🔫 How the Death of Net Neutrality Threatens Cryptocurrencies

What's going on: The war to protect net neutrality in the USA is nearing it's end and it seems that the bad guys are winning. The FCC repealed the net neutrality rules established under the Obama administration. While this may not be the end, it doesn't look good for everyone who wants the internet to remain accessible to everyone, without paying your ISP to just see visit certain sites and use services.

These are bad news for anyone except lobbyists in the telecommunications industry, who want to finally make more money on exploding traffic and want to capitalize on the popularity of streaming services like Netflix or Spotify.

But what has all this to do with crypto? Well, it's pretty simple: While Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin etc. are in fact decentralized, people need to go to certain websites to buy or sell these cryptocurrencies. This is the crucial weak point: What happens when an ISP like Comcast, Time Warner or AT&T decides that access to the most popular exchange, Coinbase.com, is throttled, you have to pay extra to visit it or they block it entirely?

The end of net neutrality could also have sever effects on crypto mining, because ISPs could charge extra for running nodes or block them. This is by the way something that already happened with peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent.

Why should I care: The war over net neutrality is not over yet, but the free internet took a huge blow. If it really turns out the way it looks like now, then we could see similar legislation in Europe and other regions as well.

Because the US, like it or not, is as influential in shaping global policy as any country in the world. As the largest consumer of retail goods, it's not likely that China for example would let Bitcoin get in the way of peddling Huawei and Xiaomi products to a potential customer base of 300-plus million.

Source: motherboard.com, thenextweb.com
GIF: giphy.com

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