By Andrea O’Sullivan | Reason
If you are a government that wants to stop bitcoin, what can you do? Can you make people think it is killing the planet?
Authoritarian governments try. The Chinese Communist Party—ever the tree-huggers—clamped down on cryptocurrency last year in part because of environmental concerns. Russia is entertaining major controls on cryptocurrency because of the supposed threats to financial stability and Mother Earth. Both countries have been major mining centers, so energy usage is a convenient scapegoat to justify doing away with something that is good for the people but bad for the ruling party.
The United States leads the world in bitcoin mining. America absorbed many of the miners who fled the Chinese crackdown. We should expect Russian miners to tag along if their government follows through on these threats.
