5 ms·

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 b

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.

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.