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China says it wants to eliminate Bitcoin mining
- killjoywashere 8y agoBecause they finally realized everyone is using bitcoin to exfiltrate currency?
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoMore like they are using cheap subsidized Chinese power prices for something that they weren’t intended for. It’s more of an environmental play (since a lot of that electricity is produced by dirty coal burning).
- Macross8299 8y agoFunny that they care about the environmental effects when the end result is something they have little control over, less so when it's a state-run or state-affiliated business
- hanniabu 8y agoThey've taken a huge shift to improve their environment. This is initiative is what caused them to stop accepting the world's recycling and causing the massive recycling bubble.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoWhy should China subsidize world bitcoin production with more bad air for them? At least the other stuff they use electricity to produce, like cars, steel, and rubber dog poop, has a tangible value.
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoIt makes sense to me. They believe their control is an important part of the country’s economic development. They’re willing to sacrifice the environment when they believe the benefits outweigh the concerns, but they trust their own plans more than that of individual actors. Not saying it’s right, but it’s consistent with their outlook on politics and government.
- sharperguy 8y agoI'd say it's more a consequence of subsidizing a highly versatile good. It must be continually regulated to ensure the subsidies aren't exploited for something that was outside the original intention. Sadly the increased regulation also reduces individual choice in favor of the governments vision of what's best for the nation.
- jcfrei 8y agoThis is clearly the main motivation. If the CPC was so serious about curbing emissions they would put a high environmental tax on coal power plants and the bitcoin mining would quickly wind down as a result of higher electricity prices. The CPC requires a firm grip on monetary policy (and capital flows) in order to stay in power (and prevent a yuan devaluation).
- forkLding 8y agoThis will probably crush Bitmain and other Chinese bitcoin mining giants and they will probably move elsewhere, however Chinese courts have said bitcoin itself is legally allowed. Probably what is going to happen is that you can own but you can't mine or even obtain more bitcoins in China. https://www.ccn.com/chinas-merchants-are-legally-allowed-to-accept-bitcoin-and-crypto https://www.ccn.com/chinas-merchants-are-legally-allowed-to-...
- mpoteat 8y agoBitmain makes huge margins on selling equipment, not mining. They make shovels in the gold rush.
- capsulecorp 8y agoYeah but if California banned mining in the state during the gold rush, not many shovels or picks would be sold.
- chrisco255 8y agoI mean, China is not the only place you can mine Bitcoin...
- capsulecorp 8y agoCorrect, just as California isn't the only place you could mine gold. But you were making a correlation between Bitmain and the goldrush tool vendors. The goldrush happened for a larger part in California and there is pretty much zero dispute who bitmain/china is in that analogy. Why are you backpedaling?
- chrisco255 8y agoI'm not backpedaling. You're desperately trying to mold the 1849 Gold Rush analogy onto Bitcoin, which can be mined from anywhere there's electricity...so basically anywhere within range of civilization. This is an absurd argument. Gold is only found within certain mineral deposits. BTC can be mined in Russia, USA, Mexico, Iceland, Britain, or Outer Space.
- baxtr 8y ago“...said should be phased out as they did not adhere to relevant laws and regulations, were unsafe, wasted resources or polluted the environment.“ It surely doesn’t help keeping the rivers clean
- brisance 8y agoSaw this coming back when the Chinese government expressed an interest in Bitcoin. They'll pass a law to confiscate all Bitcoin in China.
- revskill 8y agoBTC harms "poor" newscomers who think they will get rich/richer overnight. So instead the media told that it's a revolution with blockchain, they should tell people that: BTC is also a game, a trading game, keep yourself at risk before pouring your money into it.
- CaliforniaKarl 8y agoFrom an energy-consumption standpoint, I'm not too surprised at this. They have better uses for their mostly-non-renewable power generation. This will probably continue the push towards bitcoin mining in places with stable renewables (like hydro and geothermal). That being said, I just found https://www.coindesk.com/norway-ends-power-tax-subsidy-for-bitcoin-miners https://www.coindesk.com/norway-ends-power-tax-subsidy-for-b..., which makes me wonder if current prices would be able to support mining there. Also, at least part of Washington State is interested: https://www.bendbulletin.com/business/6853387-151/central-washington-doubles-down-on-blockchain https://www.bendbulletin.com/business/6853387-151/central-wa...
- kevintb 8y agoGood. There are few things more wasteful in energy and minimal in doing good for the world. Widespread bitcoin adoption would be catastrophic for the Earth and climate change efforts [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8
- superkuh 8y agoBut it still doesn't waste as much energy as the standing armies fiat currencies rely on. And if your country doesn't have a large standing army then your currency is being subsidized by those you ally with who do have standing armies of significance. And the good it brings to the world in being a non-nation state controlled currency is obvious. From enabling continuation of money transfer in failing or restrictive governments to allowing for capital exchange between individuals directly without rent seeking or censorship it provides good every day.
- IntelMiner 8y agoBitcoin has proven time and time again to be a giant ponzi scheme https://www.reddit.com/r/buttcoin https://www.reddit.com/r/buttcoin contains good reading
- dx034 8y agoWhy should Fiat money use more energy than global bitcoin adaption? Bitcoin already used as much energy as medium-sized countries (I believe it was as much as Ireland last year or the year before) and nearly no one uses it for daily payments. Compared to that, I'm not aware that the Swift Network or Visa/Mastercard would run whole power plants to support their energy needs. They just need a medium sized data center to support hundreds of millions of payments a day.
- tapland 8y agoMainframes running a ton of financial transactions bill by CPU usage from IBM. Banks etc want to use as little computer resources as possible.
- latchkey 8y agoIn the early days of crypto, it used to be that China would ban it and the price would drop as the market would freak out. This is just another scare tactic that won't go anywhere. China makes so much money from mining and crypto, there is no way they would get rid of it.
- ashwinr14 8y agoGood luck
- Mengkudulangsat 8y agoInteresting development. There's a massive amount of accumulated capital and equipment inventory held by Chinese miners. These are mobile, and will surely emigrate.
- sschueller 8y agoI wonder if bitcoin will try to go the Ethereum route and move to proof of stake [1] instead of proof of work. [1] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ
- Arbalest 8y agoIt wouldn't be bitcoin anymore then... Being able to grandfather in the whole transaction log after rolling out a new system runs counter to the principle.
- lucb1e 8y agoFine by me, if it makes people want to switch to other proof of stake networks. Who cares about a name when we all know we need to use drastically less energy?
- Dylan16807 8y ago> Being able to grandfather in the whole transaction log after rolling out a new system runs counter to the principle. Counter to what principle? I don't think that's right. Bitcoin has changed the protocol multiple times, too.
- sschueller 8y agoWhy am I being downvoted? Is my question not valid? Is there this much hate towards ethereum from the bitcoin community?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- polskibus 8y agoSupply reduction should pump up the price, right? Good for holders.
- tfha 8y agoThat's not how it works. Supply is fixed, regardless of how much mining happens. The difficulty to mine a coin adjusts as miners come online and go offline.
- Nursie 8y agoSupply is constant, regardless of how many people mine. In theory it should have no effect on price. I guess existing miners would get their coins cheaper, so there would be less pressure on them to sell to cover electricity costs, so the supply may reduce a little via that mechanism.
- gayFaggot 8y agoMeanwhile, there's incentive to operate high transaction volumes, migrating token values from wallet to wallet to wallet, so as to bury illegal activity deep in the ledger, to the point of overflow, so that it's costly and painful to index and extract identities and establish relationships, while building evidence to throw people in jail. So the idea that there will always be a rational amount of activity is laughable. There's always an incentive for excessive noise, when illegal activity is involved, so as to drown out the ability to keep a watchful eye on criminal behavior.
- balboah 8y agoin the long run I believe cryptos that doesn't require mining this way will be more popular, such as EOS and maybe Ethereum soon. But mining will probably never go away completely
- AFascistWorld 8y ago"Ok guys, enough with this money launderying, the party should be over now."
- 127 8y agoWhen people realize that Bitcoin mining is a mechanism to prevent fraud, the energy consumption suddenly makes a lot more sense. How much waste in the world is the result of fraud and lack of trust? Quite a lot of it. That said, reducing the energy consumption of Bitcoin should be an absolute priority. Lightning Network and other such technologies help.
- jayd16 8y agoIt doesn't really prevent fraud that isn't already a solved problem. When was the last time you had to deal with wire transfer fraud? If you buy counterfeit goods with bitcoin there's not much you can do. A credit card protects you from fraud over $50. What exactly is this bitcoin waste getting us?
- jraedisch 8y agoI would not call it preventing fraud, rather simplifying global money supply and making it more transparent, which in turn could prevent fraud due to smaller attack surface and more eyeballs.
- jayd16 8y agoBut this is just a pipe dream. You would just have fraud hidden away in Swiss bitcoin accounts and wallets in the Cayman islands. Isn't it just less privacy for the naive user and business as usual for the fraudster?
- Al-Khwarizmi 8y agoAs a techie and a math lover, I was initially excited with Bitcoin, and did a bit of mining, transactions, etc. But after learning about the environmental impact, I no longer support Bitcoin. It's just not worth the cost, a very beautiful idea but with a serious flaw (which I hope can be fixed in the future). So this sounds quite sensible to me.
- tudorizer 8y agoAs a techie, you should still apprectiate the fact that Bitcoin mining is the first financial system that can be measured in terms of energy impact. Existing systems, banks and all adjacent institutions and companies, are close to impossible to track and measure.
- bamboozled 8y agoI think the same thing, I'd love to see the Co2 emissions of all financial institutions combined put against bitcoin, that would be interesting.
- nosuchthing 8y agoFinancial institutions offer a vast array of services, safeguards, and functionality and significantly higher transactional infrastructure versus Bitcoin/cryptocoins. Exchanging cash versus submitting a Bitcoin transaction would be more on par.
- asdff 8y agoIt's still impossible to measure if you are getting into semantics here. How much energy does it take to keep the coinbase servers running? How much energy does it take to keep the coinbase IT people's houses heated? How much energy does it take to keep the lights on in the coinbase office? That's also impossible to track if you wanted to jump down the B.S. rabbit hole.
- GenericsMotors 8y agoExisting financial systems process many orders of magnitude more transactions than Bitcon does. There's no acceptable excuse for its current consumption VS the throughput it provides.
- ulfw 8y agoOh thank the lord this idiotic waste of (often fossil) energy will find it's end. Crypto proof of work is such a flawed (proof of) concept in many ways.
- drak0n1c 8y agoCommenters are applauding the environmental implications of this policy, but I’m curious why no one is considering the human side of this ban. There are a billion people living under authoritarianism who are stuck with an increasingly devalued Yuan and steadily losing the ability to obtain other currencies. Is that not also a problem that can result in humanitarian disaster? I don’t think we should be comfortable with blanket bans just because they are accompanied by government greenwashing PR.
- pakitan 8y agoBitcoin trading is already essentially banned in China.
- sekai 8y agoExchanges are, not OTC - it's booming.
- ackbar03 8y agoNo it is not a humanitarian disaster. If it was it'd be a economic policy problem and their are much more factors to be considering for that. Plus your entire premise is wrong, yuan is definitely not increasingly devalued. Even if it was that wouldn't directly mean it's a problem
- rocqua 8y agoThis should help a little against centralization. With the cheaper electricity out of the game, more locations might become viable as sites for bitcoin mining. We're still stuck with two Chinese ASIC manufacturers, but at least more of the actual mining will be outside china.
- fenk85 8y agoOne just has to watch Gold Rush on Discovery to see that the main cost of gold mining is burning lakes worth of diesel in order to create moonscapes of dug up land.
- chakintosh 8y agoGenuine question. Would it be possible for mining facilities to harness the heat from the miners and use it on steam turbines to generate power that'll be used by the miners?
- swarnie_ 8y agoNot an engineer so maybe someone else will have to chime in but i doubt the radial heat from a GPU is enough to heat an element which in turn can flash water to steam. Surely you cant get the density needed before the GPU's themselves burst in to flames?
- chakintosh 8y agoYes but we're talking about thousands of GPUs here and each one radiating 70ºC
- swarnie_ 8y agoAgain, probably need a physicist or engineer to figure out if that's enough to get water to the 500-600 degrees typically used in steam driven turbines.
- smile_ 8y agoI do not believe this would be possible. If we stick with 70 degrees being the max temperature of the GPUs^, as we increase the number of GPUs then the coolant will approach 70 degrees but not go over, hovering from 69-70. To break it down, if you have a comically large stove top heater set to 70 degrees and a regular sized one set to 70 degrees, if you put a pot on either the max temperature of the water in the pot is still 70 degrees. The rate at which it heated to 70 would change but max temp wouldn't. ^Max safe temp of GPUs is around 100c. What will actually happen is that the GPUs will heat the coolant to this temperature, then either the coolant will lose heat through normal means (when water isn't heated it cools), or if the coolant stays hot eventually a GPU will turn itself off through overheat safety mechanisms. Once this GPU is off the coolant loop will drop temperature for a while then slowly approach max temp again, until either another GPU gets turned off or the system finds its equilibrium where the coolant is at a stable temperature and no more GPUs are turning themselves off.
- sekai 8y agoWhy a Chinese Bitcoin mining ban is good news: * It kills the narrative that China controls Bitcoin. * It severely diminishes the Chinese state's ability to disrupt the Bitcoin network by commandeering hashpower. * The Chinese miners will move their operations overseas, leading to higher geographical/jurisdictional decentralization. * It becomes relatively speaking more profitable for Chinese ASIC manufacturers to directly sell their miners compared to mining themselves. This will diminish their oversized power in the ASIC market and decentralize mining in terms of operators. * BTC itself isn't banned, OTC demand will stay, causing a premium. This means some mining will likely continue in smaller, less obvious operations outside the reach of the state. Everything about that is healthy for the network. * The biggest source of Bitcoin blocks won't be behind the biggest firewall of the globe anymore. * The article mentions a phasing out, so the two-week difficulty adjustment period can more than likely gracefully handle this. * Although a lot of Bitcoin mining is done with hydropower in China, it also has a significant share of cheap coal-powered mining. This likely makes overall Bitcoin mining greener, hurting the Bitcoin climate change FUD.
- Nursie 8y ago> This likely makes overall Bitcoin mining greener, hurting the Bitcoin climate change FUD. It's not FUD if it's true, which you're implying with the first half of that there sentence...
- sekai 8y agoIt's debatable, most frequently cited articles are bogus with inflated numbers.
- rtpg 8y ago>* The Chinese miners will move their operations overseas, leading to higher geographical/jurisdictional decentralization. I feel like you really don't get the... particulars of being a Chinese national, on multiple levels
- throwaway32366 8y ago
- Proven 8y ago> the NDRC said should be phased out as they did not adhere to relevant laws and regulations, were unsafe, wasted resources or polluted the environment. Of course - why do you need to mine it, you can simply trust the Central Bank-regulated cryptos that don't need PoW
- cheekybillberry 8y agoI think bitcoin has been really overhyped (and manipulated in many different ways), and would be happy to see it fade into history (if not some of the technologies and ideas it's based on). However, I'm not happy to see an outright ban on it, for all sorts of reasons. Not only are there fundamental freedom of speech issues involved, but it sets a dangerous precedent with regard to decentralized computing in general. I also believe that the best way forward in a bitcoin-free future is to leave things be, expose rather than suppress, and to let people do what they want so as to encourage transition. I'm surprised to see so many comments supportive of this move here. First they come for bitcoin, then they come for Matrix?
- SRTP 8y ago"China bans Bitcoin, for realsies this time."
- SP47471 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9611848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9611848
- HNLurker2 8y agoThis reminds me of the idea of bitcoin owning 51% of miners and being able to split. What do you think?