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An alternative perspective is that crypto mining should be required to only use main-grid surplus or their own renewable energy sources. Then make it hideously
by kwdc 5y ago
An alternative perspective is that crypto mining should be required to only use main-grid surplus or their own renewable energy sources. Then make it hideously expensive for them to not use renewables. This way the bitcoin / cryptos would be for public good. They'd be incentivised to improve the world situation rather than be a burden.
But governments are usually really bad at this sort of thing and they'd probably just mess it all up. It would likely involve a messed up website, multiple privacy violations, various forms of messed up bureaucratic red tape and all sorts of other anti-patterns.
Also, incentives being incentives, forcing crypto miners to use, eg solar, would likely just spike the prices of renewables and cause other issues.
Ok, I'm outta ideas.
- lars 5y agoIdea: We could stop using cryptocurrencies. Any downsides to that?
- confiq 5y agothere are crypto-coints that don't depend heavily on cpu/gpu calculation.
- ttt0 5y agoDownvotes you're getting are speaking for themselves, no one actually cares about environment. They just want to ban cryptocurrencies or leave just one that the government can fully control, like in India.
- KozmoNau7 5y agoAll cryptocurrency depends on consuming resources, whether that is CPU/GPU calculations or disk transactions (Chia burns up SSDs at an astonishing rate). It can't be any other way, the "work" and consumed resources are the value, if it was quick, simple and efficient, it would have insane inflation rates, or the entire space would be run through quickly, entrenching the majority of wealth with the early adopters and making it impossible for new players to enter.
- tiluha 5y agoSee Proof of Stake or Open Representative Voting for alternatives which don't encourage waste
- xtracto 5y agodBFT has solved the concensus mechanism without PoW for quite a while. https://docs.neo.org/docs/en-us/basic/technology/dbft.html#:~:text=Byzantine%20Fault%20Tolerance%20mechanism%20is,Practical%20Byzantine%20Fault%20Tolerance)%20algorithm https://docs.neo.org/docs/en-us/basic/technology/dbft.html#:.... People talking about blockchain technologies being wasteful are just literally ignorant.
- confiq 5y agoI find it really interesting that big chunk of tech people don't believe in cryptocurrency! From day 0 until today, there is always this doubt and it's fine...
- jlokier 5y ago> if it was quick, simple and efficient, it would have insane inflation rates, or the entire space would be run through quickly, entrenching the majority of wealth with the early adopters and making it impossible for new players to enter. Is this not true of proof of work mining already? The majority of wealth captured by miners appears to be going to those who were early adopters or with significant capital. Newcomers can enter and play at the fringes, but they cannot get seriously involved without large capital investment. To be honest proof of stake looks no better for this at the monent. But no worse either, and at least the energy consumption is a vastly lower.
- louwrentius 5y agoThe fundamental problem is that cryptocurrencies serve no legal purpose. They make a few people rich at the expense of others. If they continue to operate, even with wind or solar, those green energy sources can’t be used to help with the legitimate electricity demand, so we rely less on gas power plants. As I see it, the best course of action is to ban any bank/company from exchanging money for crypto and vice versa.
- ilaksh 5y agoI hope you will research some more. Cryptocurrency is about democratization of money. Removing intermediaries for holding and exchanging money digitally. The typical way for digital monetary exchange is a credit card transaction, which is completely obsolete. It's like giving away the key to your cryptocurrency wallet every time you make a transaction.
- Tesl 5y ago"obsolete". The way you guys talk was funny at first but now it's plain sad. I hope your funbux go to zero.
- gtvwill 5y agoFiat's dead. It is the horse and cart whilst defi and crypto are automobiles. But that's ok. Folks claimed cars would never replace horses too until they became the norm.
- md_ 5y ago[I'm not particularly pro or anti cryptocurrency--having a strong opinion on this strikes me as odd. But a few things in your post seem worth noting.] > I hope you will research some more. This is sort of a snarky way to start a post. :) Maybe they know something you don't know? > Cryptocurrency is about democratization of money. I never can figure out what this means. By some point of view, all money is democratic; it only has value if other people assign it value, and it has value roughly in proportion to how much value people assign it. This is extremely democratic! (Arguably, if you're a chartalist, then most "fiat" currency only has value because governments assign it value, but I think this is a bit of a silly perspective; even if it is true, it's like saying "when you cast your vote, it only has value because governments assign it value", which, like, yes? That's the point? But also, strict chartalism doesn't really make a lot of sense; people are often keen to buy Swiss Francs even though the tax base for Francs is quite small, after all.) > Removing intermediaries for holding and exchanging money digitally. I don't think this has anything to do with the definition of "democratic." Maybe you mean disintermediated? Grassroots? Distributed? But none of those adjectives suggest quite the normative value that "democratic" does. Why do I care if my money is disintermediated? > The typical way for digital monetary exchange is a credit card transaction, which is completely obsolete. "Obsolete" is an odd way to describe something used by hundreds of millions or billions of people on a regular basis. > It's like giving away the key to your cryptocurrency wallet every time you make a transaction. This is perhaps your least well-founded statement. First, it isn't: if you give away your cryptocurrency wallet, anyone can steal your money without recourse. But if I give you my credit card number--which I'm not inclined to do, I admit--the worst case is I have to call my credit card company and get a new number. This is wildly different than the cryptocurrency analogy. (Now, it is true that all that fraud detection, insurance, chargebacks, etc, are all paid for, directly or indirectly, by transaction fees. But the average BTC transaction fee is about $8, which would be break-even with a ~2% credit card transaction fee when the transaction exceeds $400--not very efficient either, and with far fewer consumer protections!) But more to the point, and what strikes me as especially ludicrous about your argument: every time you do a transaction online, be it with BTC or Visa, what do you do? You go to a site with "https". Who are you trusting to help you validate that HTTPS identity? Some certificate authority. Bitcoin doesn't exist in a "zero trust" world. There's no such thing. I do think shipping around static credit card numbers is kind of bad, and we're gradually seeing more secure replacements (EMV in the real world, online systems like Apple Pay in the virtual). But the idea that cryptocurrency is somehow immune to this reliance on trusted third parties is just wrong, and the suggestion that for practical usage it's actually better for consumers is just laughable. I do disagree with the parent poster--cryptocurrencies serve a (currently) legal and (in most social systems) "legit" purpose: as a store of wealth and speculative asset. But they don't serve as the basis for regular consumer transactions, because most cryptocurrencies are just really bad for that.
- ilaksh 5y agoAny non-proof-of-work strategy such as proof-of-stake.
- Jhsto 5y agoLets ban redundant computation. I see all these inefficiencies in everyday software engineering: container isolation spends unnecessary resources, hundreds of thousands of Wordpress sites run on their own servers instead of a single big Wordpress multi-site, HN and reddit are more or less the same so deleting the other would relieve unnecessary load somewhere. I think regardless of the application, it is important to allow everyone to choose their own level redundancy. Crypto is bad for the environment because of blockchain's redundancy. Banning an application because of its redundancy sounds absurd to me.
- ttt0 5y agoYou want a Big Brother looking over your arm at all times or how exactly would that ban even work?
- kwdc 5y agoRedundant calculation isn’t necessarily a bad thing by itself. That redundancy is often buying insurance against data loss (ECC?) and resiliency. A giant wordpress site isn’t necessarily more power efficient or even more secure than a distributed network of them. Multiple tradeoffs. I didn't even suggest banning crypto at all.
- inglor_cz 5y agoI run my own Wordpress site precisely because I do not want its very existence to be subject to someone's elses whims. It is only inefficient if you do not consider freedom and independence to be valuable.
- oliwarner 5y agoIt's not redundancy that's the problem. "Blockchain" isn't the inefficiency. It's the silly proof of work race to sign transaction blocks that's inefficient.
- solmag 5y agoBTC and crypto merely is a price discovery mechanism for the demand for energy consumption (as they act as a proof of energy). As such, it is not itself the disaster, rather than the first unobstructed signal of some underlying cause (inflation).
- jlokier 5y agoBTC is clearly adding a lot of energy consumption that would otherwise not occur. I don't think you can handwave away that elephant in room as mere price discovery or "signal of inflation". It's one of the purest causes of energy consumption inflation in the world right now.
- gher-shyu3i 5y agoFix the underlying usurious financial system and things will automatically become much better.
- oliwarner 5y agoHow about planting trees? You buy land, plant 50-100 trees and in a mere 10 years or so you get to walk through your own little forest. You might argue that's a useless waste of money and time, but when people are spending $500k+ on NFTs, I don't think that argument works. If anything, with the price of timber at the moment, this seems like a solid 40y investment. 100 2×4s in a 40 year tree, $100k payout on 100 trees (before costs or subsidies and warm fuzzies). Let's put this proof-of-nonsense "currency" stuff behind us.