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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'

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.
graeme 5y ago
If Statistia is to be believed, Facebook consumes 22x less energy than Bitcoin. 5 vs 110 Terawatt hours. And Bitcoin is hardly used for any transactions, and its energy usage will increase linearly with BTC price. (If someone has a direct source that would be great. Statista is not good) Update: seems the FB figure is correct, for 2019: https://sustainability.fb.com/report-pages/renewable-energy/ https://sustainability.fb.com/report-pages/renewable-energy/
- cm2187 5y ago
  Why does the energy moves with the price? Is it because of increased number of transactions?
  - brazzy 5y ago
    No, it's because competition between miners necessarily drives the hash rate and thus energy usage to scale up with the value of mining rewards and transaction fees.
    - cm2187 5y ago
      But if there aren't more transaction (as number of transactions), what happens when the hash rate increases? They hash incomplete blocks of transactions? Or does the same block gets confirmed by a greater number of miners?
      - est31 5y ago
        The second answer, although there is only one "winner" of each block's competition, so it's only one miner/mining pool which ends up confirming a transaction. It's controlled by a hardness parameter that's readjusted automatically in a regular fashion.
  - wcoenen 5y ago
    Miners tend to increase their hashrate because that's how they compete for block rewards. However, the electrical energy a miner spends on finding blocks should not be more than the value of the block rewards, otherwise they would operate at a loss. This provides a ceiling for the energy expenditure. Therefore, if the price of Bitcoin doubles, miners can afford to burn twice as much electricity. (Roughly. This is a simplification of course.)
gpm 5y ago
I think the proposal here is very simple. Pass a law against proof of work crypto currencies, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and deal with the next big waste of power when it comes about by passing a law about it. Don't address of any the things that you are proposing need addressing, because they don't need to be addressed in the same law, or really addressed right now at all. The law doesn't need to try and anticipate the actions that occur in the future, we will still have a legislature in the future capable of addressing the future when it comes about. The law needs to address the actions of today.
- beaner 5y ago
  You answered literally nothing that the person you're responding to asked.
  - Garlef 5y ago
    You are right. Instead, they explained why these questions are (partially) misguided. That's also an answer.
    - beaner 5y ago
      They didn't do that either. It reads more like avoidance. The semblance of an answer by posting anything, rather than a plain, direct response. Which gives the original questions more weight: why were they not able to be responded to directly? Are the questions potent? Your reply here is just shifty on shifty.
      - stale2002 5y ago
        You really don't understand the problem with asking questions like "well who decides?!?" To literally every proposal of legislation ever? Because that is what always happens. Every time someone make s a general proposal, for any law at all, there are people making the same old, dumb argument, of "well who decides?!?" Every single time. Sure you do not believe that all laws ever are wrong, right? Because the answer to this dumb question is the same as for every law ever. That makes it valid, unless you believe that all laws ever are bad.
est31 5y ago
IDK in Germany it's forbidden per § 30 StVO to drive around senselessly inside settlements. You are still allowed to drive around, even if the reasons are stupid. But if they are too stupid, police can fine you. There is a youtuber in Berlin who specializes in driving around for hours and he's been stopped by police already. The original video has been made private [0], but a raw version of it still exists [1]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLozreFvl24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLozreFvl24 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LfccX_pBHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LfccX_pBHM
- riskable 5y ago
  Is the reason for the law to reduce the number of cars on the road or is it more to reduce emissions? I'm curious if someone driving an electric would get ticketed as well.
  - hobofan 5y ago
    It's mainly to reduce emissions and to protect the local environment. The paragraph also more generally states that you have to "prevent unnecessary noise pollution and emissions", which as we learn in driving school also means shutting off your motor when sitting at a red light.
    - lostandbored 5y ago
      So at redlights you need to turn off your car, then turn it back on when it changes to green EDIT: Specify the part of the post that bewildered me.
      - kapp_in_life 5y ago
        Many recent car models do this by themselves nowadays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-stop_system#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-stop_system#History
        5y ago
trimbo 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? Spinning up cores to do intensive math for the sake of its difficulty is wasting energy by design. PoW's financial incentive is to waste power. Facebook spends a massive amount of money on compute, and their profit is only as good as the margin they can make over that compute cost. Therefore they have a financial incentive to save power.
baby 5y ago
Yes. The latter has value whereas the former is just dumb as green cryptocurrencies exist.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  Facebook actively makes the world a worse place in every way -- be it be providing a captive audience for authoritarian governments to push their propaganda, for surveillance states to collect and build models to control humanity, or trying to control the flow of money and implement economic censorship on Earth via Diem.
  - baby 5y ago
    Agree to disagree
hannob 5y ago
The arbiter is "if you build something that is build to be as inefficient as possible by design that's forbidden". I can't think of anything other than PoW that matches this.
pjc50 5y ago
Burning gasoline to drive somewhere is fine, but (at least in my city) sitting parked with your engine running incurs a fine. Fundamentally it's become too big a waste to ignore, like so many other things. We banned incandescent bulbs, we can ban proof-of-waste, which is basically an incandescent bulb that never illuminates anything.
helmholtz 5y ago
Why do HN comment threads always end up as Pedantry Pageants where all ye who dare comment must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child comment about failing to do so. It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring. It always follows the same pattern too. "Where do you draw the line?" "Who decides what's the truth?" Always the same fucking slippery slope fallacy. Every fucking time "Regulations" of any kind come up. I think the HN audience wears Being Anal as a kind of badge of honour. To paraphrase Alan Watts slightly, do you know of a law that set everything to right? Let's just all sit around twiddling our thumbs eh? Since you obviously didn't really offer a counter solution.
- declnz 5y ago
  Yes. In fact perhaps we could automate these, with GPT-3! Unless, err, that's already happened
- JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
  Because it's missing the forest for the trees. Look at total energy usage, across all industries. This is more an indictment of cryptocurrency than it is about actually caring about the environment. Compare it to say, eliminating all gas vehicles for electric cars. Where is the HN thread advocating for that, if the end result would be massively fewer carbon emissions versus this proposal? My criticism is this proposal is like banning plastic straws. It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real solution.
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    > It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real solution. modern politics in a nutshell
  - kaesar14 5y ago
    Are you joking? There are plenty of conversations on Hackernews about electric vehicles, it just so happens that replacing every single car in the world with a totally different energy system is a way harder problem than banning useless cryptocurrencies that are burning energy to fuel equity bubbles.
JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
It's not about power. Well, not electrical power. It's about control over our currency. The argument is a trojan horse for an effective ban on the entire category of currencies not controlled by central authorities. Without Proof of work, cryptocurrency would have never been established as a novel concept. Proof of work was the only rationale way to decide who should initially own how many units of the currency.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  Does it need to remain? At some point coins were composed entirely of valuable metals because that's how their value was determined, but we've moved on from that. Can't we move on from proof of work as well?
adonovan 5y ago
Exactly, that's how laws work: they express value judgements. Installing solar on the roof? Good, the people will help you pay for it. Earning a fortune? Bad, the people want a piece of that. The laws set up the playing field, and the market responds to the incentives. There has never been any such thing as a "free" market, and it's a good thing too.
shiado 5y ago
HN embodies this weird upper class environmentalist fascism where they proudly pick and choose what the plebes should be allowed to do with their lives based on totally logically inconsistent environmental reasons. The Musk thing was so funny for this. "No you plebes should have no recourse or experimentation against a fiat system it's bad for the environment, now don't mind me driving my Tesla around to do things like shop at expensive stores in my gated community or just kick it on the weekend doing a road trip in my TOTALLY ENVIRONMENTALLY NECESSARY electric vehicle that uses electricity from my wall socket not derived from fossil fuels at all which was not mined from not dubious sources whose environmental impact is totally not cool". I can't imagine where this ideology will land but I imagine the scope will expand greatly outside of PoW cryptocurrencies. Pretty soon commenters here will be scolding your for turning up your graphics settings in AAA games but only if you're poor and your house is in a dump that doesn't have a renewable grid.
- helmholtz 5y ago
  Nah, you're right. Best not to do anything just in case we incovenience the 'plebes'. Or just in case First They Came For My PoW's And I Said Nothing. Then They Came For My AAA Games. Nevermind the burning planet, nothing should ever be done for the greater good if 100% logical consistency isn't baked into the thought. Always the same fucking slippery slope!
  - shiado 5y ago
    You just proved my point. Your comment presents the idea that Bitcoin is "burning the planet" and needs to be focused on with ZERO elaboration as to why, then you use an appeal to emotion invoking the undefinable term "greater good", then you ignore logical consistency as if it doesn't matter when making an argument. Absolutely pathetic.
    - StandardFuture 5y ago
      Don't worry. There are many here who agree with everything you are saying.
tnecio 5y ago
I think the real problem is that there is no cost associated with emitting CO2 for the emitter even though it creates tremendous costs for the society in the long term. If there was a tax associated with the act of emitting CO2 itself (purpose of which could be to invest in green technologies) then the market could be the arbiter.
gideon13 5y ago
I think the correct comparison is against the Bloomberg Terminal, through which the vast majority of capital flows responsible for environmental damage, occur. Not only does the terminal itself use a vast amount of power with its humongous do-it-all servers and 8-screen users, but the facilitated capital flows, commodity trading, speculation, are probably responsible for 2-3 orders of magnitude more environmental damage than proof of work.
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
Yes, what about that other thing? Look over there! Is there literally any response that isn't this mere Whataboutism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- jerry1979 5y ago
  Not everything is "Whataboutism". The parent poster wants to know how we should treat various uses of energy in the context of calls for the outright banning of specific uses. How can you expect them to talk about that topic without talking about the various uses of energy that currently exist?
scotty79 5y ago
Crypto is currently the only viable reason to overbuild renewables so we can expand their capacity faster than the battery technology allows us. Just tax the carbon sources and ban building new coal power plants or reactivating defunct ones. Instead of downvoting please give me one other example why would rational market entity build more renewables than to satisfy demand when production peeks. Because to go full renewables without batteries (and we barely have any when compared to our renewables) we need to always meet the demand even when renewable energy production is the lowest. And what should rational market entity do with the power at all other times where production is far higher than demand? Because "mine cryptocurrencies with it" seems like the only reasonalble answer in the world where cryptocurrencies exist and people with too much money buy them enthusiastically.
- iabacu 5y ago
  It's amazing to me that the real answer on how to make renewable energy economical (while avoiding the ecological toxicity of building utility-scale batteries) are getting downvoted.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Ajedi32 5y ago
Exactly! Just because you don't think something has value doesn't make it so. Value is a matter for the market to decide. Electricity usage has almost no negative externalities. Electricity production does. Attacking people for using their own resources on something that they find to be useful and worthwhile is foolish. Confront the actual problem, and quit harassing innocent third parties.
DCKing 5y ago
> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? I see a lot of people replying with a slippery slope argument of this nature, which makes me think I should explain my argument better. I'm not arguing that burning electricity alone is the problem. I'm arguing that burning electricity for the direct purpose of making a financial product is a problem for society, when 1) the financial product explicitly incentivizes burning up as much as you can to make more money and/or 2) burning up that energy can be alleviated by other technical solutions. I'm not arguing that mining should be illegal. I'm saying the 'sale' of the results of that mining should be illegal. Using or making incandescent lightbulbs is not illegal, but the sale of them is banned or restricted in large portions of the world [1]. Less harmful alternatives exist, so sale is disincentivized, the world moves on. This is not the government deciding how you spend energy resources. You can continue to mine all you want. But you shouldn't be rewarded for that. One thing I should point out is that I recognize that an alternative solution for these incentives is to make electricity always so expensive that it costs more money in electricity spend to mine crypto than you can make money of it. Make electricity price depend on crypto price. Needless to say I don't see that working out :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_light_bulbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_ligh...
austincheney 5y ago
> who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? Congress, courts, Department of Energy.
crazygringo 5y ago
> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? The legislature and the regulatory agencies it has created, obviously. The exact same way literally every other environmental regulation has ever been passed. There are entire divisions of agencies dedicated to drawing the line of "too much" in all sorts of areas, for pollution, poisons, contamination, energy usage, etc. In fact, pretty much everyone but extreme libertarians agrees this is one of the main functions of government. So while you might not agree on the resulting policy or even the mechanisms that arrived at it, it is a solved problem. You don't need to wonder how we'd accomplish it -- that part is easy.
schmorptron 5y ago
The arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case is the fact that proof of work systems are literally designed to waste resources / power.
oefrha 5y ago
Last time I checked, Facebook isn’t designed to adjust its computational difficulty in order to suck up any amount of energy thrown at it to do the same (pitiful) amount of work.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? The difference is that Facebook’s energy use potential is limited and gets better with improved computer tech. There is a limit to how much analysis you can do. As you get more efficient hardware, the energy use would go down. Facebook also invests a lot of effort in optimizing their code to run more efficiently. With proof of work crypto, the only limit is the price of crypto. Despite any efficiency gains, you can always expect the energy use to scale with the price of crypto. For example, a 10x more efficient miner, won’t cause 10x less energy use, it may actually increase energy use as more people mine with higher rate electricity. There is a chance that we develop a situation that the most monetarily efficient thing you could do with electricity is to mine proof of work crypto. If that becomes the case, then even a carbon tax won’t help because proof-of-work crypto can easily pay the tax compared to all the other uses of electricity.
dheera 5y ago
It's easier to get Facebook to be carbon neutral because they are a centralized institution, and it only takes a committed government to zero down on a corporation and force them to move to clean energy or pay a carbon tax. With crypto it's too decentralized to implement either. > who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case Ultimately Mother Nature will be the arbiter. If people spend too much time arguing about politics instead of either lowering power usage or moving to clean energy, those people will be killed sooner or later.
takeda 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? Yep, I hate to say it, but even FB is more useful compared to BTC. No one uses BTC for actual payment but to hold a value. People holding BTC could just switch to MtG cards and saved tons of energy without losing any benefits that they are currently using.
memming 5y ago
We gotta optimize the bottleneck (and future bottlenecks).
mgdev 5y ago
Facebook is net-zero emissions.
agloeregrets 5y ago
> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? "If there is a clear and obvious better with minimal impact." It's just that simple. We make choices like this all the time. Here in the US we set CARB rules to slow emissions but we don't just ban old cars even though that would be better for the environment. Grey is okay in laws if the black and white bit behind it is clear! (Reduce emissions if possible with least possible impact on people.) Otherwise you will never be able to improve anything until the harmful methods have grown too much.
csomar 5y ago
> who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? The king. The digital crypto king.
chrisan 5y ago
I'm not a user of Facebook, but is their electrical use near bitcoin levels? The quick google says facebook uses 5 while bitcoin uses 143 terawatt-hours
Scramblejams 5y ago
This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but I keep waiting for Google's Chrome team to add an energy rating icon to the browser that gives you a rough feel for how energy intensive a given page is. At some point the shaming would begin, web devs would respond, and then I'd generally get what I'm really after -- much faster page load times!
Aunche 5y ago
The difference is that Facebook is actually using electricity to provide services that somebody wants. It's just that you happen to disagree with the value of this service. Meanwhile, Bitcoin uses a country's worth of electricity just to provide a tiny amount of accounting.
Skunkleton 5y ago
Facebook used 5 TWhr in 2019 (citation: totally unverified top summary from google). Bitcoin alone is estimated to have used 110 TWhr in a year. To put that in perspective, that is sixfold the power output of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Produces power on the order of magnitude of detonating two small atomic bombs per day.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
The key difference is that I'm certain that Facebook makes continuous efforts to use less energy. Maybe not for environmental reasons, but they have an economic incentive to increase efficiency. Regulating the energy consumption/efficiency is more akin to fuel efficiency standards for cars.
bcrosby95 5y ago
The elephant in the room is bitcoin literally requires the mass consumption of computation to work - the more the better. And it was designed this way. In comparison, Facebook and industrial processes work to make their processes more efficient and use less resources for their workload. Bitcoin will just gobble up any efficiency to do more mining and end up consuming the same amount of resources. Bitcoin is an endless energy pit. The same isn't true of things like Facebook.
8note 5y ago
Burning energy to prove that you burned energy is not right. You can run cryptocurrency without requiring proof that burned electricity. You don't need to worry about how much electricity was burned, only that it wasn't done in exchange for a plaque saying "I filled a swimming pool with gasoline, then lit it on fire"
okareaman 5y ago
I know something about addiction so to me Bitcoin enthusiasts sound like alcoholics who justify their drinking by saying "many people drink and doctors say a little drinking is good for you so lay off me." The fact that I couldn't even criticize Bitcoin's energy usage on HN util Elon Musk came out against it reinforces my opinion that it's an addiction. I imagine Bitcoin is a game like poker with a bluffing and holding strategy. Bitcoin as it is currently played has many addicted to it without regard to disastrous environmental consequences.
imtringued 5y ago
> and how do you punish those who use too much? CO2 taxes

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.

graeme 5y ago

If Statistia is to be believed, Facebook consumes 22x less energy than Bitcoin. 5 vs 110 Terawatt hours. And Bitcoin is hardly used for any transactions, and its energy usage will increase linearly with BTC price. (If someone has a direct source that would be great. Statista is not good) Update: seems the FB figure is correct, for 2019: https://sustainability.fb.com/report-pages/renewable-energy/ https://sustainability.fb.com/report-pages/renewable-energy/

cm2187 5y ago
Why does the energy moves with the price? Is it because of increased number of transactions?
- brazzy 5y ago
  No, it's because competition between miners necessarily drives the hash rate and thus energy usage to scale up with the value of mining rewards and transaction fees.
  - cm2187 5y ago
    But if there aren't more transaction (as number of transactions), what happens when the hash rate increases? They hash incomplete blocks of transactions? Or does the same block gets confirmed by a greater number of miners?
    - est31 5y ago
      The second answer, although there is only one "winner" of each block's competition, so it's only one miner/mining pool which ends up confirming a transaction. It's controlled by a hardness parameter that's readjusted automatically in a regular fashion.
- wcoenen 5y ago
  Miners tend to increase their hashrate because that's how they compete for block rewards. However, the electrical energy a miner spends on finding blocks should not be more than the value of the block rewards, otherwise they would operate at a loss. This provides a ceiling for the energy expenditure. Therefore, if the price of Bitcoin doubles, miners can afford to burn twice as much electricity. (Roughly. This is a simplification of course.)

gpm 5y ago

I think the proposal here is very simple. Pass a law against proof of work crypto currencies, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and deal with the next big waste of power when it comes about by passing a law about it. Don't address of any the things that you are proposing need addressing, because they don't need to be addressed in the same law, or really addressed right now at all. The law doesn't need to try and anticipate the actions that occur in the future, we will still have a legislature in the future capable of addressing the future when it comes about. The law needs to address the actions of today.

beaner 5y ago
You answered literally nothing that the person you're responding to asked.
- Garlef 5y ago
  You are right. Instead, they explained why these questions are (partially) misguided. That's also an answer.
  - beaner 5y ago
    They didn't do that either. It reads more like avoidance. The semblance of an answer by posting anything, rather than a plain, direct response. Which gives the original questions more weight: why were they not able to be responded to directly? Are the questions potent? Your reply here is just shifty on shifty.
    - stale2002 5y ago
      You really don't understand the problem with asking questions like "well who decides?!?" To literally every proposal of legislation ever? Because that is what always happens. Every time someone make s a general proposal, for any law at all, there are people making the same old, dumb argument, of "well who decides?!?" Every single time. Sure you do not believe that all laws ever are wrong, right? Because the answer to this dumb question is the same as for every law ever. That makes it valid, unless you believe that all laws ever are bad.

est31 5y ago

IDK in Germany it's forbidden per § 30 StVO to drive around senselessly inside settlements. You are still allowed to drive around, even if the reasons are stupid. But if they are too stupid, police can fine you. There is a youtuber in Berlin who specializes in driving around for hours and he's been stopped by police already. The original video has been made private [0], but a raw version of it still exists [1]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLozreFvl24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLozreFvl24 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LfccX_pBHM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LfccX_pBHM

riskable 5y ago
Is the reason for the law to reduce the number of cars on the road or is it more to reduce emissions? I'm curious if someone driving an electric would get ticketed as well.
- hobofan 5y ago
  It's mainly to reduce emissions and to protect the local environment. The paragraph also more generally states that you have to "prevent unnecessary noise pollution and emissions", which as we learn in driving school also means shutting off your motor when sitting at a red light.
  - lostandbored 5y ago
    So at redlights you need to turn off your car, then turn it back on when it changes to green EDIT: Specify the part of the post that bewildered me.
    - kapp_in_life 5y ago
      Many recent car models do this by themselves nowadays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-stop_system#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Start-stop_system#History
      - 5y ago

trimbo 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? Spinning up cores to do intensive math for the sake of its difficulty is wasting energy by design. PoW's financial incentive is to waste power. Facebook spends a massive amount of money on compute, and their profit is only as good as the margin they can make over that compute cost. Therefore they have a financial incentive to save power.

baby 5y ago

Yes. The latter has value whereas the former is just dumb as green cryptocurrencies exist.

rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
Facebook actively makes the world a worse place in every way -- be it be providing a captive audience for authoritarian governments to push their propaganda, for surveillance states to collect and build models to control humanity, or trying to control the flow of money and implement economic censorship on Earth via Diem.
- baby 5y ago
  Agree to disagree

hannob 5y ago

The arbiter is "if you build something that is build to be as inefficient as possible by design that's forbidden". I can't think of anything other than PoW that matches this.

pjc50 5y ago

Burning gasoline to drive somewhere is fine, but (at least in my city) sitting parked with your engine running incurs a fine. Fundamentally it's become too big a waste to ignore, like so many other things. We banned incandescent bulbs, we can ban proof-of-waste, which is basically an incandescent bulb that never illuminates anything.

helmholtz 5y ago

Why do HN comment threads always end up as Pedantry Pageants where all ye who dare comment must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child comment about failing to do so. It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring. It always follows the same pattern too. "Where do you draw the line?" "Who decides what's the truth?" Always the same fucking slippery slope fallacy. Every fucking time "Regulations" of any kind come up. I think the HN audience wears Being Anal as a kind of badge of honour. To paraphrase Alan Watts slightly, do you know of a law that set everything to right? Let's just all sit around twiddling our thumbs eh? Since you obviously didn't really offer a counter solution.

declnz 5y ago
Yes. In fact perhaps we could automate these, with GPT-3! Unless, err, that's already happened
JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
Because it's missing the forest for the trees. Look at total energy usage, across all industries. This is more an indictment of cryptocurrency than it is about actually caring about the environment. Compare it to say, eliminating all gas vehicles for electric cars. Where is the HN thread advocating for that, if the end result would be massively fewer carbon emissions versus this proposal? My criticism is this proposal is like banning plastic straws. It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real solution.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  > It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real solution. modern politics in a nutshell
- kaesar14 5y ago
  Are you joking? There are plenty of conversations on Hackernews about electric vehicles, it just so happens that replacing every single car in the world with a totally different energy system is a way harder problem than banning useless cryptocurrencies that are burning energy to fuel equity bubbles.

JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago

It's not about power. Well, not electrical power. It's about control over our currency. The argument is a trojan horse for an effective ban on the entire category of currencies not controlled by central authorities. Without Proof of work, cryptocurrency would have never been established as a novel concept. Proof of work was the only rationale way to decide who should initially own how many units of the currency.

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
Does it need to remain? At some point coins were composed entirely of valuable metals because that's how their value was determined, but we've moved on from that. Can't we move on from proof of work as well?

adonovan 5y ago

Exactly, that's how laws work: they express value judgements. Installing solar on the roof? Good, the people will help you pay for it. Earning a fortune? Bad, the people want a piece of that. The laws set up the playing field, and the market responds to the incentives. There has never been any such thing as a "free" market, and it's a good thing too.

shiado 5y ago

HN embodies this weird upper class environmentalist fascism where they proudly pick and choose what the plebes should be allowed to do with their lives based on totally logically inconsistent environmental reasons. The Musk thing was so funny for this. "No you plebes should have no recourse or experimentation against a fiat system it's bad for the environment, now don't mind me driving my Tesla around to do things like shop at expensive stores in my gated community or just kick it on the weekend doing a road trip in my TOTALLY ENVIRONMENTALLY NECESSARY electric vehicle that uses electricity from my wall socket not derived from fossil fuels at all which was not mined from not dubious sources whose environmental impact is totally not cool". I can't imagine where this ideology will land but I imagine the scope will expand greatly outside of PoW cryptocurrencies. Pretty soon commenters here will be scolding your for turning up your graphics settings in AAA games but only if you're poor and your house is in a dump that doesn't have a renewable grid.

helmholtz 5y ago
Nah, you're right. Best not to do anything just in case we incovenience the 'plebes'. Or just in case First They Came For My PoW's And I Said Nothing. Then They Came For My AAA Games. Nevermind the burning planet, nothing should ever be done for the greater good if 100% logical consistency isn't baked into the thought. Always the same fucking slippery slope!
- shiado 5y ago
  You just proved my point. Your comment presents the idea that Bitcoin is "burning the planet" and needs to be focused on with ZERO elaboration as to why, then you use an appeal to emotion invoking the undefinable term "greater good", then you ignore logical consistency as if it doesn't matter when making an argument. Absolutely pathetic.
  - StandardFuture 5y ago
    Don't worry. There are many here who agree with everything you are saying.

tnecio 5y ago

I think the real problem is that there is no cost associated with emitting CO2 for the emitter even though it creates tremendous costs for the society in the long term. If there was a tax associated with the act of emitting CO2 itself (purpose of which could be to invest in green technologies) then the market could be the arbiter.

gideon13 5y ago

I think the correct comparison is against the Bloomberg Terminal, through which the vast majority of capital flows responsible for environmental damage, occur. Not only does the terminal itself use a vast amount of power with its humongous do-it-all servers and 8-screen users, but the facilitated capital flows, commodity trading, speculation, are probably responsible for 2-3 orders of magnitude more environmental damage than proof of work.

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

Yes, what about that other thing? Look over there! Is there literally any response that isn't this mere Whataboutism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

jerry1979 5y ago
Not everything is "Whataboutism". The parent poster wants to know how we should treat various uses of energy in the context of calls for the outright banning of specific uses. How can you expect them to talk about that topic without talking about the various uses of energy that currently exist?

scotty79 5y ago

Crypto is currently the only viable reason to overbuild renewables so we can expand their capacity faster than the battery technology allows us. Just tax the carbon sources and ban building new coal power plants or reactivating defunct ones. Instead of downvoting please give me one other example why would rational market entity build more renewables than to satisfy demand when production peeks. Because to go full renewables without batteries (and we barely have any when compared to our renewables) we need to always meet the demand even when renewable energy production is the lowest. And what should rational market entity do with the power at all other times where production is far higher than demand? Because "mine cryptocurrencies with it" seems like the only reasonalble answer in the world where cryptocurrencies exist and people with too much money buy them enthusiastically.

iabacu 5y ago
It's amazing to me that the real answer on how to make renewable energy economical (while avoiding the ecological toxicity of building utility-scale batteries) are getting downvoted.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Ajedi32 5y ago

Exactly! Just because you don't think something has value doesn't make it so. Value is a matter for the market to decide. Electricity usage has almost no negative externalities. Electricity production does. Attacking people for using their own resources on something that they find to be useful and worthwhile is foolish. Confront the actual problem, and quit harassing innocent third parties.

DCKing 5y ago

> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? I see a lot of people replying with a slippery slope argument of this nature, which makes me think I should explain my argument better. I'm not arguing that burning electricity alone is the problem. I'm arguing that burning electricity for the direct purpose of making a financial product is a problem for society, when 1) the financial product explicitly incentivizes burning up as much as you can to make more money and/or 2) burning up that energy can be alleviated by other technical solutions. I'm not arguing that mining should be illegal. I'm saying the 'sale' of the results of that mining should be illegal. Using or making incandescent lightbulbs is not illegal, but the sale of them is banned or restricted in large portions of the world [1]. Less harmful alternatives exist, so sale is disincentivized, the world moves on. This is not the government deciding how you spend energy resources. You can continue to mine all you want. But you shouldn't be rewarded for that. One thing I should point out is that I recognize that an alternative solution for these incentives is to make electricity always so expensive that it costs more money in electricity spend to mine crypto than you can make money of it. Make electricity price depend on crypto price. Needless to say I don't see that working out :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_light_bulbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_incandescent_ligh...

austincheney 5y ago

> who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? Congress, courts, Department of Energy.

crazygringo 5y ago

> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? The legislature and the regulatory agencies it has created, obviously. The exact same way literally every other environmental regulation has ever been passed. There are entire divisions of agencies dedicated to drawing the line of "too much" in all sorts of areas, for pollution, poisons, contamination, energy usage, etc. In fact, pretty much everyone but extreme libertarians agrees this is one of the main functions of government. So while you might not agree on the resulting policy or even the mechanisms that arrived at it, it is a solved problem. You don't need to wonder how we'd accomplish it -- that part is easy.

schmorptron 5y ago

The arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case is the fact that proof of work systems are literally designed to waste resources / power.

oefrha 5y ago

Last time I checked, Facebook isn’t designed to adjust its computational difficulty in order to suck up any amount of energy thrown at it to do the same (pitiful) amount of work.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? The difference is that Facebook’s energy use potential is limited and gets better with improved computer tech. There is a limit to how much analysis you can do. As you get more efficient hardware, the energy use would go down. Facebook also invests a lot of effort in optimizing their code to run more efficiently. With proof of work crypto, the only limit is the price of crypto. Despite any efficiency gains, you can always expect the energy use to scale with the price of crypto. For example, a 10x more efficient miner, won’t cause 10x less energy use, it may actually increase energy use as more people mine with higher rate electricity. There is a chance that we develop a situation that the most monetarily efficient thing you could do with electricity is to mine proof of work crypto. If that becomes the case, then even a carbon tax won’t help because proof-of-work crypto can easily pay the tax compared to all the other uses of electricity.

dheera 5y ago

It's easier to get Facebook to be carbon neutral because they are a centralized institution, and it only takes a committed government to zero down on a corporation and force them to move to clean energy or pay a carbon tax. With crypto it's too decentralized to implement either. > who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case Ultimately Mother Nature will be the arbiter. If people spend too much time arguing about politics instead of either lowering power usage or moving to clean energy, those people will be killed sooner or later.

takeda 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? Yep, I hate to say it, but even FB is more useful compared to BTC. No one uses BTC for actual payment but to hold a value. People holding BTC could just switch to MtG cards and saved tons of energy without losing any benefits that they are currently using.

memming 5y ago

We gotta optimize the bottleneck (and future bottlenecks).

mgdev 5y ago

Facebook is net-zero emissions.

agloeregrets 5y ago

> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? "If there is a clear and obvious better with minimal impact." It's just that simple. We make choices like this all the time. Here in the US we set CARB rules to slow emissions but we don't just ban old cars even though that would be better for the environment. Grey is okay in laws if the black and white bit behind it is clear! (Reduce emissions if possible with least possible impact on people.) Otherwise you will never be able to improve anything until the harmful methods have grown too much.

csomar 5y ago

> who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case? The king. The digital crypto king.

chrisan 5y ago

I'm not a user of Facebook, but is their electrical use near bitcoin levels? The quick google says facebook uses 5 while bitcoin uses 143 terawatt-hours

Scramblejams 5y ago

This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but I keep waiting for Google's Chrome team to add an energy rating icon to the browser that gives you a rough feel for how energy intensive a given page is. At some point the shaming would begin, web devs would respond, and then I'd generally get what I'm really after -- much faster page load times!

Aunche 5y ago

The difference is that Facebook is actually using electricity to provide services that somebody wants. It's just that you happen to disagree with the value of this service. Meanwhile, Bitcoin uses a country's worth of electricity just to provide a tiny amount of accounting.

Skunkleton 5y ago

Facebook used 5 TWhr in 2019 (citation: totally unverified top summary from google). Bitcoin alone is estimated to have used 110 TWhr in a year. To put that in perspective, that is sixfold the power output of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Produces power on the order of magnitude of detonating two small atomic bombs per day.

toomanybeersies 5y ago

The key difference is that I'm certain that Facebook makes continuous efforts to use less energy. Maybe not for environmental reasons, but they have an economic incentive to increase efficiency. Regulating the energy consumption/efficiency is more akin to fuel efficiency standards for cars.

bcrosby95 5y ago

The elephant in the room is bitcoin literally requires the mass consumption of computation to work - the more the better. And it was designed this way. In comparison, Facebook and industrial processes work to make their processes more efficient and use less resources for their workload. Bitcoin will just gobble up any efficiency to do more mining and end up consuming the same amount of resources. Bitcoin is an endless energy pit. The same isn't true of things like Facebook.

8note 5y ago

Burning energy to prove that you burned energy is not right. You can run cryptocurrency without requiring proof that burned electricity. You don't need to worry about how much electricity was burned, only that it wasn't done in exchange for a plaque saying "I filled a swimming pool with gasoline, then lit it on fire"

okareaman 5y ago

I know something about addiction so to me Bitcoin enthusiasts sound like alcoholics who justify their drinking by saying "many people drink and doctors say a little drinking is good for you so lay off me." The fact that I couldn't even criticize Bitcoin's energy usage on HN util Elon Musk came out against it reinforces my opinion that it's an addiction. I imagine Bitcoin is a game like poker with a bluffing and holding strategy. Bitcoin as it is currently played has many addicted to it without regard to disastrous environmental consequences.

imtringued 5y ago

> and how do you punish those who use too much? CO2 taxes