Imagine the savings of stopping to allow running arbitrary javascript in advertisements.

I'm making a different argument. We may not like ads, but all sorts of real things happen in the world in order to make ads, and as a consequence of ads. The ad industry is not on a trajectory to turn every last grain of sand into an ad-making machine.

I also made a prediction: It will be banned eventually. Not because I or anyone else doesn't like it, but because it is a disaster in the making. PoW currencies are already a significant drag factor on, for example, ML research. The drag factor is increasing, and it will be felt in more and more industries.

You can only replace so much real economic activity by literal hot air production before it causes an acute crisis.

There's lots of ways to turn electricity into money. Bitcoin is one of the easiest but you're not going to stop climate change or make a reasonably impact on the growing energy demands of civilization by banning it.

Better to focus on replacing all energy production with green sources and taxing polluters rather than trying to ban specific energy uses you don't like.

This seems like a fair solution that could have the same impact - if the pollution tax is high enough and the mining profits are low enough then mining would no longer be profitable. At a minimum it at least makes sure people are "cleaning up after themselves" by paying to mitigate the damage they cause

Exactly, and then its not limited to just bitcoin, but any process that creates pollution (coal power, dirty manufacturing, forest removal, etc).

If pollution stops being free, the market will finally be incentivized to reduce it.

This is totally how I feel, and it's even worse than that - we're still subsidizing fossil fuels, so we're not only NOT taxing the pollution, we're actually helping to make it cheaper for companies to do. I think step 1 should be stopping all the subsidies.

I haven't actually seen the numbers before but this is pretty absurd:

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...

> Globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion (6.3 percent of global GDP) in 2015 and are projected at $5.2 trillion (6.5 percent of GDP) in 2017

> coal and petroleum together account for 85 percent of global subsidies

Absolutely insane. And people sometimes argue that renewables are only viable due to subsidies.

Unfortunately, that won't work. Bitcoin is designed so that material/energy approximately equal in value to mining revenue is wasted. What you waste it on is ultimately irrelevant.

Bitcoin can be designed however it wants, that doesn't magically grant it value.

It's value is only based upon how much value people ascribe to it. And for that, I don't really care how what people ascribe to it, so long as they pay for the pollution they produce in the process.

What else would you make illegal? High fidelity 3d graphics in gaming? It is clearly wasteful and games are hardly any better because of high polygon count, right?

Why would you want that? There isn’t a cheaper centralized system of rendering 3D graphics that uses 1/1000 the energy.

We can handle transactions with quite little energy using traditional means. It’s not pseudonymous or decentralized and it’s not extremely efficient. But compared to Bitcoin it’s a wonder of efficiency.

I wouldn’t take anything off the table when it comes to banning energy use. But rendering in particular seems like a strange choice.

Incandescent bulbs were banned because there was a good alternative. PoW cryptocurrency is the incandescent bulb.

Ok, imagine yourself in Belarus. All traditional means are under government control. How do you fund anti-Lukashemko guerrillas? Cash?

Yes, for example. Or any other way that has worked more or less well throughout history. Few people are buying the “but the dissidents” argument of cryptocurrency. It’s a valid use case in theory but little so far shows that has been a use case.

The thing about Bitcoin is that it’s mature tech now. Whatever promises it has should be materialized now. If it’s to be a currency rather than a store of value and instrument of speculation - it ought to show already. But it doesn’t. It hasn’t materialized. And we shouldn’t be sinking resources into something that is perpetually a few years from being a currency.

> but little so far shows that has been a use case.

How do you think I donate to the anti-Putin opposition every month?!

Oh that settles it then. Definitely in wide use as a currency…

He expects you to mail them a batch of dollars with Fedex of course , lol.

Not using any currency which depends on an internet connection anyway since that makes it rather easy for the government to deprive those rebels of their funding - just block the 'net and jam satellite-borne access methods. I'd fund my guerillas with armaments, food and medical supplies. Gold and silver maybe. No digital currencies for the stated reasons.

And how do much armaments do you have on hand and how do you plan to deliver it to your guerillas?

None, yet, for lack of a cause as well as a guerilla army to fight for it. Should I ever get the urge to find a cause and an army I know I'll go long on tools of war and short on digital currencies. As stated, an SD card full of hitcoins will hit no harder than a card without such a load, i.e. not at all. Any digital currency which relies on an internet connection suffers from this problem.

thing is, you can't fully block internet connectivity in your country. Unless you want to destroy it fast, of course. And if you don't completely block all internet access, people will find ways to send a transaction.

Of course you can block it, what a silly statement. Remember that many of the participants of this forum were alive when the 'net was but a glint in the eye of some future greybeards, things worked just as well/badly as they do now and they can be made to work just as well/badly in a disconnected country. Also realise that the situation we're talking about - a country on the brink of war - has more important issues than whether its inhabitants can get on the 'net. Would such a block inconvenience the populace? Sure it would. Would it cause some of them to riot? Sure it would. Would it cause the country to be destroyed? No way, it wouldn't. Riot police would quickly put an end to those internet riots like they've done to many other riots in many countries. Is it possible to keep network connectivity for the happy few while blocking it for the rest of the country? Yes, even that is possible, have a look at the self-reliant "Juche" [1] paradise of North Korea for an example of such. Assuming that the guerilla financier is not one of those anointed few he'd be sadly out of luck in trying to buy that crate of Kalashnikov's without tangible funds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche

There's a false equivalence here between proof of work consensus and actually doing work. 3D renders aren't done by a bunch of independent render farms in competition with each other where their work is discarded if they aren't the first to produce the render.

Once anything becomes a significant amount of our energy being used, sure. It should be examined and we should see if we can reduce energy consumption.

How would you enforce energy efficiency mandates on blockchains? We do it with fridges, why not with Bitcoin? E.g. a single transaction may not consume more than 100kWh of energy.

Yes. Nationstates very much want to make the proven distributed mechanisms of consensus that allows people to exchange value without their oversite illegal. No significant cryptocurrency has gone proof of stake, and certainly none just starting out. Etherium will never actually switch. Making proof of work illegal would make effective cryptocurrency illegal.

The violent standing armies (and their logistics networks) that protect other international currencies from manipulation and attack use far more energy and do it in very violent, centralized ways.

OOC why don't you expect ETH to switch? It seems like they're moving full steam ahead.

Just like fusion energy is 20 years away, Eth is always a year or two away from switching.