Key facts:
“I do not want the Law to be interpreted as a ban on Bitcoin,” said the deputy rapporteur.
A German bitcoiner called on his followers to put pressure on his MEPs.
The rejection in social networks of a Law that prohibits Bitcoin mining in the countries of the European Union, led Parliament to suspend the vote on the regulatory project. According to the German deputy, Stefan Berger, main rapporteur of the project, he himself requested the cancellation of the act.
As CriptoNoticias reported, the European Parliament would vote next Monday, February 28, on the draft of the bill known as MiCA (Markets in Crypto Assets). It is a regulatory package that a group of parliamentarians has been working on for several months, with the purpose of offering a legal framework for bitcoin exchanges, ICOs (Initial Currency Offerings) and cryptocurrency issuers.
The controversy was unleashed when it became known that the last draft of the bill was amended to include a provision against cryptocurrencies with “environmentally unsustainable consensus mechanisms”. The rule contemplates the prohibition of trading crypto assets that, like Bitcoin, use the proof of work or PoW, for its acronym in English as a consensus mechanism.
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This regulation would imply, not only outlawing bitcoin miningbut of the use of cryptocurrency on regulated platforms in the 27 countries of the European Union. Some bitcoiners used their social networks to alert the community that MiCA it would represent a de facto ban on Bitcoin in Europe.
Patrick Hansen, a German entrepreneur from the DeFi ecosystem (decentralized finance), published a thread of tweets where did a called on his supporters to pressure MEPs to remove the anti-bitcoin provision. “Find out who your MEP is and let them know via email, phone, social media what you think of that amendment before the vote on Monday 28 February,” reads one of the tweets.
Hansen also wrote that professional pressure groups would be in charge of coordinating actions to put pressure on the finance ministries of the member states, in order to make them pronounce on the issue. The initial tweet from the bitcoiner received almost 1,400 likes and was shared close to 700 times.
Rapporteur MP: This is not a Bitcoin ban
The deputy Stefan Berger, who is the president of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament, recognized on Wednesday in statements to a German media outlet that environmental, left-wing and social democratic parliamentary groups “strongly” requested that a ban on Bitcoin mining be included.
However, the parliamentarian answered to Patrick Hansen, also via Twitter, that the regulations It’s not about banning Bitcoin in Europe. “As rapporteur, it is critical to me that the MiCA report is not misconstrued as a de facto ban on Bitcoin,” Berger said, in the same tweet announcing the suspension of the vote.
Berger reported that would urgently resume “the talks and negotiations with parliamentary groups on this issue” to shed light on the PoW issue.
“The discussion about MiCA indicates that individual passages in the draft report can be misconstrued as prohibiting proof-of-work. It would be fatal for the EU Parliament to send the wrong signal with a vote under these circumstances,” the MP tweeted.
