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Europe is currently facing electricity and chip shortages. Banning crypto in the EU would be an acceptable measure for addressing that.
by Factorium 5y ago
Europe is currently facing electricity and chip shortages. Banning crypto in the EU would be an acceptable measure for addressing that.
- nix23 5y agoOr banning useless iot devices in cars fridges and toasters would be an even more acceptable measure. BTW the chip shortage has nothing todo with mining, but if you believe that lie Nvidia and AMD tells you since 5 years...well then that's to bad.
- noxer 5y agoOnly PoW cryptos need extensive electricity and hardware. Its completely absurd to ban crypto. Thats like if you would ban all motorized vehicles to get rid of coal blasting diesel trucks without catalytic converter. Needless to say that its also technically impossible to ban crypto. Its like banning torrents or even harder and we all know torrent was attacked heavily in the past but it did not go away.
- jeremyjh 5y agoIf its banned then not only can government shutdown large mining operations but government resources can be spent on 51% attacks to discredit them.
- noxer 5y agoLiterally irrelevant for any non-PoW coin out there aka the majority of all coins.
- FabHK 5y agoOr government could shut down exchanges that allow conversion to fiat. Then let's see how much you can really buy with crypto.
- vgalin 5y agoPerforming 51% attacks in the hope of discrediting an asset would be a waste of resources. Such an attack on the Bitcoin ecosystem would nowadays cost several billion in hardware and electricity, and all the community has to do in order to repair the damage would be a hark fork. 51% attacks happened in the past and most of them had little to no impact on major assets.
- _ph_ 5y agoWell, for the energy consumption part yes. There the need for banning crypto concerns those "currencies" which do use PoW. Like Bitcoin what the article was about. Banning crypto in a practical sense is actually quite easy. Prohibit any business and any bank in dealing with them. If you cannot do legal transactions with e.g. Bitcoins any more, the market mostly dries up. It is not necessary to ban any single coin in existance, but its wide-scale usage in the normal economy. By the way, there was never an attempt to ban torrents itself. That would have been reasonably easy on a protocol level. It was about banning illegal torrents. As in the content, not the protocol.
- alexgmcm 5y agoJust ban the fiat exchanges. The hardcore crypto types would carry on using it but like 95% would give up - that's sufficient.
- api 5y agoOddly enough besides the hard-core aficionados and techies that would mostly leave the criminals, who would operate street level informal exchange systems.
- chitowneats 5y agoThe whole point for criminals is that it allows pseudonymous (or anonymous, in the case of monero), and remote dealing of illegal goods and services. Especially across international borders. Another use is tax evasion and money laundering. Why is crypto any better than cash if users are forced to deal in person? I understand the argument of not having to carry around a duffel bag that could be seized. But nations can disrupt crypto markets on a global scale. At the very least, they can make it difficult to exchange for actual, usable, local currency. Which appears to be what China is poised to do.
- pyrale 5y agoFor them, that would be back to square one in terms of money laundering. Odds are that, given fiat to launder, or crypto that needs to be converted to fiat that still needs to be laundered, they would cut the useless step. The only illegal industry that would still see the use for it is maybe ransomware, but ransomware is not a cyclic business, so it would be surprising that they'd find enough individuals on the street to convert their millions easily.
- thinkmassive 5y agoThe same way we eliminated illegal drugs?
- Jensson 5y agoDrugs are addictive which is why people continue to use them even when illegal. Why would people use illegal crypto? It was hard enough to use them as a currency when legal, them being illegal would make them mostly worthless to most people.
- pyrale 5y ago> Needless to say that its also technically impossible to ban crypto. No one wants to ban crypto. The goal is to ban financial institutions that handle fiat from trading with institutions that handle crypto. From there, if people want to accept funny money as payment for pizzas, it's up to them really.
- MillenialMan 5y agoDrugs are the thing people have a strong incentive to accept crypto for, not pizzas. All black markets have an incentive to use it - including state actors (e.g. weapons deals). Getting caught laundering Monero is preferable to getting caught selling missiles to the Saudis.
- noxer 5y agoYou misses the point. There is no reason to ban anything. You can also buy Pokemon cards and sell or trade them. Call them funny money cards if you want, but there is no legitimate reason why people should not be able to buy/sell them. Also plenty places have already put cryptos in the laws declared them as alternative currency so they cant really prevent financial institution form handling it. If they really would globally cut crypto form fiat. You wouldn't need to pay taxes with anything you do with crypt anymore since its just "funny money" this would boost crypto and devalue fiat and cause all kind of horrible side effects. You have in incentive to get paid in funny money if you dont have to tax it.
- tjansen 5y agoDoes anyone mine in Europe? I can't imagine that, considering the cost of electricity here.
- docflabby 5y agoNot Crypto just Fifa, more profitable... https://kotaku.com/ps4-crypto-warehouse-was-actually-farming-fifa-crap-1847316570 https://kotaku.com/ps4-crypto-warehouse-was-actually-farming...
- thow-58d4e8b 5y agoSmall-scale ETH mining on gaming GPUs does take place. But nothing like dystopian warehouses stacked with racks of hardware until the ceiling
- Factorium 5y agoThis is just anecdotal, but some people run their GPU for mining during Winter since its 'free heat'. This basically renders the GPU into a space heater, which is 3x-4x less efficient than a heat pump. Additionally, some individuals steal electricity (eg. from their workplace, or if they have electricity included in their rental contract). Cryptocurrencies have thus conveniently enabled a form of electricity theft and fraud previously impossible for the individual.
- baybal2 5y agoWhy not to ban steelmaking first? Steel manufacturing requires tons of electricity, and it is already impossible in EU without enormous subsidies. It's an industry surviving entirely on life support.
- jhgb 5y agoSteelmaking is useful; you can build stuff out of steel.
- 83 5y agoGovernments want a healthy steelmaking industry so when the time comes to defend your country you can make guns and tanks. When your country is being invaded how useful is your bitcoin going to be?
- baybal2 5y ago> When your country is being invaded how useful is your bitcoin going to be? You can bribe enemy army staff with it. But seriously, just how much is too much when it comes to steel subsidies, and just how much EU can tolerate its steel industry failing so hard to upgrade? Rather than subsidising, say, buying new, more efficient blast furnaces EU countries basically just spend few hundred dollars extra of taxpayer money per ton of steel.
- barrenko 5y agoBecause we live in times of unprecedented institutional failure, not building reliable power sources and there is zero non-wishful thinking ahead.
- poontang1 5y agoIt would not. Hardly anyone mines in Europe. Ironically power shortages are due to ESG initiatives that phased out power stations using fossil fuels and left unreliable power sources of wind and solar