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Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone. At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small g
by kelp 6y ago
Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone.
At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small group to the detriment of the rest of us.
I also have a lot of personal frustration with how mining (more of ETH and others) is impacting the global GPU supply.
A whole cottage industry has cropped up of sites, discords, etc that provide notifications when GPUs come into stock. Not all the issues are related to mining, but it certainly is enough of an issue that Nvidia has announced mining specific cards and is throttling mining on their 3060 series. AMD is rumored to be doing similar soon.
Edit: Replaced 'anti-social Ponzi scheme' with 'speculative bubble' to be more accurate.
- viklove 6y agoI say we should ban data centers instead. They're clearly a scam and no one should be allowed to use them because they waste so much power!
- base698 6y agoAnd Xbox and other gaming consoles.
- insertnickname 6y agoAnd Argentina.
- kelp 6y agoA lot of datacenters provide substantial utility to others. Like the customers of the services that are hosted in those datacenters. BTC mining makes the miners more wealthy. In service of the BTC network, which has what utility? There are quite a number of criminal or at least grey market uses for BTC. But what are the legitimate uses that are not as well or better served by the traditional payment networks?
- viklove 6y agoOperating data centers makes the data center owners more wealthy. All in service of the data center network, which has what utility? There are quite a number of criminal and grey market uses for data centers. What are the legitimate uses of data centers that are not served by traditional pen & paper?
- dvh1990 6y agoBitcoin's true use case hasn't showed itself yet because it is uniquely suited to help us in case of a select few low probability and extreme scenarios, aka black swan events which we can't predict, but will probably happen.
- verdverm 6y agoIf those events happen, do you think the infra (electricity generation and telecom interconnection) that it relies upon will still be around?
- dvh1990 6y agoYes. I'm talking about financial collapse, not destruction of infra.
- verdverm 6y agoWithout details, the impact of a financial collapse is unknown. Given how BTC moves in connection with the broader market now, one would expect that the value would crash with the system, especially since BTC has no intrinsic value.
- loopz 6y agoSociety know financial collapse. They occur quite regularly every 5-7 years. The outcomes are roughly identical.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
- gruez 6y ago>BTC is an anti-social Ponzi scheme speculative bubble =/= ponzi scheme https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26203396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26203396
- neaden 6y agoTo be fair, if Satoshi Nakamoto is still around and has access to 1 million bitcoins, then it's more of a Ponzi scheme.
- gruez 6y agoEven then it's still not really a ponzi scheme unless he promised returns. Just because vitalik buterin is around doesn't mean ethereum is a ponzi scheme.
- kelp 6y agoYeah, you're right on the definition.
- 627467 6y agoI can list so many dumb uses of energy out of my head that could be beneficial if banned...
- hudon 6y agoVISA alone processes over 60,000 transactions per second [0] and only uses a tiny subset of the world's data centers. Bitcoin processes a whooping 7 transactions per second and consumes as much energy as *all data centers globally*. I'm curious to hear what dumb use of energy you have in your head that rivals this level of stupidity. edit: I'll address the "apple to oranges" replies here: you can combine the energy consumed by VISA and whatever other financial service exists that would together match the feature-set of bitcoin (eg. VISA + Bank of America + ...) and you'd still have energy consumption many orders of magnitude lower than the Bitcoin network. [0] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...
- 627467 6y agoRipping myself off from another "bitcoin will destroy the world because climate change" thread: > But visa doesn't provide most of the functions of bitcoin infrastructure. Visa does[n't] need to hold the balance of my account. Visa does[n't] need to or makes available all of my equity worth of assets for me to transfer. Visa does not custody my assets. This is literally apple to oranges (or visa to bitcoin)
- tybit 6y agoSo you think those extra functions do account for all data center power consumption added up?
- coderzach 6y ago> Visa does[n't] need to hold the balance of my account. Yes they do? > Visa does[n't] need to or makes available all of my equity worth of assets for me to transfer. This is a horrifying bug, right? A thing that no person would ever want, and it's so rare that visa would make you talk to a person and raise your limit first, or they'd get more people involved to make sure you're not being coerced because it's such an abnormal thing to do. Lawyers in some cases, just because you're being so silly. But if you REALLY wanted to make a $1b debit card transaction, you probably totally could, just call the visa billionaire line. > Visa does not custody my assets. But a regular bank can, and visa will send to and from there with a debit card.
- inshadows 6y agoYeah, pretty much expected these comments would appear soon. How come everytime Bitcoin thread is started, 99% of comments are people absolutely clueless about how difficulty is regulated within Bitcoin protocol?
- Daishiman 6y agoThere was no comment about BTC difficulty. It's a comment about the pernicious impact of BTC on the world with practically no benefit to show for it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cpach 6y agoPersonally, I would rather see a reasonable tax on emissions.
- kelp 6y agoYeah, when it comes to policy, I think you're right. I'd prefer a tax on the externalities than an outright ban.
- pazimzadeh 6y agoOr, dirty energy should be banned.
- kelp 6y agoYes, and that doesn't really address the issue of proof of work blockchains wasting energy. With BTC specifically, the incentives are there to waste as much energy as possible as the difficulty and price goes up. Yes, you try to do more work with a unit of electricity, but the net incentive is to add more and more. Then what? Do you end up with this problem? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26226470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26226470
- hddu 6y agoFuck all those people using Bitcoin to circumvent oppressive governments. Fuck your freedom. We need the gov to solve all our problems. We need to ban bit coin now!!! Muh climate change https://www.pinterest.com/pin/810859107894008357/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/810859107894008357/
- uncletammy 6y ago> Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone. How does one ban a blockchain? Serious question. Would you only arrest the miners or would you also arrest non-mining full node operators? How could you tell if regular citizens were transacting with POW coins? Would you subpoena telecom companies for records where customers have visited known sites which transact in POW coins? Or would you go the AT&T route and pipe telecom traffic through a little cabinet that uses deep packet inspection to sniff out POW transactions occurring over RPC? What about traders? Would you outlaw trading POW coins and make exchange exclude US customers? That could make for some serious arbitrage opportunities for tech savy citizens. I would genuinely appreciate your answer to any or all of these questions. I build cryptocurrency software and would gain a lot from additional insight into the threat model I face in the not-so-distant future.
- verdverm 6y agoYou don't ban the blockchain, you make it illegal to use the coins. Then the network loses value and mining doesn't pay off. If you don't do KYC or AML, you will likely become part of the banned list. Also you can look for energy consumption. Towns in upstate New York are banning new permits for mining. So it's already happened. In short, society has certain expectations and if you violate those there will be consequences. Govt and laws are always behind the publics will, so it's coming for cryptos. Which survive is the real speculative bets that will pay off
- kelp 6y agoYou regulate exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini, so there are no legitimate ways to trade your proof of work cryptocurrency for USD (or your local gov backed currency). Then the demand for the crypto currency plummets. In 2010-2011, I traded BTC for USD in person, with a laptop on wifi. And via PayPal with someone I met on IRC, where there was a bot that kept track of your reputation so the BTC sellers would know if it was safe to sell to you. At that time the price of 1 BTC was about $1 USD. I think we'd see something similar, if there was an outright ban.
- gruez 6y ago
- jennrn 6y agoHonestly, I'm thinking about buying a brand new Silverado with my crypto just because of how much I hate you whiny climate change bitches.