries. You could argue this is a bit different to some extent, but it still is a restriction on distributed computing nonetheless.
The question is, was it really for environmental purposes or was it meant to be a veiled attempt to control cryptocurrencies by going after something that sounded like a green initiative? You might get some people backing it because of the carbon footprint concerns. I don't know how overblown carbon footprint concerns are and they're probably valid to some extent. But it remains to be seen what the carbon footprint of physical coinage and other money movements are, if we’re to understand whether cryptocurrency is more environmentally damaging than other currencies.
I thought the EU’s attempt to ban proof of work (PoW) was symbolic, because I knew it wouldn’t be successful. You have one of the most distributed ecosystems out there. It does consume a metric ton of power and its consumption is only going to get worse, but for a government body to suddenly say they’re going to stop it is unrealistic. Attempting that is almost like spitting into the wind — it's not going to do anything. Somehow the government will figure out how to block computational GPUs over the internet, but it's a wild thing that's unrealistic.
But could that attempt open the door for potential ramifications down the road around energy use, or fines and sanctions for the people that they can prove are doing this? There was a lot of discussion as to why they wanted to ban PoW in terms of the environmental issues, etc.
I don't think so. China tried to block Bitcoin for years; they shut down factories and seized entire mining farms. But the end result is that it just becomes more distributed. I do think that the Bitcoin hash power is largely concentrated in massive mining farms, so you would see a broader distribution of that and perhaps less efficient mining would continue. But the time to try to do that would've been 10 years ago, and it was still a big joke back then.
The actual intent behind this PoW ban attempt was very fishy. Trying to ban distributed computing in general is futile; we've seen that, over the past 15 years or so, no government has successfully managed to ban social media. A few years ago, we heard about Russia building massive infrastructure for their own version of the internet, so they could be cut off from the rest of the world — what happened there? One way or another, people are still able to connect and communicate with the rest of the world. I am very skeptical of the idea that any government or organization will have the ability to hinder distributed technology in general, not just blockchain or crypto.