Fascinating move from the EU parliament that is trying to set up a regulatory framework for crypto money. The critical piece of legislation would be constraints so that these coins...
... shall be subject to minimum environmental sustainability standards and set up and maintain a phased rollout plan to ensure compliance.
Eyk Henning
In layman's terms, this is about the proof of work these technologies use: a long and complex arbitrary calculation distributed in the network that creates a record and a fingerprint of all transactions. On paper, it's highly seductive: your virtual money is not recorded on the servers of a central bank but by millions of anonymous participants to the system. Falsifying your account is nigh impossible, and if you're a libertarian, a Russian oligarch, a drug lord, or a cybercriminal, no one can seize your bitcoins.
But the proof of work concept is also creating an abysmal environmental impact. The Digiconomist's Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index estimated that one Bitcoin transaction requires the equivalent of approximately 53 days of power for the average US household.
Knowing that these crypto moneys serve no purpose at all past sheer speculation, I'm amazed that we're not cracking down on them faster and harder
