Almost 40 years ago Carl Sagan warned us about increasing coal usage by other countries
He starts discussing other countries around 14:30 and mentions China using increasing amounts of coal around 15m
China now emits almost twice as much greenhouse gas as the United States.
What Sagan predicted 40 years ago came true. “Even if the United States and Russia…”
We’ve essentially squandered half a century.
China has over four times the population of the US.
edit: i.e. comparing China to the US is like comparing the US to Germany or France. We're polluting twice as much, and a good amount of the pollution in China is for exporting to us.
However, as Carl Sagan warned, China had huge coal reserves and they put them to use.
Other countries are doing the same , of course.
Hence global coal usage for power generation is at records.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str...
Want to consume resources with a website that tells knock-knock jokes? Have a great time! Just make sure to pay your hosting bill. Want to host it on 10,000 servers? Again, have a great time. Just know that you'll be paying a ton of money for that website with no hope of an ROI.
Cryptocurrency is different. The more electricity you burn, the more money you make. I know this first hand - the computer I'm typing this on is running gminer to mine ETH on flexpool.io with my RTX 3070 card. I've mined $2,800 of ETH in the past 10 months.
Something that most people don't understand is that there is a finite amount of ETH that can be mined per day. Hashrate determines the size of the slice of that pie you get. Therefore the incentive is to consume infinite electricity! Of course miners can't do that because mining gear (i.e. GPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, whatever) is hard to purchase and electricity isn't infinite.
But that doesn't stop miners from trying. I know people that do anything they can to acquire GPUs - they have bots combing the Internet, they buy whole systems that have GPUs, rip out the GPU and sell the system, they've signed up for every GPU manufacturer's wait list, they stalk Microcenter, whatever they can do. They seek out areas with cheap or even subsidized electricity and latch onto it like a parasite. It is nothing like anything else you spoke of.
People are only aware cryptocurrencies exist because a handful of people were wily enough to come up with new ways of burning fuel to make money. Once the idea of crypto is encoded into a whitepaper, it's impossible to completely prevent people from reimplementing it themselves. You can make the technology itself illegal but save for completely draconian measures it's impossible to enforce such a thing.
Maybe our standard for what constitutes a good quality of life should have been frozen in time 7 years ago and we all should have just remained oblivious about how to improve that standard at the cost of the environment and our attention span. Along with crypto, we'd also be running a version of YouTube and other services with 7 years worth of research and whitepapers produced by clever people to increase engagement wiped away.
It would also future-proof us against intelligent, visionary actors that see us allocating larger and larger portions of our attention span to their neat little pet project-turned-hulking abomination that average people will never be able to forget the existence of or escape from. I do not believe that there is an upper bound to how much of some org's KPIs that humble people can be driven into contributing to - except the number of hours we can stay awake per day.
If we continue to innovate at this pace, making our products better and more attractive to where they become irresistible, when will the time come when our allocation of free hours or energy usage becomes completely saturated by unnecessarily things that we can no longer detach our attention from?
One could also argue for the banning of video games using the same logic. A relaxing drive to the beach, your wasting energy!
A better solution would be to tax Crypto earnings at a higher rate, and use the tax revenue to build some green energy. I'd imagine Kosovo could become a low cost tech hub , but if you freak out techy expats with strange laws...
I think I'm having trouble reading sarcasm today.
A dmv like government official gets to your home for your scheduled computer search.
> Is this the python binary? You better be ready for a hefty fine.
>> I'm sorry sir! I promise I was only playing around with pytorch and tensorflow! Did you know that they get compiled to much more efficient languages? I'm sure their c++ backends are pre approved!
> Playing? What do you mean by playing? Do you have an energy license for this? Anyways, python is not allowed and this is going to cost you.
>> Most of what I do is c++, don't I get some credits for it?
>Let's see..Is this an old clang compiler? They are 10% less energy efficient but I'm letting you walk with a warning if you update it right now.
>Wait a minute is this an octave binary I see!?! You sir are going to jail
This is actually a theatrical representation of code running in the background of your computer
You don't, which is why I was thinking it had to be sarcasm. That said, it sounds just idealistic enough that someone would blurt it out without thinking.
The other part that is confusing is what's an efficient programming language? The answer is none. It's all about how programmers write their code. Sometimes you're optimizing for performance, but other times you're solving a niche problem.
A hot bath, hosting a joke website, and hosting a search engine all consume magnitude less energy than a crypto farm.
This comment is very out of touch. Energy supplies are limited, even more so in developing countries. Governments everywhere have the responsibility to protect the well being of their people. Even most dictatorships at least try to do that. If crypto farms are hogging so much energy to the point of causing localized blackouts for other people, then most governments will want to put a stop to it. Governments failing to address the basic needs of their population is how you get strongmen in power who will use ruthless means to act on their agenda.
It is not a stretch to imagine that in the not too distant future, somewhere in the world, a cryptominer will be publicly executed in front of a cheering crowd. It's not what I want, but crypto bros have got to stop being so arrogant and self righteous.
I think a lot of people here will be cheering along with you. But alas, we can dream...
The only allowed programming languages should be the energy efficient ones
A government official shall follow you to the shower to make sure your hot bath is not consuming too much energy for too long
Only serious applications are permitted. Websites that mostly involve jokes are a waste of energy. Google searches that are not strictly necessary should be dropped (those Google datacenters consume to much!). Every ounce of energy should be saved
I think this is the endgame for the government having the power to decide what should and should not spend energy. (With some stretches for comedic effect)