If you're really concerned about any of that, we should start by banning video games. Then Netflix and YouTube.

All those GPUs wasted on rendering Cyberpunk 2077!

All this energy wasted playing Minecraft!

Come to think of it, you should stop reading and commenting on HN. Every minute you unnecessarily keep you laptop powered uses energy and destroys the environment. Do your part to prevent the tragedy, I beg of you!

It's absolutely hilarious to see these arguments made on HN, I don't actually hold much faith in online discourse and clearly the propaganda (by the BBC et al) has _really_ worked.

Yet what about the websites that load over 10MB of JS/other tracking scripts? Globally it probably uses more energy than entire continents! Or at the very least uses 5-10% of battery life that could otherwise be saved.

Let's start by banning > 1MB of tracking related JS/adverts which do far, far, far more damage than Bitcoin.

Sauce: Use a simple web browser on mobile, one with adblock/tracking block and one without, see how fast the device with no adblock reaches 0%, I bet it doesn't take much time at all on the really heavy JS pages.

Lol.

Projects can switch to proof of stake. no mining, people don't lose money, still decentralized.

I specifically pointed out that it's not about banning bitcoin. Make bitcoin a PoS. You can keep trading, you can keep being decentralized.

bitcoin and PoW are separate. bitcoin *can* be updated.

Why so defensive on PoW?

Pos hasn't been proven to work yet. Byzantine generals problem was unsolved for years until Bitcoin.

Not so, RSA signed messages were suggested in 1999: http://pmg.csail.mit.edu/papers/osdi99.pdf

Instead of banning whatever arbitrary thing the government deems to be using too much electricity, you could just tax carbon.

And tax imports from places which don’t tax carbon. Works for physical stuff, doesn’t work for digital stuff.

Depends on the digital stuff. BTC in particular is incredibly traceable. Tax on conversion to fiat if source of BTC is a country that doesn't tax carbon. Any sensible anti money laundering system should be tracking all the relevant information anyway.

> * power usage

> * environmental issues

Might want to take a gander at who is really using all that energy mining Bitcoin: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b...

The environmental impact argument to me seems like more of the same: China wastes energy and pollutes on a massive scale and western countries are the ones getting a stern talking to. Give me a break, it’s a convenient argument, but at the end of the day Bitcoin is a way for regular citizens to (mostly) keep the government’s hands off their wealth.

> Bitcoin is a way for regular citizens to (mostly) keep the government’s hands off their wealth.

What is the evidence for the "regular citizens" claim? Is there data on which social groups are over-/underrepresented in Bitcoin holding compared to non-Bitcoin wealth holding? My guess is that groups low in regular wealth/income are disproportionally low in Bitcoin wealth.

Government activities such as defense, education and infrastructure will still need funding. If some resource A shifts to Bitcoin and, assuming for argument, thereby becomes non-taxable won't some other non-Bitcoin resource B be taxed instead, with no net "hands off" effect?

bitcoin can still work on PoS, we should stop thinking it as a single, unmovable, un-updatable thing.

A switch to PoS like ETH2 is not going to make it lose value, decentralization and might even be an opportunity to go beyond the ridiculous 4-7 transactions/sec limit.

Going beyond the 4-7 transaction/sec would make so that exchanges stop asking you to give up control of the money, thus making it even more decentralized.

I see only positive benefits in switching to Pos. Lose nothing, gain everything

The govt couldnt even ban TikTok and now institutions who pay for their campaigns are balls deep in the industry. Its going nowhere.