Crypto mining is doomed to fail in the face of new environmental legislation

It was only a matter of time until China outlawed bitcoin mining, trading, and other crypto-related businesses. A special exemption is required to do anything with Bitcoin anywhere in the People’s Republic.

The stated goal of the Chinese government’s Bitcoin crackdown is to lessen Bitcoin’s well-documented climate impact. Regardless matter how much of this explanation is true, one thing is certain:

China’s righteous rage at energy-guzzling, carbon-emitting mined cryptocurrencies in the name of the planet’s climate is just the first salvo in an impending global showdown over Bitcoin and other crypto projects that rely on proof-of-work (PoW), the complex crypto security mechanism we call «mining.» This does not appear to be a struggle that cryptocurrency can or will win.

This is a difficult fact to accept for many cryptocurrency enthusiasts who own Bitcoin. Fortunately, there is a useful analogy, and it even goes by the same name: coal mining. Because there are cleaner, cheaper, more efficient, and technologically advanced alternatives to coal, it is on its way out.

Dominik Schiener is a co-founder of the Iota Foundation, a Berlin-based nonprofit organization. He is in charge of the project’s alliances as well as the overall realization of the project’s concept. Iota is a cryptocurrency and distributed ledger system for the Internet of Things. He also took first place in Shanghai’s largest blockchain hackathon. He has been focusing on enabling the machine economy through Iota for the past two years.

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