The European Union has no business in Bitcoin mining, whatever operation they might have would be considerably small and not worth mentioning, so who is fool enough to set up a mining pool in EU anyway? what would they gain? tax are higher than the majority of the world, no local clients of interest, exactly nothing.
I understand why would someone start a mining pool in the U.S, because regardless of the regulation, the U.S is the largest mining hub, so being a U.S "made" mining pool would certainly have some advantages at least to the larger corps mining BTC, but in EU, I don't see why.
I understand why would someone start a mining pool in the U.S, because regardless of the regulation, the U.S is the largest mining hub, so being a U.S "made" mining pool would certainly have some advantages at least to the larger corps mining BTC, but in EU, I don't see why.
Yes, I don't think any new pools will be set up in the EU in the future.
But if I'm not mistaken, it seems to me that there are still a few small pools that depend of EU regulation (Nicehash, Mining Dutch, EMCD, but it may have changed since then, I will double check and edit my post if I find something new).
I agree with you, the EU is only symbolic (and still, not even 1% of the total hashrate lol...) but personally it's more the big picture that bothers me: USA + EU impose or will impose KYC on users of pools under their regulation...
What are the news?
Not only Nicehash. We'll soon have mandatory automatic declaration of CEX accounts in the EU, and incomes from mining too (no idea how it is supposed to be done concretely). There's talk of more advanced CEX/tax agencies cooperation, and also this KYC thing to come. Fortunately, we have a few countries with extremely advantageous tax systemes in Europe (Germany, Bulgaria, Croatia, Portugal, Malta), but the screws are being tightened more and more each year. There are two big laws in the pipeline on cryptos, and everyone is pretty pessimistic about their consequences for users.
Oh, that would be pretty light, I hope it stops there, for all I know, they could use the terrorism, Iran, Russia, and Hamas card, which would be pretty devastating to BTC in general, a few weeks ago Binance froze a dozen Palestinians' accounts, the excuse was that they were "related to Hamas", we know who is behind that, there is only one country which has the means of forcing Binance to do that, ya politics sucks, let's hope these governments don't weaponize crypto further for personal gains.
Exactly, and we have good reason not to be overly optimistic.
