(2) and now look how this EU Action Plan is implemented and preparing the legal justification for a statements, such as:
🔸„States shall implement targeted and proportionate measures to lower, and must be ready to stop, the electricity consumption of crypto-asset miners, in line with the proposed Council Regulation on an emergency intervention to address high energy prices.”
and
🔸„The EC wants to “collaborate internationally with different standardization bodies to develop the energy-efficiency label.”
To make it happen, the European Commission proposed 800 k euros for three announced tender in Sept 2023 to develop „a methodology and sustainability standards to calculate and mitigate the environmental impact of crypto-assets and their consensus mechanisms”:
https://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:577973-2023:TEXT:EN:HTML
The scope of the tender describes :
“there is evidence that crypto-assets can cause significant harm on the climate and environment and generate negative economic and social externalities, depending on the consensus mechanism used to validate transaction” and shows that the EU asserts that Bitcoin mining “could undermine EU's efforts to achieve its climate and sustainability goals, in line with the Paris Agreement.”
(3) As was planed by the EU Commission in 2022, the same approach has also been taken by certain political groups in the European Parliament, and by the EP’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) in its May 2023 study “Remaining regulatory challenges in digital finance and crypto-assets after MiCA” :
“While some crypto models waste energy and are inherently exclusive in nature, others are highly energy efficient and inclusive in that customers with low degrees of financial and technical literacy may participate. For instance, developers claim that the Ethereum Merge, a major software upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain in September 2022, reduced the Ethereum blockchain’s energy usage by 99.95 per cent. At the same time, another upgrade dubbed “the Surge” will reduce costs and enhance speed and system stability. While these upgrades clearly show the potential of technological innovation, the absence of similar upgrades to the Bitcoin blockchain are deeply regrettable.”
As an example have a look at the page 70, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2023/740083/IPOL_STU(2023)740083_EN.pdf
By now the ban of PoW has been pushed in the European Parliament but those, who share the perspective that “the old Bitcoin blockchain” “consumes too much energy”, and is “idiosyncratic to crypto and now dated,” as it was presented in the study requested by the ECON.
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