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.
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.