Power Parasites: Rethinking ESG, Fiduciary Duty, and Transnational Governance in the Age of Crypto Externalities

This dataset accompanies the law review article "Power Parasites: Rethinking ESG, Fiduciary Duty, and Transnational Governance in the Age of Crypto Externalities." The paper investigates the legal, economic, and environmental implications of Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism and the regulatory gaps surrounding crypto-related externalities. Drawing from empirical data and doctrinal analysis, it argues that Bitcoin mining behavior is structurally responsive to speculative incentives, regulatory shocks, protocol-level events, and ESG pressure—none of which are adequately captured by existing commercial, securities, or environmental law frameworks. The dataset includes time-series data on historical electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network (sourced from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index), along with Python scripts to conduct stationarity testing (ADF), structural break analysis (ruptures), and time series forecasting (ARIMA). These tools are used to identify significant inflection points in Bitcoin’s environmental footprint and provide a legal-economic foundation for ESG materiality reform and regulatory harmonization. This record supports scholarly inquiry in the fields of sustainable finance, crypto regulation, environmental law, and fiduciary duty, and provides an empirical base for comparative analysis, doctrinal reform, and policy design. It contributes to growing efforts to integrate environmental accountability into the governance of decentralized financial systems. How to use: Users should download all files, upload them to Google Colab or a Python environment, and execute each .py script using the bash command !python [filename.py] to replicate the empirical analysis featured in the paper.