Dear Readers,
An unfortunate truth these days in the Bitcoin space is that people are willing to pass judgment against Bitcoin without actually bothering to research it. Case in point, the White House Office of Science and Technology released a report last week that casually proposed that the United States Congress should move to ban the Proof of Work consensus mechanism that Bitcoin relies on because of the amount of energy it uses:
Should these measures prove ineffective at reducing impacts, the Administration should explore executive actions, and Congress might consider legislation, to limit or eliminate the use of high energy intensity consensus mechanisms for crypto-asset mining.
We’ve been here before. The country of China, which at one point was estimated to host over half of the Bitcoin network’s hash rate, outright banned Bitcoin mining within its borders towards the middle of last year. It wasn’t the first attempted ban, and if the United States were to actually try to ban Proof of Work, it probably wouldn’t be the last country to do it.
