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What does the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation mean for open blockchain networks?

That’s the question many are asking themselves ahead of the sweeping new law taking effect next month. Bloomberg gives us the gist:

Under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, companies will be required to completely erase the personal data of any citizen who requests that they do so. For businesses that use blockchain, specifically applications with publicly available data trails such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, truly purging that information could be impossible. “Some blockchains, as currently designed, are incompatible with the GDPR,” says Michèle Finck, a lecturer in EU law at the University of Oxford. EU regulators, she says, will need to decide whether the technology must be barred from the region or reconfigure the new rules to permit an uneasy coexistence.

As provocative as it may be to European regulators, the better conception may be to see the new law as incompatible with the reality of open blockchain networks. That is to say, the GDPR presumes that there will be central intermediaries that can ‘erase’ information, but the world is trending toward ever more decentralized and immutable technologies. While firms may alter their behavior to comply with the new law, decentralized networks are global and unowned and won’t change. The result of the law, then, may be that Europe is closing itself off from the future of the Internet to its detriment.

That said, we’re optimistic that our European friends will come to see that their legitimate privacy concerns are best addressed not through law, but through decentralizing technology itself. Open blockchain networks, cryptocurrency, and general encryption are the backbone of a new more secure and private Internet on which individual have more control over their data, and firms are less incentivized to track and spy on their users.