3 ms·

Nice, what other software I'm not allowed to run on my machine? Can I play high end games? Make scientific computations? Experiment with machine learning?

• GaylordTuring 5y ago
  A totally valid point. It seems like the proposed ban is based on the fact that the computations costs a lot of energy, are “wasteful”, and only makes the miner in question happy. I don’t see how this differs from playing high-end computer games. Surely, you could argue that kids in the 70’s, only having access to board games, could get just as much enjoyment out of these as kids today get out of playing CoD, with the added benefit that you have to meet other people in person and that you’re not getting addicted to loot boxes. So, should we follow China in banning computer games?
• junon 5y ago
  This is purposefully reductio ad absurdum.
  • oytis 5y ago
    Reductio ad absurdum is a perfectly valid rhetorical device, it is even used in mathematical proofs. What I want to say is that regulating what kind of computations I can run on my machine is pretty bad. It would make more sense to regulate maximum power consumption of computers like it is done with lightbulbs
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • ur-whale 5y ago
    > This is purposefully reductio ad absurdum. It's not, he's making a valid point. To put it in a maybe a more arguable way: where do you draw the line at a government deciding what you can and can't run on your computer?
    • Jensson 5y ago
      You already can't keep child porn on your computer, nor are you allowed to run programs that requires a license if you don't have one, nor can you share or copy IP protected works etc. Banning crypto mining wouldn't move us noticeably closer to governments regulating everything you do on your computer.
      • oytis 5y ago
        Without advocating for legalization of child porn, we can see how it is being used by the governments for justifying violations of digital privacy on various levels, so it's definitely not a good thing to double down on I would argue that this proposal does bring it a step further though. Child porn involves a child being abused before it gets to your machine. To crack a piece of software you need to take software written by someone else and modify it to avoid paying the author. It is based o a legal framework of intellectual property, which I don't agree with, but at least it looks like a valid framework of property rights in general. This proposal also covers software that you write yourself. It is also totally arbitrary, because it doesn't even try to pretend that you are violating someone else's rights.
        • Jensson 5y ago
          It depends a bit what the proposal looks like. You have to submit papers about your energy use to authorities when you open a business, it could just be that businesses asking for significant energy to run a server cluster has to say that they aren't doing crypto. That would mean that private people can still run their own crypto mining. But still, crypto mining is such a niche use-case, preventing me from running a file sharing server I wrote myself since people use it to distribute IP seems much more intrusive to me.
          • oytis 5y ago
            That sounds pretty much like other business regulations, and is not too intrusive in my book. There is another point about abundant regulations helping Europe capture yet another brilliant opportunity to complain about foreign companies monopolizing everything, but in case of crypto mining we might be in a low risk area