3 ms·

> 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

> 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

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