Now if PoW was using 10% of the world power maybe it'd worth it but I just don't see how you can justify such a ban but only apply it to this one thing.
A gaming computer at ~400W, left on 24/7, is 67,200Wh. That assumes you are playing 24/7 - your idle wattage in sleep is < 100W.
If you run your dryer every night of the week for an hour, you are using about 38,400Wh.
You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient single miner node. About 50% less!
Bitcoin is a huge waste of electricity, and it is WAY worse than anything else you listed.
Who will make a decision as to what is considered frivolous.
Not to search very far, I consider trucks in US for non-contractor use to be frivolous, but I don't go around telling people those need to be banned.
Governments have this general monopoly on the use of force, which is why they tell you you can't do things like sell heroin. If you disobey them, they will send men with firearms and make you stop.
Governments can obtain their consent in a bunch of different models and lots of people argue about which ones are better.
A "world wide ban on crypto" probably is not going to happen but more and more countries are banning it. I suspect many more will continue.
Still, I will address your comment in good faith.
It is not a checkmate. I am simply just trying to see what world model you have in your head. We clearly disagree, but it does not mean we can't openly discuss those disagreements. It is mostly the beauty of HN. If you present a logical argument, I might simply say, it makes sense. Right now I am confused.
Are you officially arguing government is the one to say as to whether technology is banned? If so, which government speaks for humanity as a whole?
<<This is the equivalent of screaming you're a sovereign citizen when the police ask for your name.
Is it? Can you elaborate a little bit? The analogy seems a little off.
<<Governments have this general monopoly on the use of force, which is why they tell you you can't do things like sell heroin.
Yes. Government monopoly on power has been a well established theory. We are not breaking new ground here. Is crypto heroin in this scenario?
<<If you disobey them, they will send men with firearms and make you stop.
Yes. See above. How does that help your argument?
<<Governments can obtain their consent in a bunch of different models and lots of people argue about which ones are better.
Yes. See above. How does that help your argument?
<<A "world wide ban on crypto" probably is not going to happen but more and more countries are banning it. I suspect many more will continue.
Maybe yes. Maybe not. It is not, however, an argument for or against crypto banning, whether it should be banned or not. It is not an argument at all. At best, it is just a speculation.
The answer is the government.
Governments are restricted to their borders but they do like to cooperate, and so EU may pass a general crypto ban and the EU may even ask the nations it trades with or that want to join to do similar.
But there is no real question that a government may ban something in it's borders.
"Ah, but I can get away with crime sometimes! Thus the government ban doesn't matter!" is the usual response. And sure, some small crime goes unpunished, but in general people don't want to overtly engage in criminal behavior. No business would touch crypto, which harms it's value and use.
Should we ban crypto?
Well, we can explore why countries have. The answer is a mixture of "it makes tax evasion stupidly easy" and "it uses too much power". With parts of the world paying INSANE prices for fuel right now, a lot more governments will latch onto that second line of reasoning. In general, governments detest tax evasion and things which aide it.
We do in fact generally like tax revenue. We like roads and schools and such, and most people are opposed to tax cheats. Nobody particularly cares for high electricity prices or polluters either.
"Well, what about those crypto operations which pay their taxes and are funded by renewables?" Sure, perhaps those are allowed to exist, but that comes with two problems. 1. It dramatically shrinks the mining pool, making sybil attacks easier. 2. It reduces processors which means less businesses will accept crypto.
Crypto already has a strong association with open air drug markets, and for good reason. As legitimate usage declines, the desire to ban a tool used primarily for crime will increase as it should.
Crypto is already being banned and it probably should be banned. If not banned then regulated, but regulation would harm it significantly.
The gov't is supposed to represent the people's will. So are you saying that it is the will of the people to ban crypto? Aka, is crypto something that is causing harm to society, like heroin addiction etc?
Let's go back to the prohibition era - why did the gov't decide to ban alcohol? And why did they re-instate it back afterwards?
I argue that gov't is not an "authority" - they merely execute the ban. The authority lies with the average views of society. Bans on slavery, for example, is only possible because most people slowly came around to disliking it (mostly people who don't benefit from it - while those who do vehemently fought against the banning).
Not to mention, the US forced the anti drug ideology on the rest of the planet through economic coercion
I take issue with the statement "it makes tax evasion stupidly easy". The moment you touch any US-based exchange, your information is up for grabs by a variety of agencies from IRS to various LEOs. It may make doing the deed easy, but it does not really change much. It has been years now since blockchain made it into mainstream. There are companies specializing in selling blockchain insights. Unless we are not talking US. But US has an entire cottage industry devoted to making sure that the wealthy pay as little as possible. I am not sure banning crypto would help here. Killing lawyers and accountants could ( I jest.. it is just a reference to Henry VI ), but that is about it.
<<"it uses too much power"
I find this argument amusing. I am paying for it. If you don't like my use, either raise the price or, well, leave me alone. But therein lies a problem, energy prices are not an equilibrium point and people do not want to give up THEIR toys, but an appropriate scapegoat will let them keep their toys and feel righteous indignation. It is a win/win.
<<The answer is the government.
And this is where it gets fun as correctly noticed. Even without considering the distributed nature of the technology itself ( because there are way to circumvent that as internet splintering has shown ), government these days may, if not will, disagree for a variety of reasons including but not limited to "they are for A, therefore I am for not A", making it a protracted game of whack-a-mole ala piracy, war on drugs and multiple other endeavours governments proved to be so good at. To sum up, you may reasonably argue they have the authority, but do you reasonably think, they will actually pull it off?
Residential miners are using subsidized electricity. We do that so Grandma can afford to be warm and run her dryer.
If we forced miners to use commercial electricity plans then they would in fact pay a whole mess more.
Still, let us say that I accept your argument, some miners actually bought various electricity producing entities. Now what? Are you going to argue they can't use the electricity they generate or are you going to argue that we can then force them out of business some other way. Either undermines some tenets of US society, but I am curious now.
So yeah, you are not wrong about the general framework, but do you think drafting such a law right now would be..hmm.. palatable to the general populace. After all, consent of the governed is a thing.
And as for crypto specifically.. well.. the time to squash it has long passed. There is people with real money in it now. The best you can hope for is regulation.
No typical business is going to work with BTC addresses on the raw. They're going to (and currently) using simple APIs like Coinbase API (https://developers.coinbase.com/) to "implement BTC receipts".
As far as US business is concerned, the typical payment processor for bitcoin is Coinbase. They handle the bitcoint transfer, transaction history, and conversion into USD all at the same time.
Bitcoin works the way it is intended, that is peer to peer payments. Everything else is just ecosystem, which can be replaced. Coinbase is important as an on-ramp for users for now, yes, but their importance to the network is peripheral.
There's your theory, and there's the practice of the internet and business. In theory, they should be the same. In practice, they're different.
I’m talking about Bitcoin, and you better believe I run a fullnode. No provider required. I recommend you run a Bitcoin full Node too, and transact without any 3rd parties!
The users/miners decided, in decentralized fashion by contributing resources. Decentralized!
What does you not liking trucks have to do with the issue of putting limitations on mining crypto?
Just because you don't care about this random issue doesn't invalidate serious concerns other people have.
Also, this is a pretty bad faith argument to say 'who can make these decisions'. We make rules in society all the time. If enough people can be convinced for a particular regulation and the laws of the society allow it, then it'll be implemented.
At the end of the day, trucks are there to illustrate a point that people may not agree what is considered 'good','efficient' or whatever qualifier you want to add. Trucks - those humongous behemoths intended for largely for contractors, but bought people with more money than sense for reasons that are not 'good','efficient' or whatever other qualifier you would want to add to crypto - are largely inefficient for a family unit. Some could easily argue that those should be banned for personal use as their gas-guzzling abilities are a MUCH greater threat to climate change than the entirety of crypto mining operation.
But do I suggest people are mandated to only get one Prius every 5 years? No. Do you know why, because the concerns of the people may be real, but we have not, as a society, yet decided that it is ok for those concerns to override individual choices.
You are right about society. You are wrong about the argument.
[0] Siemens WT47R400: 176 kWh / year for 160 cycles by energy label, 1.4 kWh for a full run.
[1] - https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...
I don't doubt that bitcoin miners use a lot of energy, but I hesitate to trust a source that doesn't know the difference between power and energy. Also, they're lying about the energy consumption of Sweden, which actually uses 645.7 TW/yr as of 2012 [0]. They number they quote is actually the electricity consumption of Sweden [1], which is like 5x lower.
[0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=energy+consumption+of+...
[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=energy+consumption+of+...
This is what i dislike about the argument that PoW should be banned - that it wastes energy that could otherwise have been used for something else. I argue that it is not a waste, because the person who is paying for the energy does not consider it a waste. No one else can make this judgement.
The only weakness of this argument is that some energy sources have externalized the cost of emissions. I would very much like to see an emissions tax to account for it (which makes sense to do, regardless of one's position on PoW).
However, to say it's all a waste is just an emotional argument because you don't like it. That's fine but it's opinion, not objective fact.
I agree with OP though, we're within an order of magnitude of other legit uses, so let people be free. Increase electricity costs or taxes if you want.
I think OP point still stands. This is comparable in term of "waste".
It's absolutely crazy. I know that there's a big lobby behind mining, I absolutely respect what they have being doing protecting Bitcoin i.e. and making the project survive... even if it somehow completely lost it's original purpose. But FFS guys what's the purpose of having cryptocurrencies if the cost of that is aiming to destroy the world, or much more probably, to win a last minute complete cryptocurrency ban from all governments with the handy climate change as an excuse?
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...
PoW is wasteful by design. The more hash power you throw at the network, the more difficult the PoW becomes. Any efficiency gains necessarily have to go towards more hashing, instead of maintaining the same level of work at a lower power draw.
They don't really require more power, they are just getting more valuable so it's been profitable for more people to increase their mining investments. The limit is that they are not infinitely valuable, and if anything mining rewards are decreasing.
I'm also shocked that people do laundry so often. Not sure why people are doing more than one or two loads per week and that's a problem the government could look at tackling (not so much with PoW coins).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco...
[2] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ene_14060901a.pdf
We do about 4 loads per week here. I hope that the newer heat pump based dryers are reliable!
And the fires!
We all want power to be cleanly generated. This demand side bullying needs to stop. Give us clean energy!
But the main difference is that whatever you compare with those blockchains, it will never have the critical flaw: the automatically increasing difficulty. Your dryer doesn't periodically flood the drum to make it harder because more people are interested in tumble drying.
However, market forces guarantee that the difficulty will go up to the point where it's infeasible to add more hashrate, e.g. because it becomes uneconomical or there's simply no more hardware available. PoW workchains must work at maximum inefficiency. (This bears out in the data, too, I think. BTC had its highest hashrate at the beginning of this month, when energy price were at an all-time high and BTC was at the lowest over 12 months)
If I want to use a machine to dry my clothes, I pay for that electricity. This puts a limit on the amount of electricity I can consume to do it.
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.
there will be a new equilibrium - the more electricity you use, the less of it is available, and thus the price would rise to match the demand. This means there's a limit to how much you can earn (unfortunately you wont know this limit until you reach it, because the full demand for crypto is unknown atm).
But high prices of electricity would spur developments in energy production.
In any case, energy use is energy use, regardless of the purpose. As long as the person using it is paying for it, then it is a valid use.
Of course, those taxes will probably just disappear into general tax revenues and wind up paying for other things, but it would encourage crypto miners to pursue green energy sources and, perhaps, find better uses for obsolete graphics cards.
why should crypto be specifically targeted for an energy use tax (ala, a carbon tax but with extra steps), instead of a general tax on energy use (aka, just implement the aforementioned carbon tax)?
I cannot understand how this is not a bigger issue being talked about in the media. Right now in the UK we are going through an energy crisis where people can’t afford to heat their own homes (I’m not blaming crypto for this). It’s absolutely maddening that in a world where climate change and energy scarcity is such an issue this would be a controversial topic.
My dishwasher is rated based on specific cycles, but I'm legally allowed to use it as frivolously as I want. I can run an A+++ rated dryer with a single sock in and send the photo to the police.
We don't limit energy use but inefficiencies. The equivalent in crypto would be to rate hardware by hashes per joule.
Crypto things are different because the incentives are different. I'm incentivised to use my appliances efficiently as the energy cost is just a cost.
On the other hand with PoW, I'm incentivised to mine efficiently but as much as possible because I can buy a thing that turns electricity into cash.
Fine, yes. Ban both.
People are usually opposed to line drying clothes because of aesthetics and feeling like it makes their neighborhood look “poor”. Luckily quite a few states have passed laws making it illegal for landlords or HOAs to ban putting up clotheslines.
https://www.prima.co.uk/fashion-and-beauty/fashion-tips/a269...
Classic whataboutism. First of all your entire comparison makes no sense, you have to compare alternatives for use. What's the alternative to a dryer. Using a line and hanging your clothes. Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? A ventless dryer? Doesn't use substantially less energy. And so forth.
For every conceivable use case there exists alternatives that use orders of magnitude less energy. NFTs, sending money, federated computing, you name it, something already exists.
The only reason blockchain is a thing is because cryptocurrencies are booming in terms of how much they're sold for. The end.
Large swathes of Europe have winters as bad or even worse than New York's. I've grown up in one of those countries and had never seen a home clothes dryer before visiting the US. I've also almost never seen them in London or Berlin where I lived after that and those have at most marginally warmer winters than New York.
I dry my clothes on a line in the winter in New York. It's below zero outside, but like 80 degrees and 0% humidity inside my apartment. Clothes dry fast. (And the space was already being heated, because I live in it, and it's against the law for the landlord to allow the temperature to go below 55 degrees, and they are paranoid, so it's more like 80-90 all winter.)
The heat is on a timer so it's not like this all the time, but I have to wonder what a world where thermostats have been invented would be like.
Electrical resistive heating clothes dryers are an enormous energy hog.
Heat pump water heaters, though, are supposedly much better than resistive.
This is an example of Jevon's paradox, namely that increases in efficiency or quality are offset by increases in demand. It's one of the reasons why we have globally barely made a dent when it comes to the increase of renewables as a total share of energy consumed despite the fact that the capacity has increased pretty much exponentially.
This is made even worse by the fact that green infrastructure itself necessarily often consumes non-green sources, in particular during construction.
That is kinda the main point of a carbon tax... it is to make carbon usage LESS efficient, since you have to pay an extra tax in addition to the cost of the energy itself. Ideally, the money gained from the carbon tax is then redistributed to everyone equally, and that money can then be used for whatever you want.
i dont think that's a good idea - the redistribution does not decrease carbon.
I think the correct carbon tax is the amount of money it takes to fully remove the carbon emitted (at current tech levels). This pot of money is then used to actually remove carbon.
This is not true. Often, renewables aren't available to some locations but abundantly available in others. Other times, some people buy electricity from renewable providers and others don't.
With 50-75% of Bitcoin mining being renewable, one thing is clear - it's helped the adoption of renewables and made them cheaper.
Miners are chasing profit margin so they'll use whatever's cheapest. If that's renewable where some of them are, so be it. And if everyone else start reducing use of coal and that becomes cheap, miners who exploits that to derive higher profit margin will grow faster I imagine.
I would attribute growth and economies of scale that renewables have achieved to renewable proponents, industries, government subsidies and loan prorams. Crypto miners are energy consumers and some of them use renewable energy. But how do we go from there to miners being some kind of force for good in this context?
Any excess capacity spent on crypto currency is waste. It could go to scientific computing projects, it could simply not be used. The chips for the equipment (we are in a global chip shortage) could go to something that actually contributes to the real economy.
We just need to increase carbon taxes at the same rate that renewables become affordable.
We have about a few thousand pressing issues that spur us on to push for renewables as it is, we don't need to waste energy on purpose.
Crypto mining is one of those issues, we don't have a choice. Your argument reduces to "if we had no issues pushing us, we would have enough issues pushing us" which is a contradiction.
Who are you to dictate what someone does with energy they pay for? Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't mean you can ban it if it's not harming you.
There is no evidence that Bitcoin's usage of renewables is preventing others from paying for renewables too.
If everybody is using renewable energy exclusivity for everything, is still wastage. PoW only work by adjusting it's consumption upwards to create scarcity, e.g. one block per 10 minutes. At that point we will be useless solar panels, covering land uselessly, etc, etc. Bitcoin is arbitrary scalable wastage to create arbitrary, artificial scarcity.
The point is: Energy wasted is energy wasted. Bitcoin will eat everything till the point where some external factor prevents further expansion, e.g. how much are we willing to hurt the environment and ourselfs in exchange of the block reward. The person with the highest threshold wins.
It's not really not complicated. This is literally the last scene of the hitchiker, where they plan to kill all trees, so they can use the leaves for currency. The success of bitcoin makes be loose all hope in humanity.
Authoritarianism isn't an ideal outcome.
This is also in keeping with tons of existing regulations: you can't buy a monitor which uses 2,000W because various governments have caps for how inefficient you're allowed to be. That's far from perfect — or sufficient to deal with the climate change crisis — but it's not like it's some sort of unprecedented imposition on personal freedoms to cap inefficiency.
so you made a judgement on what an activity is useful. There's no such objective judgement possible, since usefulness is a subjective matter.
Therefore, pricing carbon correctly (and thus pricing electricity correctly) is the way to provide all parties the full information on cost, and each would decide how best to use their own money to buy energy.
> so you made a judgement on what an activity is useful.
No, I understand how the system works. Bitcoin uses power as a function of the aggregate network capacity — it must to avoid a 51% attack — and that means that the power usage not coupled to the number of transactions being processed: even if Bank of America wasn't already many orders of magnitude cheaper, they wouldn't buy a mainframe they didn't have work for just to stay tied with Wells Fargo. It's the computational equivalent of Luftansa flying all of those thousands of empty flights.
> Therefore, pricing carbon correctly (and thus pricing electricity correctly) is the way to provide all parties the full information on cost, and each would decide how best to use their own money to buy energy.
This would help considerably but it's not enough: we need to radically pivot the global energy system and that will involve things like shifting where major power consumption occurs (e.g. ideally things like blast furnaces or smelters would be located near sources of hydro, geothermal, nuclear, etc. power) and getting everyone to convert to things like EVs en masse.
Unfortunately those decisions take a longer timeframe than shipping a container full of cryptocurrency mining hardware to wherever the current cheapest source of power is. That adds a lot of noise to the pricing signals we need to drive business decisions, especially for major capital expenditures which require years of planning. It doesn't help if, say, Iceland adds 10GW of clean geothermal power but the price stays the same or even goes up because a bunch of miners showed up the week after it went online.
You didn't read or you didn't understand what I said. It's waste because it's designed to create a scarcity. Not by the judgement of anyone of the usefullness. The power bitcoin uses is strictly a function of how much power is available, not what service is provides. Double the number of transaction rate: No change in power usage. Half the price of electricity: Double the power usage. This strange lack of connection between utility and resource usage makes it wastage. It might be hard to grasp, because there is nothing unlike it.
> Maybe we should closely audit your energy usage and ban those activities we find objectionable.
As stated above the energy consumption of bitcoin is not bad because the a decentralised ledger is objectionable, but because it's a controller (in the sense of control theory) tuned to make energy a scare resource. This is a scheme equivalent to poison every aquifer in the world to profit from the scarcity of water. It's doesn't matter if scarcity of water is useful for some apparatus, or if the task the apparatus performs is objectionable. If you want to monitor my non bitcoin energy-usage demonstrates you didn't understand is difference between utilisation of water for the sake of using it and for the sake of wasting it. Usage can be made more efficient, and new resources can cure a lack of water. In the case of wastage the wastage can by definion not become more efficient and new resources will not make it last any longer, but simply call for an increase the rate of poisoning.
Even if bitcoin had any use case besides randomware, which it doesn't, even if it did solve every problem the financial world had, it would see be wasteful. While most other technology becomes more efficient with further use cases, PoW becomes more wastefull, for reasons state above. The only way to make it more efficient is to make energy less aviable to humanity, as such are the perverse incentives of this scheme.
IMO this is the strongest case for a carbon tax - it respects individual freedom.
You want to cruise in your diesel-sucking massive launch? You want to take your personal 747 out for a joy ride to the Bahamas?
Fill your boots, do what you want without any guilt - your environmental impact has been offset by your higher fuel bills.
Proof-of-waste systems like Bitcoin are uniquely inefficient due to the way the network adjusts to increase the difficulty — an aluminum smelter uses a ton of power but they don't build new ones in excess of market demand for aluminum — and they're easy to ship around the world. That means that demand always goes up and any time some place has cheaper power for a non-trivial period of time someone will probably ship a bunch of mining hardware there.
This is a problem because right now we need the entire global economy to electrify as soon as possible. That means things like industrial processes need to be relocated to cheap sources of clean electricity because you can't just plunk a coal power plant next door, etc. and there are also challenges with peak power demand requiring upgrades to electrical grids or other equipment. Having so much power dedicated to something which has never found a useful purpose is a source of friction we don't have time for.
A member in a democratic society that doesn't give you a fundamental right to mine bitcoins.
> Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't mean you can ban it if it's not harming you.
Believe it or not, this is not how society works.
> Believe it or not, this is not how society works.
and yet, we are now unbanning a lot of activities that some people dislike - such as smoking pot. the OP's point is that not everyone is in consensus about the energy use of PoW being a waste.
A pigovian tax by insurance would work better, I definitely think environmental protection is needed but politicians will just use the money they get in nefarious ways.
Collection can be simple too. Charge at major sources like coal mines and oil wells, and the fee gets rolled into the prices of everything downstream.
There are a lot of regulatory burden when trying to make a financial service. KYC, anti money laundering, reporting, privacy, data storage etc. There is basically none (that is enforced anyway) with crypto. That's the only reason it got traction. The technology is terrible. It's hard to come up with something more inefficient, expensive and hard to use. The one and only reason it's used for anything is that it evades regulatory burden.
It's literally "let's burn a lot of coal to run our steam powered car because steam powered cars are not subject to traffic laws" kind of situation. Fix and enforce the law and the steam car disappears. The same will happen to cryptocurrency.
This story reminds me of an urban legend that the Sony Playstation 2 consoles almost hit a snag on an export ban because of "potential military applications". Different era, different context I suppose.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about...
Edit:
Commercial aviation makes up 918 million metric tons of carbon.
Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons.
Most transactions don’t need a decentralized trust-less value transfer. But bitcoin is not only attempting to displace the small sliver of transactions that DO need trustless/decentralized
Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers, and have to trust the seller (who stands to gain if they can trick me) instead of now where i trust the bank and the conveyancers instead.
Cryptocurrencies support escrow transactions, where a mutually-trusted third party (e.g. an arbitrator) can decide whether the transaction should go forward if buyer and seller disagree. This is still "trustless" compared to other systems because it only depends on mutual trust wrt. each individual transaction, not on a pre-defined central authority.
I’m not saying blockchain is useless - just i see no use for it when it comes to the way that 99% of americans buy their house - and if 99% of americans switch to btc for this kind of transaction the carbon cost would be massive.
Proof of Work Blockchains use the same energy whether there are any transactions or not. The idea that your participation or lack thereof deters demand in protest of the carbon footprint is just … wrong. Inaccurate.
its mind boggling… I would say more but I’m reserving my thoughts in case you have a rationale that is more convincing
This is an attack on general purpose computing. You cannot tell people what they can and can’t do with their machines.
You can try, but the smart ones will tell you to go f yourself.
Deal with the supply side costs, and let people do whatever math they like.
The analogy would be you telling people they have to drink that water a certain way and banned from drinking it the way they want. That’s fascism.
Everybody that wants to ban PoW is an authoritarian fascist. Might be an eco fascist, might be a boot licking state loving fascist… still a fascist.
No one is banned from drinking poisoned water. What is banned is poisoning other people's water. Really, this isn't that difficult.
If you want to make a point about supply, please make a point about supply instead of just repeating the word randomly.
People get upset when you want to ban things because it’s a bully move. The bully thinks their opinion is true and correct and others must succumb to their will.
People don't get upset when we outlaw things because the rule of law is a great thing in general. People enjoy not getting mugged or having their water supply poisoned. Please tell me how a ban on poisoning the water supply is "bullying".
And this isn't a slippery slope argument, we are now at the point where irresponsible care for our climate is translating into actual lives lost.
Also, this is a perfect example of calling something "fascist" that categorically does not fit the definition of fascist. Fascism requires you to believe that one arbitrary group of people is superior to another, and that the govt/legislation should reflect this.
I don't want to restate everything I said above (which you definitely need to reread before you even consider responding to me), I just want you to see that you are a walking meme and should take a moment to reassess.
In fact, estimates peg Bitcoin's use of renewable energy to be between 50-75%. This is a fact lost on HN, which hates crypto at all costs.
And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it.
And my emissions are offset for the fee that I pay.
Carbon credits, more planted trees, whatever. My net impact is likely lower than anyone that doesn't pay for renewables, even with mining.
> And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it
For PoW, it's the purest form of currency - the value of energy itself.
For other currencies, it's no different than precious metals.
Trust HN to call decentralized technologies enabling pseudonymity/anonymity scams on one hand while advocating for decentralized technologies enabling pseudonymity/anonymity on the other hand.
Also, from my perspective, you should stop eating meat. Your eating of meat provides you nothing but selfish pleasure while causing a ton of carbon emissions - and actual tangible suffering on scales never before seen on this planet. The magnitude of suffering caused is tens billions of times worse than crypto. Let's ban meat first.
You might want to revise your argument if you're not going to acknowledge the fact that meat has a good number of calories per kg.
And banning crypto mining is impossible. It's arbitrary math. You can't ban a computer from doing arbitrary math. At best you could discourage businesses taking crypto as payment, but even then people can operate 100% in crypto and avoid any regulations.
Is it worse than, let's say, Christmas in this regard?
The design of Bitcoin ensures that does _not_ happen there, and it's currently using a massive amount of power to process a tiny fraction of the total economy, especially after you account for the transactions which are not linked to real economic value (money laundering, wash trading, etc.). The design ensures that if someone did find a useful application which saw popular adoption, usage would need to be many orders of magnitude higher than it is now.
That's not how it works. It just means that instead of everyone using 10% renewable energy you use 100% and 9 other people use 0%.