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Good. Very good. This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies.

by DCKing 5y ago

Good. Very good. This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Don't ban their trade because they make poor financial products, either because of rampant fraud or criminal activity. That's a different argument and requires different approaches. Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives to literally burn up energy [1] to make financial products. Especially because proof-of-work simply just isn't necessary to have cryptocurrency. Banning their trade won't categorically stop PoW cryptocurrencies. What it should do is completely tank their value and get the world to move on to less destructive coins. I don't think there's any precedent for banning classes of financial products for environmental reasons, but it's time to create one. [1]: In addition to environmental reasons, there's probably also economic ones. Mining burns through other scarce resources such as chip production capacity, although the true impact there is unclear.

asmos7 5y ago
way to devise a very specific way to kill the gravy train cryptobros have been riding on for so long
gradys 5y ago
Would Ethereum be able to make the switch to PoS if it had never used PoW originally? How would they ensure a good distribution of ownership?
- mckeed 5y ago
  It's a difficult problem, but there are coins that have managed it. Stellar has piggybacked on other services to distribute – Facebook, Keybase, and Coinbase. There's an energy-efficient memecoin that distributes based on Folding@Home contributions that has become the #1 monthly F@H team.
dboat 5y ago
Many industries do a lot of harm to the environment for profits. On the spectrum of those, where do cryptos fall? I don't know and personally hold only a little bit, nothing I would be very pained to lose, but it would certainly cause a lot of economic harm to a lot of people to do what you propose. The idea cannot be taken seriously without first answering my question.
- chrischattin 5y ago
  Youtube alone uses 2x the amout of energy as the entire Bitcoin network, for perspective.
  - pavlov 5y ago
    That's just not true.
    - artifact_44 5y ago
      ..they said authoritatively, and without evidence.
  - mytherin 5y ago
    Source?
    - chrischattin 5y ago
      Youtube uses 243.6 TWh - https://thefactsource.com/how-much-electricity-does-youtube-use/ https://thefactsource.com/how-much-electricity-does-youtube-... Bitcoin uses ~118 TWh - https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Youtube souce is from 2019, Bitcoin one is current.
      - mytherin 5y ago
        The first source does not seem particularly reliable, it makes some back of the envelope calculations based on extrapolated stats that are not even sourced. Other sources put Google’s total energy usage (including youtube) at around 12 TWh [1]. Total datacenter usage is estimated to be around 205 TWh [2]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/788540/energy-consumption-of-google/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/788540/energy-consumptio... [2] https://energyinnovation.org/2020/03/17/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-really-use/ https://energyinnovation.org/2020/03/17/how-much-energy-do-d...
  - 5y ago
bko 5y ago
If the government wants to put a higher price on energy or carbon, it should do so. But it should not be the arbiter of what's a worthy use of energy expenditure. I could see a lot of people make the argument the production of a lot of energy intensive goods is not worth-while.
- barrkel 5y ago
  Government is made out of people. If the people don't want the economy oriented around energy being put into finding hashes, they have the right to vote.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    People are made out of opinions. If they don't like the way others are voting, they have the right to convince others of theirs. Which is to say, discussing on HN is a valid way to contribute your opinion to society. Voting is not your only voice.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      So why does the buck stop with government then? If enough of us agree that a law should be passed then why not just pass the law? Seems way easier to just make a rule than try to individually convince everyone.
      - dmoy 5y ago
        It's an eventually sort-of-consistent system with a lot of buffering and delay. if enough people agree that a law should be passed, and it's a high enough priority, and the opinion stays that way for a long time, then eventually enough politicians get on board by virtue of pressure from their voting base, and a law gets passed. It's not great. But on the other hand, near-immediate direct democracy is also not great, because it leads to knee-jerk reactions causing laws put in place. I'm thinking of stuff like the USAPATRIOT Act, except worse.
  - micropresident 5y ago
Aqua 5y ago
I cringe every time I see such comments. Ban bitcoin or ban beef because it uses too much energy. Humanity will continue to require energy as it advances and banning anything "because it uses too much energy" is a ridiculous advice. How about we ban gold mining, or set quotas on the number of children people may have, that will surely contribute to our CO2 reduction goals. It's also Orwellian and reminiscent of how the world looked like for citizens of the USSR back in 1960-1990
- dd36 5y ago
  Communities tend to ban harmful things.
  - rantwasp 5y ago
    “communities”. it’s all fun and games until I ban something you rely on for your livelihood
    - dd36 5y ago
      I’m sure businesses that rely on dumping arsenic into the local lake don’t like having their livelihood threatened either. Property rights matter. Right now the market is broken.
      - rantwasp 5y ago
        consuming energy (and paying for it) is not even the same species with dumping toxic chemicals
        dd36 5y ago
        Burning coal literally dumps arsenic into the environment. And to do so for speculative fun is ridiculous.
        rantwasp 5y ago
rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
Very bad. Ive got another radical take -- cypherpunks should ban proof of stake cryptocurrencies. They are bad for freedom, bad for decentralization, bad for store of value. Wall street tricks attempting to put the genie back in the bottle. Proof of work is the only thing of value, the only distributed consensus model that is secure and the only way forward for store of value cryptocurrencies.
- artifact_44 5y ago
  100%
satyrnein 5y ago
If you want less carbon burned, tax carbon. I'm skeptical of cryptocurrency, but the idea that regulators, already captured by banks, should aggressively ban new financial products that may one day threaten the incumbents makes me wary.
- beowulfey 5y ago
  A carbon tax would filter down to the electricity consumer cost. I dont know about you, but I dont want to pay more for electricity so other people can burn electricity for virtual money. Unless you are suggesting taxing crypto itself, in which case… sure!
  - cedricd 5y ago
    That's a common take, but a well-designed carbon tax could be made revenue-neutral and non-regressive. In other words, the amount it takes in can be given back to the average person -- in forms of tax rebates, investment in public transit, education, whatever. In an ideal world a carbon tax would have no adverse impact on lower and middle class people. I should also add that in that world higher electricity cost due to carbon tax is a good thing -- it'll help carbon-neutral sources of energy to compete and replace the more dirty forms. Which is exactly what we want.
    - beowulfey 5y ago
      I have nothing against carbon taxes actually would love to see them implemented, but I am not sure how they would help prevent excessive energy use due to crypto. OP was suggesting a carbon tax instead of direct regulation, but I don’t quite get how it would dissuade crypto use without increasing electricity costs.
  - eeperson 5y ago
    Consumers can make a net profit if the tax revenue is paid as a dividend to citizens. There are number of papers about this if you are interested [1]. [1] - https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-pricing-studies/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-pricing-studies/
X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
If we are passing radical legislation that cuts across borders I'd much rather see a carbon/greenhouse gas tax.
- txsoftwaredev 5y ago
  We should impose a large tax on data centers for their massive energy usage to power such "valuable" resources like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    Who the fuck is gonna determine what is valuable? A re-distributive carbon tax incentivizes efficiency, doesn't hit stuff like renewables and allows individuals to keep on choosing what they want to do with their life. Just because you don't find facebook valuable doesn't mean that others feel the same way.
Der_Einzige 5y ago
Forget just the environmental issues. The price of commodity hardware for AI research is astronomical right now (try getting into deep learning right now, I dare you!). Crypto is directly trading off with AI research and game development.
- artifact_44 5y ago
  Gary Larson: School for the gifted.
fvdessen 5y ago
PoS is not just a more environmentally version of PoW. It is a lot more vulnerable to state level actors. If the state takes over / subverts / influences the limited number of stakeholders, then it is game over. With PoW the state can influence the existing miners, but cannot prevent new independent miners to pop up and counter act.
- CarlBeek 5y ago
  There are 141,139 validators active in Ethereum as we speak (source: https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/), corrupting that many people is very difficult. There are smaller PoS systems with eg. tens of validators which are more susceptible to state capture. Bitcoin (the network with the most mining effort) lost 25% of their hashing power due to blackouts in Xinjiang. (Soure: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s=21 https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s...) State capture of a majority of Bitcoin miners is comparatively easy. In addition, independent miners have less hardware and that hardware is generally less efficient when compared to the large ASIC farms. In reality a recovery would probably require social consensus and a hard fork
  - micropresident 5y ago
    Yeah, and the way they are issuing rewards means there's an incentive to split your validation across multiple nodes to increase your changes at getting rewards. Each one of these costs electricity to run both in terms of bandwidth and electricity. And other methods introduce the possibility of stake grinding. BOTH converge to the same energy usage as mining. OTOH, the legacy financial system is significantly more energy intensive for a given financial network value. You don't think banks and wars in the middle east to maintain the value of the network have an environmental impact?
  - eeegnu 5y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong since I've only read the brief overview of how validators work on ethereum.org, but 141k validators doesn't mean anything when every validator is independent / anonymous and someone with 32k eth staked is actually one entity taking on the role of 1000 validators.
macacobranco 5y ago
What about ASIC resistant PoW? Should it be banned too?
rmtech 5y ago
Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are in the process of banning themselves. All that wasted energy is paid for by the holders, and proof-of-stake is just more financially attractive. No government intervention is required IMO.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > All that wasted energy is paid for by the holders Could you explain me what energy is "wasted" in Proof-of-Work and also how the people currently holding the cryptocurrency is paying for that "waste"? AFAIK, the same number of blocks are made no matter how many transactions are being made or how many holders there are (or how much each holder "holds"), so the energy consumption of Bitcoin remains more or less the same during an hour, only slowly rising as more miners get on-boarded. But the energy consumption of those brought online remains the same over the lifetime of the miner instance itself.
selfhoster11 5y ago
So burning electricity on running a cryptocurrency is not right, but burning electricity on running servers for Facebook or user tracking is all right? If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? If that's not the case, how do you propose to enforce that all use cases use less electricity, and how do you punish those who use too much?
- grogenaut 5y ago
  We have such a system for appliances already, energy star. And we do restrict the manuf and sale of appliances that can't meet those goals. Same for cars.
- quonn 5y ago
  The government can simply pass a law. There are far bigger injustices. Why do I pay taxes and Facebook doesn‘t?
  - bwb 5y ago
    FB pays insane amounts of taxes. Employment taxes, property taxes, etc. Not to mention taxes on any profits.
    - quonn 5y ago
      As a percentage of their profit? Let me check. Around here small businesses pay around 30%, individuals can pay up to 45%. I doubt Facebook pays that. The tax avoidance schemes in Europe are well documented for all tech companies. And what do you mean by employment taxes? Just the employers part of the income tax?
      - bwb 5y ago
        Why would a company pay the same tax rate as a person? A company pays a tax rate of x% because that income is also taxed when they distribute it to individuals. Thus we've built a system that incentivizes them to invest it back in the company (doesn't always work - but that was the intent). So 21% + 15% to 20% capex on individuals = a tax rate around the same. Now, if you really want to look at the big picture, look at a company's tax rate of 21% on profits, but they also pay taxes on employees of ~21% of salary in the USA not to mention health care (which in europe would be included as taxes so maybe in Europe 46% to 50%). So if payroll is 40% of your costs that is another 8.4% of taxes added in there. And, you can probably add health care as a tax as well. Legal tax avoidance is legal. I hate when people bitch about companies doing legal maneuvers. It is very easy to stop that, apply a tax on gross receipts for all income created in the country. Washington State does that for example if you have a company operating in their state.
jude- 5y ago
More feasible take: ban the trade of PoW coins that cannot be shown to have been mined via green energy.
- seniorivn 5y ago
  it's all bullshit Just ban people doing bad things, like all of them. Problem solved All problems solved
LeftTriangle 5y ago
You people obsessed with reducing humanity’s energy usage are so tiresome. Anyone who actually cares about the well-being of humanity should be focused on increasing the amount of energy available. I want to climb the kardashev scale, not live in an eco-pod and eat bug burgers so I can scrounge every last joule.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  What you want and the realities of our current world are two very, very different things.
  - nmfisher 5y ago
    The reality of the current world is that a lot of people feel exactly like that, so you're unlikely to convince them to change their behaviour. Rather than deny that reality, you're better off working with it to produce more, but cleaner, energy.
  - rwcarlsen 5y ago
    Necessity is the mother of invention. [edit] - downvotes because I used the word "mother" maybe? I don't understand this community.
- hunter2_ 5y ago
  We all want luxury, but at some point the changes that come from energy usage will be very unluxurious, no?
  - LeftTriangle 5y ago
    Yeah, maybe when we’ve exhausted the sun’s net output.
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  Bingo! The more energy a system has available the greater capability it has. For example, if a mining community is able to generate cheap excess power it opens up possibility for local smelting and foundry industries. I think of each community as a game of Civilization. As you progress you unlock higher rungs of the tech ladder. Exporting your raw materials to later import finished products made from them is a waste of resources and stagnates the local industries at the raw material stage. What industries could be developed in your community if the power was available?
BTCOG 5y ago
Again with this same tired nonsense on Hacker News. Famous for censoring worthwhile comments to death while leaving up misinformed "curious" posts that mislead everyone. Bitcoin is using half of the power as banking systems. Bitcoin is using half of the power, of the gold industry. Might I suggest, if you think you can suggest banning things for using too much carbon, that you first quit working, quit driving your vehicles, and disconnect the power in your house. I don't think it's good for the environment in you doing so. In fact, your carbon consumption should be banned. Turn your computers off. Unplug your wasteful device chargers, you've had enough.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  The amount of energy used is only one aspect of the matter. The other is value derived from that energy. I think it is safe to say that regular banking provides not just twice the value of Bitcoin, but in fact probably two orders of magnitude more. Pretty much everyone uses regular banking, while pretty much nobody uses Bitcoin, and not only they use banking more, they use it many times a week or even a day. The comparison is not even close.
  - BTCOG 5y ago
    And when the comparison is not even close, why are you the one making it? All you've stated was an old opinion and not a fact about what is more useful, or how they are used. It's totally fine for you to have just said "I don't understand either banking or Bitcoin whatsoever." Bitcoin is going to get a lot more global over the next several years in it's use cases and for savings. I hope to see you commenting later on after becoming more informed about our current times of inflation and what the people want, vs what is forced on everyone so that they have no way to save hard money. The revolution isn't going to wait for everyone who chooses to be truly ignorant about Bitcoin. And there is only Bitcoin.
  - lowkey 5y ago
    The regular banking system leaks your purchasing power over time via the mechanism of inflation. The regular banking system relies on the US Dollar which is backed by proof of violence - aka the largest military industrial complex ever created. Externalities are a net negative. It's important to consider the externalities of every system. When compared with the death and destruction and burning oil fields in Iraq, Libya, Syria etc, the cost of proof of work seems trite.
disruptalot 5y ago
This is one of those "Freakonomics" type ideas. On the surface this sounds like bitcoin's PoW use will simply stop. It's actually the entire opposite. When governments ban it, they go after sizeable, identifiable organizations running these operations, that is their only choice. These operations are optimized in their energy usage, because it's only in their interest to reduce their consumption relative to the value of the coin they mine. The moment these operations are shutdown, there is a massive sink in the hash rate, smaller operations and hobbyists will rush in to fill it. Hash rate gradually climbs back up and instead you have 10x the energy usage because you can no longer run the PoW in a scalable way.
- socialist_coder 5y ago
  I think you're probably right. Money always finds a way.
  - zepto 5y ago
    The proposal is to stop Bitcoin/PoW being money. Other forms of money will find a way.
- Nursie 5y ago
  But in the mean time the value is likely to have tanked, because if they can't trivially be traded for national currency, the interest in them will wither.
  - dimmke 5y ago
    This is the thing that has always bugged me about cryptocurrency - people are only passionate about it because they want to make more traditional currency with it. Then they adopt this "decentralized" rhetoric. It's always felt hollow. If owning/trading bitcoin became a crime, it'd be done. Ever since Dogecoin had a moment, there's now a million coins trying to engineer their own "moonshot". This is on top of the security issues and of course the energy issues. Cryptocurrency is garbage.
- sdenton4 5y ago
jimbob45 5y ago
Fucking thank you. I get just as many downvotes when I suggest this but it's very obviously the right thing to do. PoW doesn't scale. It eats up power needlessly and we're only stuck on it because the original BTC was a PoW cryptocoin. Simply banning trading of PoW coins would do mounds of good - the crypto community would be better streamlined to move toward PoS coins of the future and environmentalists wouldn't have to waste their resources lobbying to ban BTC anymore.
G3rn0ti 5y ago
> Banning their trade won't categorically stop PoW cryptocurrencies. What it should do is completely tank their value and get the world to move on to less destructive coins. This ban needed to be internationally, though. Pretty difficult to enforce on a global scale. And then it would only have a short term influence on the price of, say, Bitcoin, until enough “black” mining power emerges. I would just relax. Bitcoin is not going to destroy the planet. In the long run it’s going to be a niche financial tool compared to the scale of Ethereum or other competitors (Cardano, Solana or Algorand). It’ll be the PoS enabled DeFi networks that are going to disrupt the banking business.
- BTCOG 5y ago
  In the long run, it's going to be very green. There are Crypto Climate Accord groups working to ensure Bitcoin is carbon-neutral by 2030. What is being done currently is making leaps and bounds in using solar, hydro, wind and trapped energy for bitcoin mining. It's pushing industry to green. Not the phony narrative that's constantly pushed by people who are quite literally, spreading allowed disinformation across HackerNews for the past several years on end.
  - swensel 5y ago
    Are the people downvoting the above comment considering things like trapping excess flare gas [1]? This is energy that is literally wasted otherwise, and would be vented into the atmosphere, if not used for PoW mining (or put to some other undetermined use, but PoW is the only profitable alternative that has made sense so far vs just flaring the gas). Maybe there need to be more guidelines around how to use excess energy instead of coal, but to totally disregard that PoW could be mined from excess energy is shortsighted. Flare gas is just one example. [1] https://oilmanmagazine.com/how-and-why-natural-gas-flaring-is-being-used-to-mine-bitcoin/ https://oilmanmagazine.com/how-and-why-natural-gas-flaring-i...
iabacu 5y ago
> This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof of work cryptocurrencies. That's not only radical, but a grotesque knee jerk reaction. If you think about renewable energy, there's a problem of mismatched production with consumption and transmission. This causes wasted energy (or energy that is very low value), which makes renewable energy projects less viable. Sure, one obvious way to address that is to add batteries to store such energy. Now, go mine (and refine) enough lithium to build utility-scale batteries. That's a huge environmental issue that no one wants to talk about, specially Tesla/Elon. What's a competitor to energy batteries? Proof-of-work mining of bitcoin: it make renewable energy projects economically viable, because the energy of low-usage times can be used to mine bitcoin, which can pay for energy of high-usage times. If there's an environmental/carbon cost to BTC mining, then attach a carbon tax to it (or something like that).
- iabacu 5y ago
  By the way. If one thinks about tracking the carbon cost of a mined BTC (based on the energy source used to mine it) such that a carbon tax can be accurately exacted, the usage of blockchain to track carbon offsets and cost is a pretty obvious thing that comes to mind.
pamplemoose 5y ago
i'd prefer you ban cars
micropresident 5y ago
Yeah man, Government should point guns at people who don't comply with your ideology! Let's advocate violence against people because they do stuff we don't like!
Spooky23 5y ago
I’m sure the recent, existential hand-wringing over Bitcoin energy consumption has nothing at all to do with upcoming ethereum changes. It’s all bullshit and hype — the crypto equivalent of the Chick-Fil-A cows saying “eat more chicken”.
hannofcart 5y ago
That's a slippery slope of an argument. If the government starts arbitrating on what is a judicious use of energy on environmental grounds, then you're a short step away from banning, say, beef production.
cactus2093 5y ago
This certainly seems like an unnecessarily oppressive stance to take, all effectively at the whim of your own personal aesthetics. There are tons of things that people do that I might deem not worth the environmental impact, like flying a hundred thousand miles a year for business, or eating beef, or driving to work every day, or having bigger houses and lawns than they need. Seems kind of arbitrary to allow most wasteful things that people do but draw a line at being able to participate in a certain kind of blockchain. The per-person impact of holding and transacting with bitcoin is not egregiously high compared to all the other things people do in their day to day life. And based on ethereum's move here, perhaps people are starting to vote with their wallets anyway and such dramatic limiting measures aren't needed?
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  >people are starting to vote with their wallets anyway Did you mean "the rich"?
  - cactus2093 5y ago
    "The Big Scary Scare Quotes Rich That We Should Be Eating"? No, that's not exclusively who I mean.
BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
The economic and monetary risks of deflationary coins are potentially much greater than the environmental risks imo (Even Douglas Adams tried to warn us: https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html ). You don't necessarily need to ban the coins to fix this aspect however, just make sure they don't get integrated in the financial system too much. They're basically digital gold. Gold was ok until central banks tried to anchor to it which caused the Great Depression and maybe even WWII.
DickingAround 5y ago
As a technical person, I think we should be a little more careful than to ban a technology because there's a proposal for a newer tech that could work (knowing if it works is harder than a posting on a website saying it's going great in beta). Crypto at all is risky and the tech is uncertain. Seems pretty extreme to get the guns involved on the premise someone somewhere can do it better.
tphyahoo2 5y ago
You want air conditioning? You want to eat steak? You want some microprocessors with that guided missile? Buy bitcoin. https://web.archive.org/web/20210116135412/https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things https://web.archive.org/web/20210116135412/https://taaalk.co...
GhostVII 5y ago
How about we just make people pay for their negative externalities, and let them do whatever they want. Tonnes of things people do are wasteful, no one needs a sports car either, but for some people it is worth paying extra for it. Why should it matter what I'm using my electricity for as long as I pay for the negative effects. If you want to encourage other uses of electricity, subsidize them, don't just ban arbitrary forms of consumption.
- Nursie 5y ago
  > How about we just make people pay for their negative externalities, and let them do whatever they want. Well, for one, because that tends to mean "rich folks and large companies can act with impunity, everyone else not so much". For two, we actually do discriminate quite happily between different uses of things. Maybe it's OK to keep energy prices low for households, as a compromise, but not for crypto mining?
  - GhostVII 5y ago
    Whats the problem with rich fold acting with impunity, so long as they pay for what they use? If someone burns enough electricity to power 1000 homes, but they pay for the environmental impact, and are charged enough for the electricity to fund building more generation capacity, that's a net win. Giving each household some amount of free or subsidized power makes sense. If they want to burn that power crypto mining that's their decision.
    - Nursie 5y ago
      > If someone burns enough electricity to power 1000 homes, but they pay for the environmental impact ... Well, firstly, are we even sure that's really possible? > Giving each household some amount of free or subsidized power makes sense Which is basically exactly what I was talking about - we can and do decide that some uses are better than others, and use regulation (some of which may be tax or credit) to achieve that. We already do this. I'm not sure why people are so aghast that we might do it some more for PoW cryptocurrencies.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
We're supposed to just ban uses of energy we don't like? Why not a complete and total ban on electricity consumption by the adtech industry? Surveillance capitalism does more damage to society than these little coins ever will.
kerng 5y ago
I agree that this is good - the world probably only needs one blockchain that is secured by PoW for the most fundamental use cases. Ethereum will drive and that is good - but it solves different problems compared to Bitcoin. In regards to banning PoW, sounds like the net neutrality discussions honestly... so to me that does not make sense for the same reasons. And here is the kicker, because its permissionless, it can't be stopped.
chmike 5y ago
> ban trade of PoW cryptocurrencies That might cause a financial crash of the cryptocurrency market, with the trust issues, etc. It wouldn't be wise.
- schmorptron 5y ago
  would be funny to look at the internet for a few days though
fredfoobar 5y ago
Holy shit, lol. This is an insane take. Proof of Stake is NOT secure, the stakers can collude to reorganize the chain at almost no cost. This is like the exact system we tried to get away from, the USD system is also a Proof of Stake.
- fredfoobar 5y ago
  There is no place for a PoS protocol layer on the internet, I'm willing to die on this hill.
- Graffur 5y ago
  Where can I learn more about this?
  - fredfoobar 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwgYDAoZV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwgYDAoZV0
nanidin 5y ago
I’ve thought through this over the last few days and I don’t think it’s viable unless all countries enact the ban at the same time. Imagine country A bans trade or mining of PoW coins - that puts the citizens of country A at a disadvantage to citizens of other countries, and encourages holders of PoW coins in country A to exfiltrate wealth and capital from country A. You end up needing to solve the same type of problem that PoW solves in order to enact a PoW ban simultaneously across all countries - how can all parties trust that every other party is being honest and will follow through (Byzantine Generals problem)?
mrfusion 5y ago
You people terrify me.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  if you’re afraid now, wait until you learn that these people vote. democracy! f yeah!
savant_penguin 5y ago
Sure, ban away all PoW crypto, but don't you dare touch my YouTube cat videos and Netflix series ! (that likely use a TON of bandwidth) Jokes aside it's really hard to decide what's reasonable energy usage from waste. Ultimately the real question is who gets to make that decision. And overall, the idea of government getting to decide what are acceptable uses of energy and what isn't is actually terrifying
dehrmann 5y ago
> ban trade of proof of work cryptocurrencies. I'm a crypto-skeptic, but why would I ever hold a crpytocurrency in that scenario? If governments would ban it for environmental goals, they'll ban it for political goals, too. The only interesting bit is cryptocurrencies would have to legitimately bring something new to the table that's actually better than the existing financial system in order to be viable.
woeirua 5y ago
We don't need to ban PoW crypto entirely, just tax the carbon emissions associated with it. If miners can switch their entire operation to geothermal in Iceland, then why should I care?
lhorie 5y ago
I can see that this idea comes from a place of good intentions, but I think this is a slippery slope. With this idea, PoW Ethereum is banned, but PoS Ethereum is ok; how does one even regulate that? And what of things like Chia (proof of space, i.e. "let's hog hard drives")? And what about L2 solutions? And how much is too much? Should Ethereum 2 be banned if Nano is shown to be more scalable? Where does one draw the line? I think that at some point, PoW will become so economically unfeasible that it'll simply make more sense for miners to ditch those coins and whale up on PoS ones.
lucasnortj 5y ago
they should ban cryptos full stop. They have no use case except for criminals
ryanmarsh 5y ago
Banning a certain kind of computation is a novel idea. Was this a knee jerk reaction or have you considered all the other types of computation that should not be allowed and why? Do we have an empirical understanding of the negative impacts of these specific kinds of computation, their general threat to humanity, and the negative side effects of regulation?
anm89 5y ago
How do you ban open source software that millions of people already have? It's like banning algebra or something. You can tell people they can't do it but you can only truly ban it to the extent that you can micro monitor and enforce the actions of every person interested in it. To me this illustrates a lack of understanding of the space.
lancemurdock 5y ago
While the energy consumption of bitcoin is debatable due to the unknown usage of clean, renewable energy (some reports are at 75%) to to secure the network and prevent bad actors, even for arguments sake, we can agree the energy consumption is extremely large. We also do not know how much energy is required to maintain SWIFT, or the global ACH network and other banking services. However, some of the biggest plagues to society are rooted in central banking policies that over time devalue a nations currency through excessive money printing backed by nothing, or gambling via derivatives that when a bubble pops requires bailouts. Even worse, where we are now is done via quantitative easing which is a fancy word for more money printing to buy government debts to keep the economy afloat. If Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies can provide all the same services banks offer (borrowing/lending/saving) and be backed by a finite number ensuring value over time then we, as a society will be less manipulated by politics and therefore experience deflation which will could close wealth gaps. Bitcoin may have an energy problem but the problems it aims to solve are extremely important as well. “Necessity is the mother of invention.” If Bitcoin can really solve some areas maybe the conversation should be about how can get 100% of BTC energy consumption to be renewable.
useful 5y ago
I'd much rather put kwh limits on proof of work. That would stop large farms that aren't green. Outside of ethereum, proof of stake is no different than a database. The ownership is so centralized that you only have 3-5 people/organizations approving everything. The whole point of crypto was to be decentralized, proof of stake is not that. Cardano, solana, they all are pointless as a token because the whole supply is largely owned by a few people.
rattlesnakedave 5y ago
Who decides what is a good use of energy and what isn't?
mfDjB 5y ago
It might be worth noting that not all Proof-of-Work is just finding hashes, newer cryptocurrencies make more economic and intelligent use of the work used for proof.
tromp 5y ago
> proof-of-work simply just isn't necessary to have cryptocurrency. It seems kind of necessary to achieve wide distribution and avoid wealth concentration.
dheera 5y ago
By banning them, don't you increase their value by creating scarcity?
Trias11 5y ago
Think about it from the other side. How about continuing research and development of solutions providing cheaper, greener energy instead of sparking righteous war against something that consumes energy based on incompetent social media fart? The loudest voices against something are typically hypocrites that happily fly on their gas guzzling private jets bitching about people driving their oh so inefficient cars to work.
lend000 5y ago
This is an Orwellian take to want the government to tell you how you're allowed to use electricity. Is watching TV a waste of energy? How much energy goes into steaming Netflix? If you want to target an externality of the free market, do it directly: simply tax emissions. This will guide the market towards greener energy generation and direct capital out of activities that produce emissions without generated value.
junseth 5y ago
What if you simply don't know enough to not know that you're both wrong and being lied to by the ETH marketing team? Would you be embarrassed that you believed rhetoric? Probably means you would be easily susceptible to most conspiracy theories.
jMyles 5y ago
Even if banning PoW were agreeable on logical grounds (ie, overcoming the arguments of the sibling comments to this one), is there any reason to believe that such a law will: * Reduce trade * Reduce value * Reduce carbon use? Is there a case ever where an illicit market found a price equilibrium which was lower than the licit one? And, if such a ban does cause the price go up, won't the same incentives cause continued mining competition?
rvz 5y ago
> This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Unless you want to also ban servers or services that are using deep learning training, decoding massive videos and livestreams on storage systems that are also burning up the planet. It's not fine to allow PoW cryptocurrencies to continue to burn the planet but collecting mass amounts of user data and using wasteful deep learning training continuously is fine to burn up the planet on GCP, AWS and Azure?
citilife 5y ago
Bitcoins "power consumption" has two aspects - mining and processing transactions. The power consumption used for mining (or processing) is directly correlated to the relative earning potential - i.e. bitcoin price - power cost. Mining takes up the vast majority of the computation(s) and mining bitcoin should end somewhere between 2040 and 2050. That is to say, it's self correcting. If the price of energy increases, there is less mining. Alternatively, the miners are also incentivized to find cheaper or develop cheaper alternatives; this spurs innovation. If prices rise due to mining, innovation will take place and more energy will be developed. There's nothing wrong with this mechanism, as it corrects itself. In 2050 when you can no longer mine bitcoin we will that have an abundance of cheap power. Which is the single greatest factor in reducing poverty. Frankly, I think this comment is off base. So far there have been zero negative measurable impacts from power usage related to crypto.
- meowkit 5y ago
  This is a really weak argument. The better argument is we shouldn’t tell people how to use energy they purchase and to tax consumption of it. > innovation will take place and more energy will be developed. This has way too many assumptions baked in. Increased demand will not guarantee a clean supply, nor does it guarantee technological progress in performance of efficiency.
delaaxe 5y ago
Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as Christmas lights in the USA. Should we ban Christmas lights because of their energy usage? This debate is turning to madness https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-us-christmas-lights/ https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-us-...
fuddle 5y ago
I'd be in favour of banning the use of fossil fuels for corporations mining proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. There is a few examples of Bitcoin miners using Coal power sources!
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
> Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives to literally burn up energy Videogames run GPUs at full capacity too, we should ban them too. No one NEEDS to pretend to be a cowboy for 100+ hours each across 36 million GPUs. Actually maybe there should be a ban on computing power above mobile CPUs available to non-government bodies, if this really is so devastating to the environment we need to limit the amount of damage people can cause as individuals, why does a normal person need a GPU anyway when smart phone graphics should be enough.
- goda90 5y ago
  But gamers aren't buying up dozens of GPUs each to pretend to be a cowboy, and they don't pretend to be a cowboy 24/7.
  - whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    They might only have one GPU each but there are a lot more of them, if even half of all people who bought RDR2 complete it that would be similar to 1.5 billion GPU hours of crypto mining (Eth for example). 32 million bought it, takes about 100 hours to complete runs GPU full capacity. If we're going to say using GPU computing power is bad for the environment then we can't just stop at crypto because it's convenient. We have to look at all computing and videogames isn't something that should be considered essential either.
627467 5y ago
Government can already effectively (and is already inadvertently doing so) prevent mining by manipulating energy prices within it's jurisdiction. It does NOT mean that government can easily ban the use of PoW blockchains. Miners will move to where is is profitable and will be ultimately incentivized to find cheaper (ultimately cleaner) means to mine.
generalizations 5y ago
This just sounds like an excuse to ban something that governments (read: the US) are trying to bring under control. First it was 'but criminals use it'. Now it's 'think of the environment'. What's the next excuse going to be?
reedjosh 5y ago
POW guarantees distributed security better than any other currency so far. POS relies on a _relatively_ small number of nodes to run the network. POW is more _government_ proof than any other method. To many the threat of central bank digital currencies is justification enough for POW's energy consumption.
jwblackwell 5y ago
On this logic we should also ban Christmas lights

by DCKing 5y ago

asmos7 5y ago

way to devise a very specific way to kill the gravy train cryptobros have been riding on for so long

gradys 5y ago

Would Ethereum be able to make the switch to PoS if it had never used PoW originally? How would they ensure a good distribution of ownership?

mckeed 5y ago
It's a difficult problem, but there are coins that have managed it. Stellar has piggybacked on other services to distribute – Facebook, Keybase, and Coinbase. There's an energy-efficient memecoin that distributes based on Folding@Home contributions that has become the #1 monthly F@H team.

dboat 5y ago

Many industries do a lot of harm to the environment for profits. On the spectrum of those, where do cryptos fall? I don't know and personally hold only a little bit, nothing I would be very pained to lose, but it would certainly cause a lot of economic harm to a lot of people to do what you propose. The idea cannot be taken seriously without first answering my question.

chrischattin 5y ago
Youtube alone uses 2x the amout of energy as the entire Bitcoin network, for perspective.
- pavlov 5y ago
  That's just not true.
  - artifact_44 5y ago
    ..they said authoritatively, and without evidence.
- mytherin 5y ago
  Source?
  - chrischattin 5y ago
    Youtube uses 243.6 TWh - https://thefactsource.com/how-much-electricity-does-youtube-use/ https://thefactsource.com/how-much-electricity-does-youtube-... Bitcoin uses ~118 TWh - https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Youtube souce is from 2019, Bitcoin one is current.
    - mytherin 5y ago
      The first source does not seem particularly reliable, it makes some back of the envelope calculations based on extrapolated stats that are not even sourced. Other sources put Google’s total energy usage (including youtube) at around 12 TWh [1]. Total datacenter usage is estimated to be around 205 TWh [2]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/788540/energy-consumption-of-google/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/788540/energy-consumptio... [2] https://energyinnovation.org/2020/03/17/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-really-use/ https://energyinnovation.org/2020/03/17/how-much-energy-do-d...
- 5y ago

bko 5y ago

If the government wants to put a higher price on energy or carbon, it should do so. But it should not be the arbiter of what's a worthy use of energy expenditure. I could see a lot of people make the argument the production of a lot of energy intensive goods is not worth-while.

barrkel 5y ago
Government is made out of people. If the people don't want the economy oriented around energy being put into finding hashes, they have the right to vote.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  People are made out of opinions. If they don't like the way others are voting, they have the right to convince others of theirs. Which is to say, discussing on HN is a valid way to contribute your opinion to society. Voting is not your only voice.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    So why does the buck stop with government then? If enough of us agree that a law should be passed then why not just pass the law? Seems way easier to just make a rule than try to individually convince everyone.
    - dmoy 5y ago
      It's an eventually sort-of-consistent system with a lot of buffering and delay. if enough people agree that a law should be passed, and it's a high enough priority, and the opinion stays that way for a long time, then eventually enough politicians get on board by virtue of pressure from their voting base, and a law gets passed. It's not great. But on the other hand, near-immediate direct democracy is also not great, because it leads to knee-jerk reactions causing laws put in place. I'm thinking of stuff like the USAPATRIOT Act, except worse.
- micropresident 5y ago

Aqua 5y ago

I cringe every time I see such comments. Ban bitcoin or ban beef because it uses too much energy. Humanity will continue to require energy as it advances and banning anything "because it uses too much energy" is a ridiculous advice. How about we ban gold mining, or set quotas on the number of children people may have, that will surely contribute to our CO2 reduction goals. It's also Orwellian and reminiscent of how the world looked like for citizens of the USSR back in 1960-1990

dd36 5y ago
Communities tend to ban harmful things.
- rantwasp 5y ago
  “communities”. it’s all fun and games until I ban something you rely on for your livelihood
  - dd36 5y ago
    I’m sure businesses that rely on dumping arsenic into the local lake don’t like having their livelihood threatened either. Property rights matter. Right now the market is broken.
    - rantwasp 5y ago
      consuming energy (and paying for it) is not even the same species with dumping toxic chemicals
      - dd36 5y ago
        Burning coal literally dumps arsenic into the environment. And to do so for speculative fun is ridiculous.
        rantwasp 5y ago

rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago

Very bad. Ive got another radical take -- cypherpunks should ban proof of stake cryptocurrencies. They are bad for freedom, bad for decentralization, bad for store of value. Wall street tricks attempting to put the genie back in the bottle. Proof of work is the only thing of value, the only distributed consensus model that is secure and the only way forward for store of value cryptocurrencies.

artifact_44 5y ago
100%

satyrnein 5y ago

If you want less carbon burned, tax carbon. I'm skeptical of cryptocurrency, but the idea that regulators, already captured by banks, should aggressively ban new financial products that may one day threaten the incumbents makes me wary.

beowulfey 5y ago
A carbon tax would filter down to the electricity consumer cost. I dont know about you, but I dont want to pay more for electricity so other people can burn electricity for virtual money. Unless you are suggesting taxing crypto itself, in which case… sure!
- cedricd 5y ago
  That's a common take, but a well-designed carbon tax could be made revenue-neutral and non-regressive. In other words, the amount it takes in can be given back to the average person -- in forms of tax rebates, investment in public transit, education, whatever. In an ideal world a carbon tax would have no adverse impact on lower and middle class people. I should also add that in that world higher electricity cost due to carbon tax is a good thing -- it'll help carbon-neutral sources of energy to compete and replace the more dirty forms. Which is exactly what we want.
  - beowulfey 5y ago
    I have nothing against carbon taxes actually would love to see them implemented, but I am not sure how they would help prevent excessive energy use due to crypto. OP was suggesting a carbon tax instead of direct regulation, but I don’t quite get how it would dissuade crypto use without increasing electricity costs.
- eeperson 5y ago
  Consumers can make a net profit if the tax revenue is paid as a dividend to citizens. There are number of papers about this if you are interested [1]. [1] - https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-pricing-studies/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-pricing-studies/

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago

If we are passing radical legislation that cuts across borders I'd much rather see a carbon/greenhouse gas tax.

txsoftwaredev 5y ago
We should impose a large tax on data centers for their massive energy usage to power such "valuable" resources like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  Who the fuck is gonna determine what is valuable? A re-distributive carbon tax incentivizes efficiency, doesn't hit stuff like renewables and allows individuals to keep on choosing what they want to do with their life. Just because you don't find facebook valuable doesn't mean that others feel the same way.

Der_Einzige 5y ago

Forget just the environmental issues. The price of commodity hardware for AI research is astronomical right now (try getting into deep learning right now, I dare you!). Crypto is directly trading off with AI research and game development.

artifact_44 5y ago
Gary Larson: School for the gifted.

fvdessen 5y ago

PoS is not just a more environmentally version of PoW. It is a lot more vulnerable to state level actors. If the state takes over / subverts / influences the limited number of stakeholders, then it is game over. With PoW the state can influence the existing miners, but cannot prevent new independent miners to pop up and counter act.

CarlBeek 5y ago
There are 141,139 validators active in Ethereum as we speak (source: https://beaconcha.in/ https://beaconcha.in/), corrupting that many people is very difficult. There are smaller PoS systems with eg. tens of validators which are more susceptible to state capture. Bitcoin (the network with the most mining effort) lost 25% of their hashing power due to blackouts in Xinjiang. (Soure: https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s=21 https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1384938089748041730?s...) State capture of a majority of Bitcoin miners is comparatively easy. In addition, independent miners have less hardware and that hardware is generally less efficient when compared to the large ASIC farms. In reality a recovery would probably require social consensus and a hard fork
- micropresident 5y ago
  Yeah, and the way they are issuing rewards means there's an incentive to split your validation across multiple nodes to increase your changes at getting rewards. Each one of these costs electricity to run both in terms of bandwidth and electricity. And other methods introduce the possibility of stake grinding. BOTH converge to the same energy usage as mining. OTOH, the legacy financial system is significantly more energy intensive for a given financial network value. You don't think banks and wars in the middle east to maintain the value of the network have an environmental impact?
- eeegnu 5y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong since I've only read the brief overview of how validators work on ethereum.org, but 141k validators doesn't mean anything when every validator is independent / anonymous and someone with 32k eth staked is actually one entity taking on the role of 1000 validators.

macacobranco 5y ago

What about ASIC resistant PoW? Should it be banned too?

rmtech 5y ago

Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are in the process of banning themselves. All that wasted energy is paid for by the holders, and proof-of-stake is just more financially attractive. No government intervention is required IMO.

capableweb 5y ago
> All that wasted energy is paid for by the holders Could you explain me what energy is "wasted" in Proof-of-Work and also how the people currently holding the cryptocurrency is paying for that "waste"? AFAIK, the same number of blocks are made no matter how many transactions are being made or how many holders there are (or how much each holder "holds"), so the energy consumption of Bitcoin remains more or less the same during an hour, only slowly rising as more miners get on-boarded. But the energy consumption of those brought online remains the same over the lifetime of the miner instance itself.

selfhoster11 5y ago

So burning electricity on running a cryptocurrency is not right, but burning electricity on running servers for Facebook or user tracking is all right? If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? If that's not the case, how do you propose to enforce that all use cases use less electricity, and how do you punish those who use too much?

grogenaut 5y ago
We have such a system for appliances already, energy star. And we do restrict the manuf and sale of appliances that can't meet those goals. Same for cars.
quonn 5y ago
The government can simply pass a law. There are far bigger injustices. Why do I pay taxes and Facebook doesn‘t?
- bwb 5y ago
  FB pays insane amounts of taxes. Employment taxes, property taxes, etc. Not to mention taxes on any profits.
  - quonn 5y ago
    As a percentage of their profit? Let me check. Around here small businesses pay around 30%, individuals can pay up to 45%. I doubt Facebook pays that. The tax avoidance schemes in Europe are well documented for all tech companies. And what do you mean by employment taxes? Just the employers part of the income tax?
    - bwb 5y ago
      Why would a company pay the same tax rate as a person? A company pays a tax rate of x% because that income is also taxed when they distribute it to individuals. Thus we've built a system that incentivizes them to invest it back in the company (doesn't always work - but that was the intent). So 21% + 15% to 20% capex on individuals = a tax rate around the same. Now, if you really want to look at the big picture, look at a company's tax rate of 21% on profits, but they also pay taxes on employees of ~21% of salary in the USA not to mention health care (which in europe would be included as taxes so maybe in Europe 46% to 50%). So if payroll is 40% of your costs that is another 8.4% of taxes added in there. And, you can probably add health care as a tax as well. Legal tax avoidance is legal. I hate when people bitch about companies doing legal maneuvers. It is very easy to stop that, apply a tax on gross receipts for all income created in the country. Washington State does that for example if you have a company operating in their state.

jude- 5y ago

More feasible take: ban the trade of PoW coins that cannot be shown to have been mined via green energy.

seniorivn 5y ago
it's all bullshit Just ban people doing bad things, like all of them. Problem solved All problems solved

LeftTriangle 5y ago

You people obsessed with reducing humanity’s energy usage are so tiresome. Anyone who actually cares about the well-being of humanity should be focused on increasing the amount of energy available. I want to climb the kardashev scale, not live in an eco-pod and eat bug burgers so I can scrounge every last joule.

ohgodplsno 5y ago
What you want and the realities of our current world are two very, very different things.
- nmfisher 5y ago
  The reality of the current world is that a lot of people feel exactly like that, so you're unlikely to convince them to change their behaviour. Rather than deny that reality, you're better off working with it to produce more, but cleaner, energy.
- rwcarlsen 5y ago
  Necessity is the mother of invention. [edit] - downvotes because I used the word "mother" maybe? I don't understand this community.
hunter2_ 5y ago
We all want luxury, but at some point the changes that come from energy usage will be very unluxurious, no?
- LeftTriangle 5y ago
  Yeah, maybe when we’ve exhausted the sun’s net output.
tastyfreeze 5y ago
Bingo! The more energy a system has available the greater capability it has. For example, if a mining community is able to generate cheap excess power it opens up possibility for local smelting and foundry industries. I think of each community as a game of Civilization. As you progress you unlock higher rungs of the tech ladder. Exporting your raw materials to later import finished products made from them is a waste of resources and stagnates the local industries at the raw material stage. What industries could be developed in your community if the power was available?

BTCOG 5y ago

Again with this same tired nonsense on Hacker News. Famous for censoring worthwhile comments to death while leaving up misinformed "curious" posts that mislead everyone. Bitcoin is using half of the power as banking systems. Bitcoin is using half of the power, of the gold industry. Might I suggest, if you think you can suggest banning things for using too much carbon, that you first quit working, quit driving your vehicles, and disconnect the power in your house. I don't think it's good for the environment in you doing so. In fact, your carbon consumption should be banned. Turn your computers off. Unplug your wasteful device chargers, you've had enough.

xyzzyz 5y ago
The amount of energy used is only one aspect of the matter. The other is value derived from that energy. I think it is safe to say that regular banking provides not just twice the value of Bitcoin, but in fact probably two orders of magnitude more. Pretty much everyone uses regular banking, while pretty much nobody uses Bitcoin, and not only they use banking more, they use it many times a week or even a day. The comparison is not even close.
- BTCOG 5y ago
  And when the comparison is not even close, why are you the one making it? All you've stated was an old opinion and not a fact about what is more useful, or how they are used. It's totally fine for you to have just said "I don't understand either banking or Bitcoin whatsoever." Bitcoin is going to get a lot more global over the next several years in it's use cases and for savings. I hope to see you commenting later on after becoming more informed about our current times of inflation and what the people want, vs what is forced on everyone so that they have no way to save hard money. The revolution isn't going to wait for everyone who chooses to be truly ignorant about Bitcoin. And there is only Bitcoin.
- lowkey 5y ago
  The regular banking system leaks your purchasing power over time via the mechanism of inflation. The regular banking system relies on the US Dollar which is backed by proof of violence - aka the largest military industrial complex ever created. Externalities are a net negative. It's important to consider the externalities of every system. When compared with the death and destruction and burning oil fields in Iraq, Libya, Syria etc, the cost of proof of work seems trite.

disruptalot 5y ago

This is one of those "Freakonomics" type ideas. On the surface this sounds like bitcoin's PoW use will simply stop. It's actually the entire opposite. When governments ban it, they go after sizeable, identifiable organizations running these operations, that is their only choice. These operations are optimized in their energy usage, because it's only in their interest to reduce their consumption relative to the value of the coin they mine. The moment these operations are shutdown, there is a massive sink in the hash rate, smaller operations and hobbyists will rush in to fill it. Hash rate gradually climbs back up and instead you have 10x the energy usage because you can no longer run the PoW in a scalable way.

socialist_coder 5y ago
I think you're probably right. Money always finds a way.
- zepto 5y ago
  The proposal is to stop Bitcoin/PoW being money. Other forms of money will find a way.
Nursie 5y ago
But in the mean time the value is likely to have tanked, because if they can't trivially be traded for national currency, the interest in them will wither.
- dimmke 5y ago
  This is the thing that has always bugged me about cryptocurrency - people are only passionate about it because they want to make more traditional currency with it. Then they adopt this "decentralized" rhetoric. It's always felt hollow. If owning/trading bitcoin became a crime, it'd be done. Ever since Dogecoin had a moment, there's now a million coins trying to engineer their own "moonshot". This is on top of the security issues and of course the energy issues. Cryptocurrency is garbage.
sdenton4 5y ago

jimbob45 5y ago

Fucking thank you. I get just as many downvotes when I suggest this but it's very obviously the right thing to do. PoW doesn't scale. It eats up power needlessly and we're only stuck on it because the original BTC was a PoW cryptocoin. Simply banning trading of PoW coins would do mounds of good - the crypto community would be better streamlined to move toward PoS coins of the future and environmentalists wouldn't have to waste their resources lobbying to ban BTC anymore.

G3rn0ti 5y ago

> Banning their trade won't categorically stop PoW cryptocurrencies. What it should do is completely tank their value and get the world to move on to less destructive coins. This ban needed to be internationally, though. Pretty difficult to enforce on a global scale. And then it would only have a short term influence on the price of, say, Bitcoin, until enough “black” mining power emerges. I would just relax. Bitcoin is not going to destroy the planet. In the long run it’s going to be a niche financial tool compared to the scale of Ethereum or other competitors (Cardano, Solana or Algorand). It’ll be the PoS enabled DeFi networks that are going to disrupt the banking business.

BTCOG 5y ago
In the long run, it's going to be very green. There are Crypto Climate Accord groups working to ensure Bitcoin is carbon-neutral by 2030. What is being done currently is making leaps and bounds in using solar, hydro, wind and trapped energy for bitcoin mining. It's pushing industry to green. Not the phony narrative that's constantly pushed by people who are quite literally, spreading allowed disinformation across HackerNews for the past several years on end.
- swensel 5y ago
  Are the people downvoting the above comment considering things like trapping excess flare gas [1]? This is energy that is literally wasted otherwise, and would be vented into the atmosphere, if not used for PoW mining (or put to some other undetermined use, but PoW is the only profitable alternative that has made sense so far vs just flaring the gas). Maybe there need to be more guidelines around how to use excess energy instead of coal, but to totally disregard that PoW could be mined from excess energy is shortsighted. Flare gas is just one example. [1] https://oilmanmagazine.com/how-and-why-natural-gas-flaring-is-being-used-to-mine-bitcoin/ https://oilmanmagazine.com/how-and-why-natural-gas-flaring-i...

iabacu 5y ago

> This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof of work cryptocurrencies. That's not only radical, but a grotesque knee jerk reaction. If you think about renewable energy, there's a problem of mismatched production with consumption and transmission. This causes wasted energy (or energy that is very low value), which makes renewable energy projects less viable. Sure, one obvious way to address that is to add batteries to store such energy. Now, go mine (and refine) enough lithium to build utility-scale batteries. That's a huge environmental issue that no one wants to talk about, specially Tesla/Elon. What's a competitor to energy batteries? Proof-of-work mining of bitcoin: it make renewable energy projects economically viable, because the energy of low-usage times can be used to mine bitcoin, which can pay for energy of high-usage times. If there's an environmental/carbon cost to BTC mining, then attach a carbon tax to it (or something like that).

iabacu 5y ago
By the way. If one thinks about tracking the carbon cost of a mined BTC (based on the energy source used to mine it) such that a carbon tax can be accurately exacted, the usage of blockchain to track carbon offsets and cost is a pretty obvious thing that comes to mind.

pamplemoose 5y ago

i'd prefer you ban cars

micropresident 5y ago

Yeah man, Government should point guns at people who don't comply with your ideology! Let's advocate violence against people because they do stuff we don't like!

Spooky23 5y ago

I’m sure the recent, existential hand-wringing over Bitcoin energy consumption has nothing at all to do with upcoming ethereum changes. It’s all bullshit and hype — the crypto equivalent of the Chick-Fil-A cows saying “eat more chicken”.

hannofcart 5y ago

That's a slippery slope of an argument. If the government starts arbitrating on what is a judicious use of energy on environmental grounds, then you're a short step away from banning, say, beef production.

cactus2093 5y ago

This certainly seems like an unnecessarily oppressive stance to take, all effectively at the whim of your own personal aesthetics. There are tons of things that people do that I might deem not worth the environmental impact, like flying a hundred thousand miles a year for business, or eating beef, or driving to work every day, or having bigger houses and lawns than they need. Seems kind of arbitrary to allow most wasteful things that people do but draw a line at being able to participate in a certain kind of blockchain. The per-person impact of holding and transacting with bitcoin is not egregiously high compared to all the other things people do in their day to day life. And based on ethereum's move here, perhaps people are starting to vote with their wallets anyway and such dramatic limiting measures aren't needed?

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
>people are starting to vote with their wallets anyway Did you mean "the rich"?
- cactus2093 5y ago
  "The Big Scary Scare Quotes Rich That We Should Be Eating"? No, that's not exclusively who I mean.

BenoitEssiambre 5y ago

The economic and monetary risks of deflationary coins are potentially much greater than the environmental risks imo (Even Douglas Adams tried to warn us: https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html https://benoitessiambre.com/specter.html ). You don't necessarily need to ban the coins to fix this aspect however, just make sure they don't get integrated in the financial system too much. They're basically digital gold. Gold was ok until central banks tried to anchor to it which caused the Great Depression and maybe even WWII.

DickingAround 5y ago

As a technical person, I think we should be a little more careful than to ban a technology because there's a proposal for a newer tech that could work (knowing if it works is harder than a posting on a website saying it's going great in beta). Crypto at all is risky and the tech is uncertain. Seems pretty extreme to get the guns involved on the premise someone somewhere can do it better.

tphyahoo2 5y ago

You want air conditioning? You want to eat steak? You want some microprocessors with that guided missile? Buy bitcoin. https://web.archive.org/web/20210116135412/https://taaalk.co/t/bitcoin-maxima-other-crypto-things https://web.archive.org/web/20210116135412/https://taaalk.co...

GhostVII 5y ago

How about we just make people pay for their negative externalities, and let them do whatever they want. Tonnes of things people do are wasteful, no one needs a sports car either, but for some people it is worth paying extra for it. Why should it matter what I'm using my electricity for as long as I pay for the negative effects. If you want to encourage other uses of electricity, subsidize them, don't just ban arbitrary forms of consumption.

Nursie 5y ago
> How about we just make people pay for their negative externalities, and let them do whatever they want. Well, for one, because that tends to mean "rich folks and large companies can act with impunity, everyone else not so much". For two, we actually do discriminate quite happily between different uses of things. Maybe it's OK to keep energy prices low for households, as a compromise, but not for crypto mining?
- GhostVII 5y ago
  Whats the problem with rich fold acting with impunity, so long as they pay for what they use? If someone burns enough electricity to power 1000 homes, but they pay for the environmental impact, and are charged enough for the electricity to fund building more generation capacity, that's a net win. Giving each household some amount of free or subsidized power makes sense. If they want to burn that power crypto mining that's their decision.
  - Nursie 5y ago
    > If someone burns enough electricity to power 1000 homes, but they pay for the environmental impact ... Well, firstly, are we even sure that's really possible? > Giving each household some amount of free or subsidized power makes sense Which is basically exactly what I was talking about - we can and do decide that some uses are better than others, and use regulation (some of which may be tax or credit) to achieve that. We already do this. I'm not sure why people are so aghast that we might do it some more for PoW cryptocurrencies.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

We're supposed to just ban uses of energy we don't like? Why not a complete and total ban on electricity consumption by the adtech industry? Surveillance capitalism does more damage to society than these little coins ever will.

kerng 5y ago

I agree that this is good - the world probably only needs one blockchain that is secured by PoW for the most fundamental use cases. Ethereum will drive and that is good - but it solves different problems compared to Bitcoin. In regards to banning PoW, sounds like the net neutrality discussions honestly... so to me that does not make sense for the same reasons. And here is the kicker, because its permissionless, it can't be stopped.

chmike 5y ago

> ban trade of PoW cryptocurrencies That might cause a financial crash of the cryptocurrency market, with the trust issues, etc. It wouldn't be wise.

schmorptron 5y ago
would be funny to look at the internet for a few days though

fredfoobar 5y ago

Holy shit, lol. This is an insane take. Proof of Stake is NOT secure, the stakers can collude to reorganize the chain at almost no cost. This is like the exact system we tried to get away from, the USD system is also a Proof of Stake.

fredfoobar 5y ago
There is no place for a PoS protocol layer on the internet, I'm willing to die on this hill.
Graffur 5y ago
Where can I learn more about this?
- fredfoobar 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwgYDAoZV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrwgYDAoZV0

nanidin 5y ago

I’ve thought through this over the last few days and I don’t think it’s viable unless all countries enact the ban at the same time. Imagine country A bans trade or mining of PoW coins - that puts the citizens of country A at a disadvantage to citizens of other countries, and encourages holders of PoW coins in country A to exfiltrate wealth and capital from country A. You end up needing to solve the same type of problem that PoW solves in order to enact a PoW ban simultaneously across all countries - how can all parties trust that every other party is being honest and will follow through (Byzantine Generals problem)?

mrfusion 5y ago

You people terrify me.

rantwasp 5y ago
if you’re afraid now, wait until you learn that these people vote. democracy! f yeah!

savant_penguin 5y ago

Sure, ban away all PoW crypto, but don't you dare touch my YouTube cat videos and Netflix series ! (that likely use a TON of bandwidth) Jokes aside it's really hard to decide what's reasonable energy usage from waste. Ultimately the real question is who gets to make that decision. And overall, the idea of government getting to decide what are acceptable uses of energy and what isn't is actually terrifying

dehrmann 5y ago

> ban trade of proof of work cryptocurrencies. I'm a crypto-skeptic, but why would I ever hold a crpytocurrency in that scenario? If governments would ban it for environmental goals, they'll ban it for political goals, too. The only interesting bit is cryptocurrencies would have to legitimately bring something new to the table that's actually better than the existing financial system in order to be viable.

woeirua 5y ago

We don't need to ban PoW crypto entirely, just tax the carbon emissions associated with it. If miners can switch their entire operation to geothermal in Iceland, then why should I care?

lhorie 5y ago

I can see that this idea comes from a place of good intentions, but I think this is a slippery slope. With this idea, PoW Ethereum is banned, but PoS Ethereum is ok; how does one even regulate that? And what of things like Chia (proof of space, i.e. "let's hog hard drives")? And what about L2 solutions? And how much is too much? Should Ethereum 2 be banned if Nano is shown to be more scalable? Where does one draw the line? I think that at some point, PoW will become so economically unfeasible that it'll simply make more sense for miners to ditch those coins and whale up on PoS ones.

lucasnortj 5y ago

they should ban cryptos full stop. They have no use case except for criminals

ryanmarsh 5y ago

Banning a certain kind of computation is a novel idea. Was this a knee jerk reaction or have you considered all the other types of computation that should not be allowed and why? Do we have an empirical understanding of the negative impacts of these specific kinds of computation, their general threat to humanity, and the negative side effects of regulation?

anm89 5y ago

How do you ban open source software that millions of people already have? It's like banning algebra or something. You can tell people they can't do it but you can only truly ban it to the extent that you can micro monitor and enforce the actions of every person interested in it. To me this illustrates a lack of understanding of the space.

lancemurdock 5y ago

While the energy consumption of bitcoin is debatable due to the unknown usage of clean, renewable energy (some reports are at 75%) to to secure the network and prevent bad actors, even for arguments sake, we can agree the energy consumption is extremely large. We also do not know how much energy is required to maintain SWIFT, or the global ACH network and other banking services. However, some of the biggest plagues to society are rooted in central banking policies that over time devalue a nations currency through excessive money printing backed by nothing, or gambling via derivatives that when a bubble pops requires bailouts. Even worse, where we are now is done via quantitative easing which is a fancy word for more money printing to buy government debts to keep the economy afloat. If Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies can provide all the same services banks offer (borrowing/lending/saving) and be backed by a finite number ensuring value over time then we, as a society will be less manipulated by politics and therefore experience deflation which will could close wealth gaps. Bitcoin may have an energy problem but the problems it aims to solve are extremely important as well. “Necessity is the mother of invention.” If Bitcoin can really solve some areas maybe the conversation should be about how can get 100% of BTC energy consumption to be renewable.

useful 5y ago

I'd much rather put kwh limits on proof of work. That would stop large farms that aren't green. Outside of ethereum, proof of stake is no different than a database. The ownership is so centralized that you only have 3-5 people/organizations approving everything. The whole point of crypto was to be decentralized, proof of stake is not that. Cardano, solana, they all are pointless as a token because the whole supply is largely owned by a few people.

rattlesnakedave 5y ago

Who decides what is a good use of energy and what isn't?

mfDjB 5y ago

It might be worth noting that not all Proof-of-Work is just finding hashes, newer cryptocurrencies make more economic and intelligent use of the work used for proof.

tromp 5y ago

> proof-of-work simply just isn't necessary to have cryptocurrency. It seems kind of necessary to achieve wide distribution and avoid wealth concentration.

dheera 5y ago

By banning them, don't you increase their value by creating scarcity?

Trias11 5y ago

Think about it from the other side. How about continuing research and development of solutions providing cheaper, greener energy instead of sparking righteous war against something that consumes energy based on incompetent social media fart? The loudest voices against something are typically hypocrites that happily fly on their gas guzzling private jets bitching about people driving their oh so inefficient cars to work.

lend000 5y ago

This is an Orwellian take to want the government to tell you how you're allowed to use electricity. Is watching TV a waste of energy? How much energy goes into steaming Netflix? If you want to target an externality of the free market, do it directly: simply tax emissions. This will guide the market towards greener energy generation and direct capital out of activities that produce emissions without generated value.

junseth 5y ago

What if you simply don't know enough to not know that you're both wrong and being lied to by the ETH marketing team? Would you be embarrassed that you believed rhetoric? Probably means you would be easily susceptible to most conspiracy theories.

jMyles 5y ago

Even if banning PoW were agreeable on logical grounds (ie, overcoming the arguments of the sibling comments to this one), is there any reason to believe that such a law will: * Reduce trade * Reduce value * Reduce carbon use? Is there a case ever where an illicit market found a price equilibrium which was lower than the licit one? And, if such a ban does cause the price go up, won't the same incentives cause continued mining competition?

rvz 5y ago

> This may be a radical take, but I think nations should introduce some unprecedented legislation: ban trade of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Unless you want to also ban servers or services that are using deep learning training, decoding massive videos and livestreams on storage systems that are also burning up the planet. It's not fine to allow PoW cryptocurrencies to continue to burn the planet but collecting mass amounts of user data and using wasteful deep learning training continuously is fine to burn up the planet on GCP, AWS and Azure?

citilife 5y ago

Bitcoins "power consumption" has two aspects - mining and processing transactions. The power consumption used for mining (or processing) is directly correlated to the relative earning potential - i.e. bitcoin price - power cost. Mining takes up the vast majority of the computation(s) and mining bitcoin should end somewhere between 2040 and 2050. That is to say, it's self correcting. If the price of energy increases, there is less mining. Alternatively, the miners are also incentivized to find cheaper or develop cheaper alternatives; this spurs innovation. If prices rise due to mining, innovation will take place and more energy will be developed. There's nothing wrong with this mechanism, as it corrects itself. In 2050 when you can no longer mine bitcoin we will that have an abundance of cheap power. Which is the single greatest factor in reducing poverty. Frankly, I think this comment is off base. So far there have been zero negative measurable impacts from power usage related to crypto.

meowkit 5y ago
This is a really weak argument. The better argument is we shouldn’t tell people how to use energy they purchase and to tax consumption of it. > innovation will take place and more energy will be developed. This has way too many assumptions baked in. Increased demand will not guarantee a clean supply, nor does it guarantee technological progress in performance of efficiency.

delaaxe 5y ago

Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as Christmas lights in the USA. Should we ban Christmas lights because of their energy usage? This debate is turning to madness https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-us-christmas-lights/ https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-mining-energy-consumption-us-...

fuddle 5y ago

I'd be in favour of banning the use of fossil fuels for corporations mining proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. There is a few examples of Bitcoin miners using Coal power sources!

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

> Ban their trade because global society shouldn't accept rampant incentives to literally burn up energy Videogames run GPUs at full capacity too, we should ban them too. No one NEEDS to pretend to be a cowboy for 100+ hours each across 36 million GPUs. Actually maybe there should be a ban on computing power above mobile CPUs available to non-government bodies, if this really is so devastating to the environment we need to limit the amount of damage people can cause as individuals, why does a normal person need a GPU anyway when smart phone graphics should be enough.

goda90 5y ago
But gamers aren't buying up dozens of GPUs each to pretend to be a cowboy, and they don't pretend to be a cowboy 24/7.
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  They might only have one GPU each but there are a lot more of them, if even half of all people who bought RDR2 complete it that would be similar to 1.5 billion GPU hours of crypto mining (Eth for example). 32 million bought it, takes about 100 hours to complete runs GPU full capacity. If we're going to say using GPU computing power is bad for the environment then we can't just stop at crypto because it's convenient. We have to look at all computing and videogames isn't something that should be considered essential either.

627467 5y ago

Government can already effectively (and is already inadvertently doing so) prevent mining by manipulating energy prices within it's jurisdiction. It does NOT mean that government can easily ban the use of PoW blockchains. Miners will move to where is is profitable and will be ultimately incentivized to find cheaper (ultimately cleaner) means to mine.

generalizations 5y ago

This just sounds like an excuse to ban something that governments (read: the US) are trying to bring under control. First it was 'but criminals use it'. Now it's 'think of the environment'. What's the next excuse going to be?

reedjosh 5y ago

POW guarantees distributed security better than any other currency so far. POS relies on a _relatively_ small number of nodes to run the network. POW is more _government_ proof than any other method. To many the threat of central bank digital currencies is justification enough for POW's energy consumption.

jwblackwell 5y ago

On this logic we should also ban Christmas lights