This is about why Bitcoin is scrutinized while other industries aren’t? For example, a report from 2019 shows that electronic devices on standby in the United States alone consume more electricity than the whole Bitcoin network would in over 3 years. Yet, nobody is talking about their impact on our environment.
It’s probably obvious by now why governments, authoritarians and big fish in finance scrutinise it, because it is coming for their ability to game the system, educating people about a lot of authoritarian-unfriendly subjects and would put them out of business in certain areas. On an individual level they have more power and wealth if they contain/ try to neuter Bitcoin than otherwise.
Simple conflict of interest that doesn’t exist for other industries, who can actually be milked and controlled by the same group of people. I think we would only see a change here when the incentives change, and people no longer accept being gamed by a broken financial system.
What’s more interesting is that regular people with zero actual knowledge about Bitcoin participate in this scrutinisation, which goes against their own interest. Probably because it’s so easy to scrutinise, when it gets falsely depicted as
climate destroying by trusted authorities, used for crimes and speculations and there’s a general push in mainstream culture to scrutinise anything that questions the status quo. They value low-quality misinformation higher just because it’s coming from a place they trust, there’s no verification of anything. It’s easy and trendy to bash it, so people can depict themselves as wannabe critics and climate saviours without actually knowing anything they’re talking about.
With all this in mind, what do you think will be the future of PoW and Bitcoin mining?
1. Do you think it will be banned entirely after scaring people with climate change concerns?
2. Will they find ways to make it harder to mine Bitcoin? More regulation, bigger taxes, regular inspections, overly complicated paperwork, and heavy fines for not complying with CO2 emissions are some of the ways they could penalize entities involved with PoW mining.
3. Do you think the world governments could incentivize those still mining with fossil fuels to transition to clean energy?
4. Or will all this calm down one day, Bitcoin and its POW will be left alone, and world leaders will focus on other, more important things?
Please vote in the poll and share your thoughts and ideas below.
It’s hard to give a general answer, we’ll probably see all four of these in different jurisdictions and changing over time. Mining will be fine.