Legal gambling is a lesser evil. It would be better for society if gambling did not exist, but if we ban it, it will just happen anyway. Gambling is primarily legal to be able to regulate it. Illegal gambling is a major cash cow for organized crime. (Although organized crime has also been known to muscle in on legal gambling)

Your reasoning seems unsound.

It would [let us assume for the sake of argument] be better for society if proof of work systems did not exist. But if we ban it it will just happen anyway.

It would be better for society if murder did not exist but even though we banned it, murder just happens anyway.

The difference is that while legalized gambling is bad, illegal gambling is much worse, it's more predatory where games can be outright rigged, and it's also funding organized crime and has a corrupting effect on society. A politician owing money to a bank is bad. The same owing money to a mob-affiliated loan shark is worse.

Banning this type of activity has historically proven difficult, it's basically the lesson we keep re-learning with the prohibition, the war on drugs and so forth.

> A politician owing money to a bank is bad.

Why?

Speaking primarily in the context of being up to your ears in debt, but because it creates a conflict of interest. Such a person is a lot more susceptible to bribes as a means to get out of their predicament, because they can't afford to tell someone waving a bag of money in front of them to piss off.

Debt is also something foreign intelligence looks for when attempting to recruit spies.

A politician is just another mafia in my eyes. There have been mafias that are not worse than politicians in history. Literally.

I mean... That's not a very strong or interesting statement to make. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of mafias that did less bad than <insert your least favourite dictator here>.

I think the difference is that gambling addictions are real and lotteries and other legal gambling is somewhat of a form of harm reduction by minimalizing externalities like organized crime. There is no recognized cryptocurrency addiction.

> There is no recognized cryptocurrency addiction.

Crypto speculation. Like all speculation is ultimately gambling, which people can get addicted to.

No. The difference is that lottery is a legal monopoly of the state to squeeze you. As long as it is them who do it everything is ok. They do not care, they just make ir look better to have the excuse and a monopoly.

If there was a auditable publicly-viewable record of all lotteries, then it would be practical to simply ban them. As it is, banning them does more harm than good by funding organizations which also commit murder.

Legal gambling funds governments who commit murder

Yes, but governments are much less murdery and much more predictable than the sloppy gangs which are funded by lotteries.

Uh, if I'm reading this right, by this logic we should also make murder legal ??

No, because there wouldn't be much benefit to being able to regulate murder. (Also, I don't really think that that'd really work in terms of public approval.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man If this is your best argument for burning $1 of (subsidized) fossil fuels so you can get $1.05 of crypto you need to reevaluate what you're spending your time on.

It shouldn't be subsidized. That's the real problem.

price of electricity should be doubled after a certain high use. lots of businesses just leave their ac and lights on despite not needing, all because its too cheap.

Yeah, IMHO it makes no sense that they get cheaper power than residential users (well, it does make financial sense for the electric businesses to attract big customers using low prices, but that's not my point) : the cheapest power should be for the poorest citizens (but with limits to maximum power and lack of guarantees for continuous power supply), while the most expensive power should be for the businesses requiring lots of uninterrupted power ! (Note that cryptominers should be able to deal very well with programmed power cuts...)

Even for poor citizens, electricity shouldn't be subsidized. They should get straight up money and decide for themselves if they want to use it for (non-subsidized) electricity or if they can use it more efficiently on something else.

In theory, I agree : it's probably everyone else that should be taxed instead.

The issue here is that at the very bottom you end up with really nasty vicious poverty circles... and now that I think of it, we don't know in advance what kind of combination of minimum low power and low time fraction of guaranteed supply is the best, and how you combine market discovery for that with regulation...

There are many people here with a lot of potentially destructive ideas. How do u know the exact needs of each business? What u would do is to make many go bankrupt just bc of a regulation.

Of course, I know that many of you... as lomg as it is not your own business everything is ok.

If they can only exist when subsidized, we need to decide explicitly whether the business is worth subsidizing. Not keep lots of businesses alive through subsidized electricity while they would otherwise not be profitable.

Agree on this.

Lotteries and Casinos are also heavily regulated

> Why not ban lotteries too? And casinos?

Your terms are acceptable.

Lotteries and casinos don't have massive externalities like crypto does. If running a casino required burning coal 24/7 to produce an absurd amount of energy, creating kilotonnes of CO2 & sulfur dioxide and causing respiratory illnesses, environmental damage, climate change, etc., then it would absolutely be illegal.

Bitcoin mining uses energy, it does not generate it. What needs to be regulated is the dirty ways of producing energy, they should be banned out right. All fossil fuels.

But miners just pay their energy bills like any other citizen. Who are you to tell them what activity should they perform with the energy they purchase?

If you ban fossil energies and nuclear/gas I am not sure from where you are going to take all energy from.

With the current technology it is just impossible.

They aren't like any other citizen, because they use a really, really huge amount of energy. If they did use as little energy as any other citizen, there wouldn't be a problem. If anything, you'd have to compare them to huge companies or something. And those are still significantly different to (and usually more useful to society) cryptominers.

>If anything, you'd have to compare them to huge companies

Sounds like this is a good reason for them to pay lower rates per kwh.

Sure, so compare them with Google if you want (because I guess google's electricity bill for data centers is huge). Now, why would you want to forbid what bitcoin miners do with the energy they purchase while you don't forbid what Google does with the energy they purchase?

Why not two committees and a head of state?