Hash rate would drop from downsizing operations, bankruptcies and migration. Massive forced selling of rigs and coins would occur.
Price down & hash rate down, a dominant negative narrative against PoW plus the entire BlackRock holdings shifting to PoS bitcoin which is simultaneously being portrayed loudly to the public as the greatest innovation of our time....now that's something that has the potential to leave Bitcoin PoW as relevent as ETC.
Sounds like a fantasy imho,
Practice looks more like this...
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/05/17/bitcoin-mining-appears-to-have-survived-ban-in-china/
What happening in China is a great example of a total ban scenario. It's not the same as carbon regulations. But it does show that without off-grid electricity, mining in China would likely have stayed near 0%.
✅Mining initially dropped to 0%.
✅Mining in china resumed using off-grid electricity.
Citation:
“Access to off-grid electricity and geographically scattered small-scale operations are among the major means used by underground miners to hide their operations from authorities and circumvent the ban," the CCAF said in a statement.
The sudden drop to 0% in July and August followed by a swift increase in the subsequent months suggests mining firms may have been operating covertly
When it went to 0%, the hashrate dipped, then popped, even before Chinese miners came back online...
Carbon regs or not, the block reward forces an incentive that will be sought after.
There would always remain some miners for it, but the accepted "real" bitcoin could change under a climate pandemic cocktail of:
- Steep carbon regulation coordinated across the UN and harsh sanctions against countries that don't comply.
- Forced selling from BTC miners and panic selling from investors.
- The resulting drop in BTC price means miners cannot afford to pay for carbon offsets.
- Large drop in hash rate that doesn't recover quickly due to shortages in renewable energy infrastructure materials, further shaking confidence in the network.
- BlackRock swapping BTC holdings into PoS Bitcoin and declaring it the "real" bitcoin.
- PoS Bitcoin narrative pushed mainstream as the greatest innovation of our time.
