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China wants an orderly exit from Bitcoin mining
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoI am personally of the opinion that China swiftly killing off its cryptocurrency mining industry overnight would be to the great benefit of humanity. The sheer amount of electricity it wastes is an environmental disaster.
- vadimberman 9y agoLet alone the psychological damage to the society that any kind of speculation and a flood of "get-rich-fast" schemes incur. Strict measures are not always bad. If China did not handle the SARS epidemic years ago the way they did, things could have been more similar to the Ebola epidemic.
- makomk 9y agoThe likely reason Bitcoin has been taking off in China is because the available traditional investing options for people there are terrible as a result of government meddling. In particular, the whole country's economy is in the middle of a terrifying debt-fuelled bubble in which bank lending has effectively become an arm of the state, leading to a rather terrifying debt-to-GDP ratio and a banking system that may well collapse the moment the growth pauses. Combine that with increasingly strict capital controls that restrict the ability of most people to invest their money outside of China and a lack of trust in the government not to seize less favoured people's businesses for the benefit of insiders, and you have a strong recipe for Bitcoin popularity.
- tbabb 9y agoAgreed. Shutting down participation in the planet's largest pyramid scheme doesn't have a lot of downside.
- isoprophlex 9y agoCan't agree more. Also I am getting pretty sick of the impact crypto trading is having on office conversations. All I hear these days are inane conversations about getting rich quick. Everyone is an expert in technical analysis these days. At best, trading these currencies is a zero-sum game where you take money from others without providing any intrinsic worth to humanity. At worst is a pyramid scheme plain and simple.
- llamataboot 9y agoNaysayers would point out that trading increases liquidity which ostensibly increases the ability of a market to parlay information into value. But I'd be likely to agree with you. While blockchain technology /does/ have a future and will enable forms of socio-economic organization that were previously impossible, it's not there yet, and at the moment we're mostly passing tulips off to the greater fool.
- BoiledCabbage 9y ago> Naysayers would point out that trading increases liquidity which ostensibly increases the ability of a market to parlay information into value. And increasing opioid supplies, increases the ability of the market to efficiently parlay money into an altered mental state. Doesn't mean it's a net positive for society. The "liquidity" argument is such a terrible and simplistic justification for so many things.
- oxide 9y agoTrust me, those opioids would be just as easy to acquire with Amazon Gift Cards, Paypal, Western Union, a bank deposit, you name it pal. If you're trying to stand on some kind of anti-opiate moral ground for why cryptocurrency is evil it's a poor hill to die on.
- walrus1066 9y ago'at the moment we're mostly passing tulips off to the greater fool.' At least tulips have some intrinsic value, I.e. They can be quite pretty!
- tanilama 9y agoAgreed, China's excessive state power can be at least of good use for this case.
- mathattack 9y agoYes. What's it do to the price of Bitcoin though?
- randyrand 9y agoChina getting out of Bitcoin would probably help the currency long term IMO.
- bamboozled 9y agoI don't get winging about mining crypto currency and "wasting power", it's not really a waste, it's proof of work. Besides, we humans waste energy on way worse things than mining Bitcoin. What about running Facebook, the tens of thousands of high end servers running globally just to figure out what useless junk to feed people, in a way that is detrimental to their health. I don't hear many people complaining about that side of it personally and it's a way bigger waste of electricity IMO. The other issue is the fact that electricity is produced using fossil fuels, again, not enough protesting about that issue.
- mehrdadn 9y ago> it's not really a waste, it's proof of work Every kind of waste I can think of is a proof of some kind of work. That doesn't make it a good thing.
- bamboozled 9y agoThe value provide by these systems is trust, which literally requires proof of work to establish. Facebook news feeds don't require proof of work in the same sense.
- Nursie 9y agoThat's not a requirement for trust. It's a requirement for this particular kind of decentralised trust.
- mehrdadn 9y ago> The value provide by these systems is trust, which literally requires proof of work to establish. This is going to go on a tangent but I do not see why proof of work has anything to do with trust. Does your trust in me increase somehow if I give you a string whose hash ends in twenty zeros? i.e. if I subsequently told you I had found a number whose hash ended in thirty zeros but didn't give you the number, would you somehow trust me more than someone else who hadn't shown you proof of work for twenty zeros? Not really. If anything, proof of work is not producing trust, but eliminating it (and the need for it).
- jrsks 9y agoMany newer cryptocurrencies use Proof of Stake vs. Proof of Work. PoS is much more efficient than PoW. https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/118/whats-the-difference-between-proof-of-stake-and-proof-of-work/141#141 https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/118/whats-the-d... So if electricity is the only reason to combat Bitcoin, many other cryptocurrencies should be fine.
- jpatokal 9y agoAs long as there's money to be made, which there undoubtedly is (right now), Bitcoin mining will just move somewhere else. Also, as the Chinese proverb says, the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. Liberal use of the death penalty hasn't solved China's drug problem, a few Politburo decrees aren't going to stop China's Bitcoin mining.
- koonsolo 9y agoI am personally of the opinion that cryptocurrency swiftly killing off the (central) banking industry would be to the great benefit of humanity. The sheer amount of electricity, human energy, infrastructure, material and real estate it wastes is an environmental disaster.
- bamboozled 9y ago100% agree with this, imagine the carbon foot print of all current financial institutions combined.
- mcv 9y agoI have no idea, actually. But bitcoin consumes more energy than a small country (Denmark, I think?), which is quite a lot, yet it's much less useful than all current financial institutions combined. I'm all for shrinking the carbon footprint (or social footprint, even) of banks and other institutions, but I don't think bitcoin can do that.
- dcow 9y agoIt's things like this that really make the west seem backwards. Did you know the average Chinese citizen has more representation in their government than the average US citizen cf. https://aeon.co/ideas/one-way-the-us-and-the-eu-are-less-democratic-than-china https://aeon.co/ideas/one-way-the-us-and-the-eu-are-less-dem...?
- eddieplan9 9y agoComparing China's National People's Congress to the US Congress is ludicrous. The NPC holds one annual session lasting less than 2 weeks, and passes legislations often with 99% Yeas. Every Chinese knows that the NPC is largely a show and holds no real power despite what the constitution says. Wikipedia summarizes it pretty well [1]: > In theory, the NPC is the highest organ of state power in China, and all four PRC constitutions have vested it with great lawmaking powers. However, in practice it usually acts as a rubber stamp for decisions already made by the state's executive organs and the Communist Party of China. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People's_Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People's_Congress
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- squaredpants 9y agoMaybe these operations will incorporate solar + battery storage into their systems if they want to stay alive... Be less efficient and less productive, but be legal, environmentally and socially responsible (sucking this much power from the public system is not responsible), and still profit.
- juicyfroot 9y agoCitibank uses more electricity. Have you seen the electricity foot print for livestock? Going vegetarian would allow us to live longer, cause less methane/co2 release and allow us to do Democratic banking. Bitcoin (Cash) is The most efficient banking system in the world. (Large blocks will scale to trillions of tx/sec)
- coinGuyBri 9y agoNot gonna happen, they just wanted to stop it and get a piece of the pie. Mining will resume in China
- tanilama 9y agoChinese government hates everything it can't control, especially related to money. That is just a fact.
- joe_the_user 9y agoAs to mining farms owned by smaller players, especially those in the mountainous areas of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, simply locating the miners is a near impossible task. A growing number of private owners of hydropower plants in the two regions have begun to operate mining machines themselves as the price of bitcoin has surged, Du Jun, founder of Node Capital, a Beijing-based venture-capital firm focusing on the blockchain industry, told Quartz prior to news of the latest crackdown. “How can you find them?” he asks. Couldn't they be found by looking at their IP address? The Chinese state has tremendous resources. It seems like if tell people to stop mining bitcoins, the vast majority would do so and any minority which didn't would be very vulnerable. Also, it seems like China could stop bitcoin mining by blocking the protocol using the Great Firewall or otherwise filtering bitcoin out.
- ThatPlayer 9y agoMiners find a block and distribute them to the P2P Bitcoin network. Blocks do not carry IP addresses, and everyone running a Bitcoin node contributes to sharing blocks, so you'd have a hard time finding out who is mining just from the IP. If the Chinese miners are using a public mining pool, you may be able to see who is connected to the pool. If they're pool mining, they do not even have to run a Bitcoin node in the first place.
- littlestymaar 9y ago> Miners find a block and distribute them to the P2P Bitcoin network. Blocks do not carry IP addresses You just need to become part of the p2p network by yourself, and log the IP of people you communicate with …
- ThatPlayer 9y agoMiners also do not need to be part of the p2p network. A mining pool for example will distribute the block for you and send you the bitcoins. There's also a tool to send transactions [1] so you do not even have to be part of the network to send/receive transactions. [1] https://insight.bitpay.com/tx/send https://insight.bitpay.com/tx/send - These still require your signing key, so you can use Bitcoin without ever being on the network. It just requires you to trust all the block explorers that you have actually received payment.
- abrkn 9y agoThis is a good time to invest in electricity and facilities in Mongolia > Mongolia hosts 10% of the world's known coal reserves at an estimated 162 billion tonnes in 2011 with 17 operating coal mines
- tanilama 9y agoFun fact: Mongolia buys electricity from China
- jrsks 9y agoMongolia is also investing in renewable energy. For example the solar park in Darkhan and the Salkhit wind farm, but of course these are not closely enough to cover Mongolia's need yet. In the meanwhile the population of Ulaanbaatar has to breathe some of the most toxic air in the world. However, Mongolia seems to be one of the few countries, where Bitcoin mining seems to make sense, because of cheap energy and it's complicated economic situation that makes producing and exporting goods very hard. With Bitcoin they don't have to ask China or Russia for permission to cross the borders.
- MagnumOpus 9y agoIs coal electricity competitive for mining coins? I thought you need to be next to a hydro plant?
- amorphid 9y agoCan they track mining operations down by looking for abnormally high power consumption?