If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd say this was totally planned. News from the US comes out that Congress is considering legislation to ban PoW mining at the same time Ethereum is ready to move to PoS. The United States would benefit greatly from #TheFlippening and popularity moving away from bitcoin. Not only would it be able to destroy mainstream acceptance for the primary threat to dollar supremacy around the world, but it would have plenty of leverage to completely domainate the new crypto token king ETH.
(Fortunately, I don't think BTC will ever lose enough popularity to become useless. The current global financial structure necessitates losers. Those designated losers will always have an incentive to move into another system that gives them more opportunity. Said losers, from individuals to countries, will maintain and grow the bitcoin system regardless of Western behavior. The West can't stop this. Doesn't mean they won't try — you can actually make a lot of money basing a strategy around this incredibly predictable behavior.)
The Ethereum move to PoS means anyone with the most ETH has the ability to validate transactions in the system. Though the entities holding the ETH may seem disparate, if they are all beholden to a similar regulatory system, they are basically a single entity.
The West, led by the US and the Fed, will attempt to consolidate regulation over entities with a lot of ETH. The major exchanges are already basically on board, and Vitalik himself really doesn't have the backbone to pit the Ethereum Foundation against anything the West would do. He's made this attitude clear through numerous tweets that has shown his financial attitudes to basically mirror the status quo.
So there's really not a huge amount of finnagling the status quo has to do to get its way. Basically
1. just don't get in the way of the Merge,
2. seed the idea of bitcoin being persona non grata with saber rattling around legislation and carbon footprint virtue signaling, and
3. slowly enact regulation that affects all large ETH holders under its jurisdiction.
This is the plan of the status quo. What are you going to do about it? Comment below.
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