PANews reported on June 5th that according to Bitcoin.com, Alexandre Stachtchenko, the chief strategy officer of French crypto exchange Paymium, warned that the latest draft guidelines from the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) could potentially make Bitcoin illegal in the EU. The draft considers blockchain public keys as personal data and requires their deletion under certain conditions, but the inherent characteristics of blockchain technology make data immutable.
The EDPB explicitly stated that "technical infeasibility cannot be a reason for non-compliance with GDPR" and noted that if fine-grained data deletion is not possible, they might need to "delete the entire blockchain". Stachtchenko criticized this stance as being detached from technical reality and pointed out that anonymization schemes are not recognized by existing regulations. The public consultation period ends on June 9th, and if the draft is passed, Bitcoin might be considered illegal for failing to meet data deletion requirements.
