12 ms·

Everyone needs to ban Bitcoin... and likely other cryptocurrencies. Not only are they by far the biggest enablers of ransomware (which we're supposedly taking s

Everyone needs to ban Bitcoin... and likely other cryptocurrencies. Not only are they by far the biggest enablers of ransomware (which we're supposedly taking seriously now), but Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C. [1] Bitcoin already consumes 0.55% of energy produced globally. [2] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 [2] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

oblio 5y ago
We need to ban all proof-of-work and generally all resource intensive cryptocurrencies.
- dataflow 5y ago
  I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say maybe we should in general ban things that are a certain amount less energy efficient (say, 5x more wasteful) than the best technology we've achieved for a similar purpose so far. And progressively tax anything that's moderately more wasteful (say, 2x-5x). It's bad enough that we have cars on roads that are twice as wasteful as they could be, let alone a transaction processing mechanism that is literally a million times more wasteful than our existing technology.
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    Clears throat... [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report-the-u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-many-industrialized-nations-infographic/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report...
    - bigger_inside 5y ago
      ...and the US military effectively backs the dollar, which makes this the energy footprint of the dollar. meanwhile, gold stripmines the soil in poor countries, where children die in mines, while the loot is carried off to the west, AND it uses much more energy than bitcoin. and bitcoin is technology to replace, at least partially, those two things. And like a car versus a bike, it does so with more utility: better to store, better to transport, better to divide into units. and it can use energy anywhere, whereas banks and gold mining have to use it where there is gold and people to use banks, which means that energy for these uses is actually newly made for this purpose. Bitcoin often and increasingly uses energy that was made, but not used: 1/3 of all global energy production is produced and then just seeps into the metaphorical ground, which is necessary as a network safety measure. Bitcoin miners put their ASICs there and take it, meaning no additional energy was produced and the opposite of waste occured: it prevented waste. Not to speak of the fact that bitcoin incentivizes green energy, because solar and wind are problematic for everyday use (bc you're so highly dependent on the whims of nature). Bitcoin is not your dryer; it can run whenenever it happens to be there, thereby increasing the efficiency of renewables massively. This whole argument suffers from a lot of ignorance about what's actually going on here.
      - emn13 5y ago
        This makes no sense. Are you suggesting that e.g. the US military wouldn't exist if the US used bitcoin rather than dollars? And similarly for other currency+military combos? That strikes me as really implausible.
        paulgb 5y ago
        I think the best representation of the argument is that if governments couldn’t print fiat they wouldn’t be able to fund huge militaries and we’d have less destructive wars. It seems fairly utopian to me, given that wars existed on the gold standard too, and if they were less destructive it was for want of technology. But maybe if I held Bitcoin I’d be more inclined to believe it was the solution to world peace.
        andirk 5y ago
        FDR confiscated all gold to thwart the Great Depression and fund the war effort, and froze bank accounts for a handful of days, a Bank Holiday. For better or worse, it would be much more difficult to do this with btc.
        emn13 5y ago
        Let's hope we never get to test this hypothetical, because it might even be easier to confiscate BTC - certainly to merely destroy BTC, and thus raise the value of your own. When a physical force comes knocking, it's going to be tricky to resist sharing a key - and unlike physical stores of value, digital trails of ownership might make it quite a lot trickier to deny ownership; it really depends on how much information that occupying force has. Also, it's trivial to freeze BTC accounts too; that just means controlling the network - which in the even of a physical occupation is going to be obvious anyhow. Then there's the fact that occupiers may be able to engage in a 50% attack (assuming occupation is large scale and impacts many miners) - and may well force usage of their fork of the chain, even in absence of a global 50% control, making the whole thing rather tricky to predict. Let's hope it never comes to that, but I'm certainly not convinced BTC would be immune from a physically occupying force's influence. I bet it depends hugely on the details of that occupation.
  - Tepix 5y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong but of course it's not that easy. Using your argument we could ban all cars because there are bicycles and they are vastly more efficient. Or we ban heating in houses because you can just wear warmer clothes instead.
    - dataflow 5y ago
      No, you're just turning what I said into a strawman. A bike is far more limited in what it can achieve than a car. And home heating heats a lot more than just the people inside. Note that I didn't claim it's easy to come up with a good way to do this. You might have to settle for some partial progress. But that doesn't mean I'm putting up a strawman either.
    - kiliantics 5y ago
      > we could ban all cars because there are bicycles I would actually support this for urban areas. I wish more people would see that this would significantly benefit everyone.
  - tda 5y ago
    No, please don't tax something because it is wasteful or not, but tax something based on how much resources it uses. In fact, tax the resource usage not the activity. Even an extremely efficient car uses a ton of energy to move around. New cars often have engines in the multiple hundred kW range, which is insane compared to any other appliance you own. If fossil fuels were taxed properly, that would discourage using/wasting fossil fuels. But please don't tax based on what you feel is acceptable usage was wasteful usage, cause the atmosphere does not care if the CO2 came from kerosene on a plane bringing tourists to vacation, or if it was used to power the ambulance that brings you to the hospital. But when we tax all fossil fuel uses equally and heavily, I'm sure the ambulances will still drive around cause they save lives, but weekend trips to the other side of the Atlantic will be a thing of the past.
    - dataflow 5y ago
      > No, please don't tax something because it is wasteful or not, but tax something based on how much resources it uses. "Wasteful" = "using more resources than it genuinely needs". We're saying very, very similar things here. I don't find the difference between them significant enough to be worth arguing about honestly. I'm just suggesting an alternative that I think might be more viable, but if we go with your proposal, that's enough progress to make me happy.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        > "using more resources than it genuinely needs" Are you going to create a commission which decides what a "genuine resource usage" is?
        dataflow 5y ago
        > Are you going to create a commission which decides what a "genuine resource usage" is? Uhm... if it's necessary, sure? I already suggested a starting point: the current state-of-the-art provides a baseline to compare against. If we need a commission to gauge this, then sure, how about have an agency like the EPA or DoE figure it out. We can even give a good name to products that meet high energy-efficiency standards... like, I don't know, maybe "Energy Star"?
  - b93rn 5y ago
    A million? Can you back this up somehow? Did you take in account the infrastructure and offices of our existing "technology"?
    - dataflow 5y ago
      > Equivalent to the carbon footprint of 1,659,173 VISA transactions or 124,768 hours of watching Youtube. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
      - celticninja 5y ago
        And YouTube streams 1 billion hours of video a day, what's the carbon footprint of that? Is watching despacito or gangnam style really better for the world than a bitcoin transaction? Is it worse? Who is the arbiter if these decisions?
        emn13 5y ago
        You can make a rough estimate of e.g. the CO2 emissions due to youtube and bitcoin, and thus get an idea of how the two relate. E.g. a quick google finds this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22256-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22256-3 or this https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 - so let's say bitcoin uses 150 TWh in 2021. Here's another one: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ By contrast, various sources list global datacenter power usage as "just" ~200TWh (e.g. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str... or 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...) and it's likely the average datacenter isn't as reliant on coal power plants in china as bitcoin is, so I'd say it's at least plausible that bitcoin by itself emits as much if not more CO2 than all the worlds datacenters combined. Let alone just teeny singular sites like youtube. Of course, if you're going to include client power consumption, that's a different story... Then again, a youtube video is an actual desirable product in and of itself, whereas a bitcoin transaction is not; it's just a way to (perhaps in the future) acquire something desirable. Ideally we'd price carbon conservatively (i.e. higher than necessary), and then this would all be a moot point. However, by the time we get all the relevant countries on board with that, and get democrats and republicans to sufficiently cooperate (even harder), the universe's heat death is likely nigh, so perhaps in the interim it's reasonable to just outright ban exceptionally pointless wasteful activities such as bitcoin mining.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    So all websites which are slow will be taxed? Yes please!
  - fsflover 5y ago
    > literally a million times more wasteful than our existing technology This is not a fair comparison. Did you count all the banking services and data centers? Also, cryptocurrencies provide features which banks can't provide, e.g., independence on a third party.
    - emn13 5y ago
      But a cryptocurrency-backed exchange does not provide independence of a third party; so a in the pretty implausible hypothetical that you'd ban systems so gratuitously inefficient, you could make the argument that peer-to-peer transactions are OK, but that case is harder to make for exchanges. I mean, not that this kind of ban is likely to happen; it's probably not even a good idea (unless we can be much more specific about what counts as wasteful, and what counts as comparable existing technology, and have a way to make that simple, please no patent prior art search 2.0 nonsense).
    - lottin 5y ago
      Even if cryptocurrencies had unique features that some people demand, the fact remains that these cryptocurrencies could provide the same exact features without wasting enormous amounts of energy (e.g. by using a "proof of stake" mechanism). Therefore the wastefulness can't be justified on these grounds.
  - joshspankit 5y ago
    While I feel like the words you used caused some debate, if I’m understanding the premise correctly I think you’re on to something: If a technology is objectively more wasteful than it could be it should be penalized, and as we move forward with newer/better/more efficient technologies the standards bar should raise with them. For anyone who has further concerns: let’s imagine that we have a magic calculator that tells us the total and complete cost of anything, from the true local socioeconomic impact of extracting materials to the CO2 emitted in production to the cumulative future cost of disposing of it. And that we could use that as the measuring stick.
- axelroze 5y ago
  One energy-efficient approach is the one used by the Pi network: - https://minepi.com/ https://minepi.com/ The whitepaper is pretty detailed about how they avoid the proof of work and the energy waste associated: - https://minepi.com/white-paper https://minepi.com/white-paper If cryptos really make it in their ideological goal of a truly free capitalistic society, something like Pi which can be mined by everyone will have to win out over Bitcoin which can be "produced" only by already rich.
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago
    Based on some quick reading, Pi is a scam. There is no blockchain or 'mining' happening, they instead get you to watch ads on your phone every so often. There are real, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies which are much more energy efficient than proof of work. Cardano currently being the biggest one by market cap. It's still a relatively 'new' space, but I hate seeing it crowded by so many scam products.
  - tromp 5y ago
    I have little faith in a coin that claims in its whitepaper "Pi creates a fixed supply of Pi for each person that joins the network up to the first 100 Million participants" without so much as mentioning Sybil attacks.
- premium-komodo 5y ago
  No we don't, you little Hitler. You buy electricity and use it as you see fit; so do other people. You don't dictate what they can use it for, so long as their activity is peaceful. If you mean you want to limit pollution, take a number and get in line, we've been trying to do that for decades. We'd probably have it already if it weren't for anti-nuclear activists of the past. Please try to curb your authoritarian streak.
knuthsat 5y ago
Global warming above 2°C will happen just by the nature of n-th order effects. Trees burning, methane stored in tundra getting released can have decades of CO2 equivalent emissions compared to 1 human civilization year. Bitcoin has a small effect compared to everything else we do and everything else that will happen. Human civilization isn't exactly living as optimal as possible and I do not see why Bitcoin needs to be the thing we optimize. There's Las Vegas, having AC 24/7, cooling the streets from open casino doors. There's individuals feasting on steaks every single day, every single meal. Looking through the eyes of a frugal optimizer, should we ban that too?
- henearkr 5y ago
  Maybe? Although, which one do you think is easier to ban? If cryptocurrencies were to disappear tomorrow, would the everyday life change? And if we ban meat? Which one do you think will encounter the most resistance? So which one is the most feasible? And then, which one do you think has the best return on investment?
  - knuthsat 5y ago
    Best return on investment is most definitely finding new ways to produce energy and new ways to sequester greenhouse gases. Anything else is a minor dampener to an exponential process. Getting rid of Bitcoin is absolutely nothing compared to our exponentially increasing energy needs. Lowering greenhouse emissions to 0 today would still result in dire consequences when the temperature increase comes, just from the massive n-th order effects. I have no idea how the opinion of Bitcoin being so detrimental to climate came to fruition and how it's considered plausible at all.
    - henearkr 5y ago
      Whether we develop new clean energies without reducing our energy consumption, or we reduce our consumption while doing the development, can make the difference between catastrophic failure and hope. This is why I think it is important.
    - 5y ago
Varqu 5y ago
Good luck banning internet access. Even if you ban crypto exchanges and money transfers to them, you cannot ban a single entity called Bitcoin Co, nor you can ban individuals from possessing it. You could potentially ban crypto miners from using the electrical energy, but that doesn't ban Bitcoin either. Any other ideas? :)
- Tepix 5y ago
  If you can't exchange your crypto currency against fiat it will become worthless.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    I have a bridge to sell you. I mean, a big chunk of the market transactions are favors and unwritten agreements. Someone helps to close an important deal and gets some bitcoins later on an off the books wallet.
  - lottin 5y ago
    Exactly right. Money that can't be spent is worthless and without exchanges that's exactly what cryptocurrencies would become.
  - dangerface 5y ago
    I can exchange it with the guy down the street like I currently do, how are you going to stop this? LOL
    - Tepix 5y ago
      That sounds rather combersome. What is the guy down the street going to do with it?
      - dangerface 5y ago
        Same thing any one does with money. The point is that bitcoin exited before there where institutions built around it, you can ban those institutions you can ban coal power plants you can ban whatever you want people will still continue to use it the way they currently do. Mine bitcoin on renewable energy not connected to the grid and transact with each other not large institutions, if you want to ban bitcoin you need to prevent the core value of bitcoin not just show off your fud.
buildingmateri 5y ago
Yes this is the current mainstream media propaganda against cryptos, thanks for that.
teekert 5y ago
Ban knifes! The biggest enabler of stabbings!
- dataflow 5y ago
  Because the cost/benefit ratio of Bitcoin is even on the same planet as that of knives?
  - NotEvil 5y ago
    Yeah, but they are talking about crypto not bitcoin. It's like banning knives because one type use to stab
    - dataflow 5y ago
      Replace Bitcoin with cryptocurrencies in my comment.
      - bruce343434 5y ago
        You do it. You can edit your comments.
        dataflow 5y ago
        No I can't.
- pjc50 5y ago
  https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/poundland/poundland-writes-to-police-to-ask-for-knife-sale-ban-backing/591173.article https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/poundland/poundland-writes-to-po...
Isinlor 5y ago
Another option is to also regulate it into oblivion.
me_me_me 5y ago
Bitcoin is the biggest enabler of cheap renewable energy, gtfo with the list about bitcoin causing global warming. It is getting ridiculous. Pollution causes fucking global warming, ships, cars industry concrete. This idiotic scapegoat of BTC is killing the planet is akin to the crying Indian campaign. Its a misdirection to avoid talking about real causes and solutions to global warming.
- rspoerri 5y ago
  Thats bs. Everything that requires energy advances global warming. Bitcoin is a disaster compared to any other value or money transfer. Everybody mining bitcoin is using the cheapest energy source available which currently is coal. Get your facts right, stop destroying the world of our children!
  - celticninja 5y ago
    >Everybody mining bitcoin... This is just demonstrably false. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-27/bitcoin-miners-in-nordic-region-get-a-boost-from-cheap-power https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-27/bitcoin-m... https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/news/newsbitcoin-mining-pool-launched-powered-by-hydropower-8632436 https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/news/newsbitcoin-mining-p... I could go on, but I won't, I just wanted to show how hysterical and full of BS you and people like you are.
    - rspoerri 5y ago
      How nice that all energy magically appears out of nowhere to generate the power needed by bitcoin. As if the power to heat your meal and home is suddently not needed anymore when you have your nice valuable bitcoins. The world is already struggling to keep up with the rising power requirements from all the sectors, from production, households and transportation. One of the large problems moving to renewable power sources is, that it's hard to replace current power sources and keep up with the rising power demand. By increasing power demand, older power plants that are worse for the environment must be kept running for a longer time.
celticninja 5y ago
Cheap plastic disposable goods shipped from China on polluting cargo ships are a huge source of environmental damage. This is a direct result of consumerism. Where is the plan to deal with that? Bitcoin energy use is just a stick used to beat it, it is not a genuine concern. Why? Because most people who raise the issue are not green environmentalists, they are just bitcoin detractors. They don't highlight the issues with energy use in other sectors, they don't worry about the emissions from concrete production and building etc. Why? Because complaining about them does not further their goal.
- simonw 5y ago
  > Because most people who raise the issue are not green environmentalists, they are just bitcoin detractors. Why would someone be a Bitcoin detractor if not for environmental reasons?
  - celticninja 5y ago
    I agree, literally the only negative is it's current energy use, but even that has been blown out of proportion and has not been fairly compared with the energy use of other sectors and technologies.
  - didroe 5y ago
    Aside from the environmental issue, I think Bitcoin is a poorly designed currency that ignores economic history/principles. I have a really low expectation of it being able to provide price stability.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Bad whataboutism is bad. > Cheap plastic disposable goods shipped from China on polluting cargo ships are a huge source of environmental damage New regulations are here about polluting ships. Single use plastics are (progressively) being banned - in the EU they're heavily taxed and will be absolutely banned since ~2022.
  - celticninja 5y ago
reacharavindh 5y ago
Well, a country can't _really_ ban bitcoin and other crypto currency because of its decentralised nature. As longs as there is usefulness to it, there will always be people vying to make it a thing. The governments can collectively make it unusable - prevent all financial institutions from recognising it, and never exchange their currency to these crypto coins. This way, sure bitcoins will continue to exist, and there will always be someone stealing power to mine them, but it becomes worthless without the ability to convert to usable currencies you can buy stuff with. If BTC -> USD/EUR/etc becomes too difficult, bitcoin becomes like Monopoly money right?
- oauea 5y ago
  Sure they can. Ban all legal exchanges, continue auditing income as usual usual. Bitcoin will still exist for illegal purposes, but that's fine.
jp555 5y ago
Bitcoin is a public ledger. I dont understand how a zero-privacy blockchain would be the biggest enabler of ransomware? Isnt TCP/IP a bigger enabler? SHA-256 came out of the NSA. Didnt the FBI retrieve the Bitcoin from the pipeline ransomware attack? They have lots of tradecraft at their disposal that we cannot know of.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Bishizel 5y ago
The main argument against crypto is actually an argument against the way we generate power. If our power generation wasn’t so dirty, this argument against crypto goes away. Banning crypto isn’t going to fix the root cause.
- adrianN 5y ago
  So maybe we should ban crypto until the world reaches net zero emissions?
  - dangerface 5y ago
    Why not ban electricity since its the culprit?
dangerface 5y ago
These claims have both been debunked. The majority of energy used by bitcoin is renewable [1]. Ransomware was enabled by credit cards before bitcoin was a thing. The increase in ransomware is because of the increase in the value of that data not the ability to extort. [1] https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-not-as-prominent-in-cryptocurrency-mining-as-previously-claimed https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-...
kemonocode 5y ago
Blanket statements like these come from privilege. That a supposedly vanishingly small amount of people use crypto to transact and safeguard the fruits of their labor is irrelevant because, well, I know I exist. To me, the value Bitcoin brings to the table is much, much greater than the one from countries that enforce unjust embargoes and overthrow governments only to replace them with even worse dictators... and also pollute the planet. Also, specifically on the second article you linked: it references the first and even mentions why such runaway growth necessitated by that argument wouldn't happen. EDIT: Before some tries to gotcha me with the same old tired memes or accuses me of building up the typical "oh, but X uses more power than the entire crypto system" strawman argument, what I'm trying to say is: value is relative. If you have a comfortable life and live in a reasonably free country, Bitcoin is very likely to have negative value to you, as its cons outweigh its pros. But that's not going to be the same for the rest of the world, and blanket bans on things are reductionist and hardly ever get anywhere good, especially when you should be looking at why such thing exists.

oblio 5y ago

We need to ban all proof-of-work and generally all resource intensive cryptocurrencies.

dataflow 5y ago
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say maybe we should in general ban things that are a certain amount less energy efficient (say, 5x more wasteful) than the best technology we've achieved for a similar purpose so far. And progressively tax anything that's moderately more wasteful (say, 2x-5x). It's bad enough that we have cars on roads that are twice as wasteful as they could be, let alone a transaction processing mechanism that is literally a million times more wasteful than our existing technology.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  Clears throat... [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report-the-u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-many-industrialized-nations-infographic/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report...
  - bigger_inside 5y ago
    ...and the US military effectively backs the dollar, which makes this the energy footprint of the dollar. meanwhile, gold stripmines the soil in poor countries, where children die in mines, while the loot is carried off to the west, AND it uses much more energy than bitcoin. and bitcoin is technology to replace, at least partially, those two things. And like a car versus a bike, it does so with more utility: better to store, better to transport, better to divide into units. and it can use energy anywhere, whereas banks and gold mining have to use it where there is gold and people to use banks, which means that energy for these uses is actually newly made for this purpose. Bitcoin often and increasingly uses energy that was made, but not used: 1/3 of all global energy production is produced and then just seeps into the metaphorical ground, which is necessary as a network safety measure. Bitcoin miners put their ASICs there and take it, meaning no additional energy was produced and the opposite of waste occured: it prevented waste. Not to speak of the fact that bitcoin incentivizes green energy, because solar and wind are problematic for everyday use (bc you're so highly dependent on the whims of nature). Bitcoin is not your dryer; it can run whenenever it happens to be there, thereby increasing the efficiency of renewables massively. This whole argument suffers from a lot of ignorance about what's actually going on here.
    - emn13 5y ago
      This makes no sense. Are you suggesting that e.g. the US military wouldn't exist if the US used bitcoin rather than dollars? And similarly for other currency+military combos? That strikes me as really implausible.
      - paulgb 5y ago
        I think the best representation of the argument is that if governments couldn’t print fiat they wouldn’t be able to fund huge militaries and we’d have less destructive wars. It seems fairly utopian to me, given that wars existed on the gold standard too, and if they were less destructive it was for want of technology. But maybe if I held Bitcoin I’d be more inclined to believe it was the solution to world peace.
        andirk 5y ago
        FDR confiscated all gold to thwart the Great Depression and fund the war effort, and froze bank accounts for a handful of days, a Bank Holiday. For better or worse, it would be much more difficult to do this with btc.
        emn13 5y ago
        Let's hope we never get to test this hypothetical, because it might even be easier to confiscate BTC - certainly to merely destroy BTC, and thus raise the value of your own. When a physical force comes knocking, it's going to be tricky to resist sharing a key - and unlike physical stores of value, digital trails of ownership might make it quite a lot trickier to deny ownership; it really depends on how much information that occupying force has. Also, it's trivial to freeze BTC accounts too; that just means controlling the network - which in the even of a physical occupation is going to be obvious anyhow. Then there's the fact that occupiers may be able to engage in a 50% attack (assuming occupation is large scale and impacts many miners) - and may well force usage of their fork of the chain, even in absence of a global 50% control, making the whole thing rather tricky to predict. Let's hope it never comes to that, but I'm certainly not convinced BTC would be immune from a physically occupying force's influence. I bet it depends hugely on the details of that occupation.
- Tepix 5y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong but of course it's not that easy. Using your argument we could ban all cars because there are bicycles and they are vastly more efficient. Or we ban heating in houses because you can just wear warmer clothes instead.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    No, you're just turning what I said into a strawman. A bike is far more limited in what it can achieve than a car. And home heating heats a lot more than just the people inside. Note that I didn't claim it's easy to come up with a good way to do this. You might have to settle for some partial progress. But that doesn't mean I'm putting up a strawman either.
  - kiliantics 5y ago
    > we could ban all cars because there are bicycles I would actually support this for urban areas. I wish more people would see that this would significantly benefit everyone.
- tda 5y ago
  No, please don't tax something because it is wasteful or not, but tax something based on how much resources it uses. In fact, tax the resource usage not the activity. Even an extremely efficient car uses a ton of energy to move around. New cars often have engines in the multiple hundred kW range, which is insane compared to any other appliance you own. If fossil fuels were taxed properly, that would discourage using/wasting fossil fuels. But please don't tax based on what you feel is acceptable usage was wasteful usage, cause the atmosphere does not care if the CO2 came from kerosene on a plane bringing tourists to vacation, or if it was used to power the ambulance that brings you to the hospital. But when we tax all fossil fuel uses equally and heavily, I'm sure the ambulances will still drive around cause they save lives, but weekend trips to the other side of the Atlantic will be a thing of the past.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    > No, please don't tax something because it is wasteful or not, but tax something based on how much resources it uses. "Wasteful" = "using more resources than it genuinely needs". We're saying very, very similar things here. I don't find the difference between them significant enough to be worth arguing about honestly. I'm just suggesting an alternative that I think might be more viable, but if we go with your proposal, that's enough progress to make me happy.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      > "using more resources than it genuinely needs" Are you going to create a commission which decides what a "genuine resource usage" is?
      - dataflow 5y ago
        > Are you going to create a commission which decides what a "genuine resource usage" is? Uhm... if it's necessary, sure? I already suggested a starting point: the current state-of-the-art provides a baseline to compare against. If we need a commission to gauge this, then sure, how about have an agency like the EPA or DoE figure it out. We can even give a good name to products that meet high energy-efficiency standards... like, I don't know, maybe "Energy Star"?
- b93rn 5y ago
  A million? Can you back this up somehow? Did you take in account the infrastructure and offices of our existing "technology"?
  - dataflow 5y ago
    > Equivalent to the carbon footprint of 1,659,173 VISA transactions or 124,768 hours of watching Youtube. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
    - celticninja 5y ago
      And YouTube streams 1 billion hours of video a day, what's the carbon footprint of that? Is watching despacito or gangnam style really better for the world than a bitcoin transaction? Is it worse? Who is the arbiter if these decisions?
      - emn13 5y ago
        You can make a rough estimate of e.g. the CO2 emissions due to youtube and bitcoin, and thus get an idea of how the two relate. E.g. a quick google finds this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22256-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22256-3 or this https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 - so let's say bitcoin uses 150 TWh in 2021. Here's another one: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ By contrast, various sources list global datacenter power usage as "just" ~200TWh (e.g. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str... or 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...) and it's likely the average datacenter isn't as reliant on coal power plants in china as bitcoin is, so I'd say it's at least plausible that bitcoin by itself emits as much if not more CO2 than all the worlds datacenters combined. Let alone just teeny singular sites like youtube. Of course, if you're going to include client power consumption, that's a different story... Then again, a youtube video is an actual desirable product in and of itself, whereas a bitcoin transaction is not; it's just a way to (perhaps in the future) acquire something desirable. Ideally we'd price carbon conservatively (i.e. higher than necessary), and then this would all be a moot point. However, by the time we get all the relevant countries on board with that, and get democrats and republicans to sufficiently cooperate (even harder), the universe's heat death is likely nigh, so perhaps in the interim it's reasonable to just outright ban exceptionally pointless wasteful activities such as bitcoin mining.
- fsflover 5y ago
  So all websites which are slow will be taxed? Yes please!
- fsflover 5y ago
  > literally a million times more wasteful than our existing technology This is not a fair comparison. Did you count all the banking services and data centers? Also, cryptocurrencies provide features which banks can't provide, e.g., independence on a third party.
  - emn13 5y ago
    But a cryptocurrency-backed exchange does not provide independence of a third party; so a in the pretty implausible hypothetical that you'd ban systems so gratuitously inefficient, you could make the argument that peer-to-peer transactions are OK, but that case is harder to make for exchanges. I mean, not that this kind of ban is likely to happen; it's probably not even a good idea (unless we can be much more specific about what counts as wasteful, and what counts as comparable existing technology, and have a way to make that simple, please no patent prior art search 2.0 nonsense).
  - lottin 5y ago
    Even if cryptocurrencies had unique features that some people demand, the fact remains that these cryptocurrencies could provide the same exact features without wasting enormous amounts of energy (e.g. by using a "proof of stake" mechanism). Therefore the wastefulness can't be justified on these grounds.
- joshspankit 5y ago
  While I feel like the words you used caused some debate, if I’m understanding the premise correctly I think you’re on to something: If a technology is objectively more wasteful than it could be it should be penalized, and as we move forward with newer/better/more efficient technologies the standards bar should raise with them. For anyone who has further concerns: let’s imagine that we have a magic calculator that tells us the total and complete cost of anything, from the true local socioeconomic impact of extracting materials to the CO2 emitted in production to the cumulative future cost of disposing of it. And that we could use that as the measuring stick.
axelroze 5y ago
One energy-efficient approach is the one used by the Pi network: - https://minepi.com/ https://minepi.com/ The whitepaper is pretty detailed about how they avoid the proof of work and the energy waste associated: - https://minepi.com/white-paper https://minepi.com/white-paper If cryptos really make it in their ideological goal of a truly free capitalistic society, something like Pi which can be mined by everyone will have to win out over Bitcoin which can be "produced" only by already rich.
- pcthrowaway 5y ago
  Based on some quick reading, Pi is a scam. There is no blockchain or 'mining' happening, they instead get you to watch ads on your phone every so often. There are real, blockchain-based cryptocurrencies which are much more energy efficient than proof of work. Cardano currently being the biggest one by market cap. It's still a relatively 'new' space, but I hate seeing it crowded by so many scam products.
- tromp 5y ago
  I have little faith in a coin that claims in its whitepaper "Pi creates a fixed supply of Pi for each person that joins the network up to the first 100 Million participants" without so much as mentioning Sybil attacks.
premium-komodo 5y ago
No we don't, you little Hitler. You buy electricity and use it as you see fit; so do other people. You don't dictate what they can use it for, so long as their activity is peaceful. If you mean you want to limit pollution, take a number and get in line, we've been trying to do that for decades. We'd probably have it already if it weren't for anti-nuclear activists of the past. Please try to curb your authoritarian streak.

knuthsat 5y ago

Global warming above 2°C will happen just by the nature of n-th order effects. Trees burning, methane stored in tundra getting released can have decades of CO2 equivalent emissions compared to 1 human civilization year. Bitcoin has a small effect compared to everything else we do and everything else that will happen. Human civilization isn't exactly living as optimal as possible and I do not see why Bitcoin needs to be the thing we optimize. There's Las Vegas, having AC 24/7, cooling the streets from open casino doors. There's individuals feasting on steaks every single day, every single meal. Looking through the eyes of a frugal optimizer, should we ban that too?

henearkr 5y ago
Maybe? Although, which one do you think is easier to ban? If cryptocurrencies were to disappear tomorrow, would the everyday life change? And if we ban meat? Which one do you think will encounter the most resistance? So which one is the most feasible? And then, which one do you think has the best return on investment?
- knuthsat 5y ago
  Best return on investment is most definitely finding new ways to produce energy and new ways to sequester greenhouse gases. Anything else is a minor dampener to an exponential process. Getting rid of Bitcoin is absolutely nothing compared to our exponentially increasing energy needs. Lowering greenhouse emissions to 0 today would still result in dire consequences when the temperature increase comes, just from the massive n-th order effects. I have no idea how the opinion of Bitcoin being so detrimental to climate came to fruition and how it's considered plausible at all.
  - henearkr 5y ago
    Whether we develop new clean energies without reducing our energy consumption, or we reduce our consumption while doing the development, can make the difference between catastrophic failure and hope. This is why I think it is important.
  - 5y ago

Varqu 5y ago

Good luck banning internet access. Even if you ban crypto exchanges and money transfers to them, you cannot ban a single entity called Bitcoin Co, nor you can ban individuals from possessing it. You could potentially ban crypto miners from using the electrical energy, but that doesn't ban Bitcoin either. Any other ideas? :)

Tepix 5y ago
If you can't exchange your crypto currency against fiat it will become worthless.
- akomtu 5y ago
  I have a bridge to sell you. I mean, a big chunk of the market transactions are favors and unwritten agreements. Someone helps to close an important deal and gets some bitcoins later on an off the books wallet.
- lottin 5y ago
  Exactly right. Money that can't be spent is worthless and without exchanges that's exactly what cryptocurrencies would become.
- dangerface 5y ago
  I can exchange it with the guy down the street like I currently do, how are you going to stop this? LOL
  - Tepix 5y ago
    That sounds rather combersome. What is the guy down the street going to do with it?
    - dangerface 5y ago
      Same thing any one does with money. The point is that bitcoin exited before there where institutions built around it, you can ban those institutions you can ban coal power plants you can ban whatever you want people will still continue to use it the way they currently do. Mine bitcoin on renewable energy not connected to the grid and transact with each other not large institutions, if you want to ban bitcoin you need to prevent the core value of bitcoin not just show off your fud.

buildingmateri 5y ago

Yes this is the current mainstream media propaganda against cryptos, thanks for that.

teekert 5y ago

Ban knifes! The biggest enabler of stabbings!

dataflow 5y ago
Because the cost/benefit ratio of Bitcoin is even on the same planet as that of knives?
- NotEvil 5y ago
  Yeah, but they are talking about crypto not bitcoin. It's like banning knives because one type use to stab
  - dataflow 5y ago
    Replace Bitcoin with cryptocurrencies in my comment.
    - bruce343434 5y ago
      You do it. You can edit your comments.
      - dataflow 5y ago
        No I can't.
pjc50 5y ago
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/poundland/poundland-writes-to-police-to-ask-for-knife-sale-ban-backing/591173.article https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/poundland/poundland-writes-to-po...

Isinlor 5y ago

Another option is to also regulate it into oblivion.

me_me_me 5y ago

Bitcoin is the biggest enabler of cheap renewable energy, gtfo with the list about bitcoin causing global warming. It is getting ridiculous. Pollution causes fucking global warming, ships, cars industry concrete. This idiotic scapegoat of BTC is killing the planet is akin to the crying Indian campaign. Its a misdirection to avoid talking about real causes and solutions to global warming.

rspoerri 5y ago
Thats bs. Everything that requires energy advances global warming. Bitcoin is a disaster compared to any other value or money transfer. Everybody mining bitcoin is using the cheapest energy source available which currently is coal. Get your facts right, stop destroying the world of our children!
- celticninja 5y ago
  >Everybody mining bitcoin... This is just demonstrably false. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-27/bitcoin-miners-in-nordic-region-get-a-boost-from-cheap-power https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-27/bitcoin-m... https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/news/newsbitcoin-mining-pool-launched-powered-by-hydropower-8632436 https://www.waterpowermagazine.com/news/newsbitcoin-mining-p... I could go on, but I won't, I just wanted to show how hysterical and full of BS you and people like you are.
  - rspoerri 5y ago
    How nice that all energy magically appears out of nowhere to generate the power needed by bitcoin. As if the power to heat your meal and home is suddently not needed anymore when you have your nice valuable bitcoins. The world is already struggling to keep up with the rising power requirements from all the sectors, from production, households and transportation. One of the large problems moving to renewable power sources is, that it's hard to replace current power sources and keep up with the rising power demand. By increasing power demand, older power plants that are worse for the environment must be kept running for a longer time.

celticninja 5y ago

Cheap plastic disposable goods shipped from China on polluting cargo ships are a huge source of environmental damage. This is a direct result of consumerism. Where is the plan to deal with that? Bitcoin energy use is just a stick used to beat it, it is not a genuine concern. Why? Because most people who raise the issue are not green environmentalists, they are just bitcoin detractors. They don't highlight the issues with energy use in other sectors, they don't worry about the emissions from concrete production and building etc. Why? Because complaining about them does not further their goal.

simonw 5y ago
> Because most people who raise the issue are not green environmentalists, they are just bitcoin detractors. Why would someone be a Bitcoin detractor if not for environmental reasons?
- celticninja 5y ago
  I agree, literally the only negative is it's current energy use, but even that has been blown out of proportion and has not been fairly compared with the energy use of other sectors and technologies.
- didroe 5y ago
  Aside from the environmental issue, I think Bitcoin is a poorly designed currency that ignores economic history/principles. I have a really low expectation of it being able to provide price stability.
sofixa 5y ago
Bad whataboutism is bad. > Cheap plastic disposable goods shipped from China on polluting cargo ships are a huge source of environmental damage New regulations are here about polluting ships. Single use plastics are (progressively) being banned - in the EU they're heavily taxed and will be absolutely banned since ~2022.
- celticninja 5y ago

reacharavindh 5y ago

Well, a country can't _really_ ban bitcoin and other crypto currency because of its decentralised nature. As longs as there is usefulness to it, there will always be people vying to make it a thing. The governments can collectively make it unusable - prevent all financial institutions from recognising it, and never exchange their currency to these crypto coins. This way, sure bitcoins will continue to exist, and there will always be someone stealing power to mine them, but it becomes worthless without the ability to convert to usable currencies you can buy stuff with. If BTC -> USD/EUR/etc becomes too difficult, bitcoin becomes like Monopoly money right?

oauea 5y ago
Sure they can. Ban all legal exchanges, continue auditing income as usual usual. Bitcoin will still exist for illegal purposes, but that's fine.

jp555 5y ago

Bitcoin is a public ledger. I dont understand how a zero-privacy blockchain would be the biggest enabler of ransomware? Isnt TCP/IP a bigger enabler? SHA-256 came out of the NSA. Didnt the FBI retrieve the Bitcoin from the pipeline ransomware attack? They have lots of tradecraft at their disposal that we cannot know of.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Bishizel 5y ago

The main argument against crypto is actually an argument against the way we generate power. If our power generation wasn’t so dirty, this argument against crypto goes away. Banning crypto isn’t going to fix the root cause.

adrianN 5y ago
So maybe we should ban crypto until the world reaches net zero emissions?
- dangerface 5y ago
  Why not ban electricity since its the culprit?

dangerface 5y ago

These claims have both been debunked. The majority of energy used by bitcoin is renewable [1]. Ransomware was enabled by credit cards before bitcoin was a thing. The increase in ransomware is because of the increase in the value of that data not the ability to extort. [1] https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-not-as-prominent-in-cryptocurrency-mining-as-previously-claimed https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-...

kemonocode 5y ago

Blanket statements like these come from privilege. That a supposedly vanishingly small amount of people use crypto to transact and safeguard the fruits of their labor is irrelevant because, well, I know I exist. To me, the value Bitcoin brings to the table is much, much greater than the one from countries that enforce unjust embargoes and overthrow governments only to replace them with even worse dictators... and also pollute the planet. Also, specifically on the second article you linked: it references the first and even mentions why such runaway growth necessitated by that argument wouldn't happen. EDIT: Before some tries to gotcha me with the same old tired memes or accuses me of building up the typical "oh, but X uses more power than the entire crypto system" strawman argument, what I'm trying to say is: value is relative. If you have a comfortable life and live in a reasonably free country, Bitcoin is very likely to have negative value to you, as its cons outweigh its pros. But that's not going to be the same for the rest of the world, and blanket bans on things are reductionist and hardly ever get anywhere good, especially when you should be looking at why such thing exists.