I find it hard to believe that in America you have lawmakers telling individuals that they shouldn't be able to run their business because it "uses too much power". Why lawmakers aren't seeing that they should be creating more power to accommodate the future is beyond me. Do they want to limit competing fiat currencies to have more control over their own USD? Are they simply lazy, uninformed, and don't want to put in the effort when they still have their 6-figure salaries and cozy handshake deals?

Maybe the lawmakers should look at how much power the current financial system uses - from cellphones with NFC capabilities, POS terminals on one end and massive datacenters processing AI algorithms, private wireless communication networks laid out nationally for stock broker/trader access on the other end.

I'm sure the current global payment system uses the same, if not far more energy than bitcoin mining does.