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Bitcoin mining is being banned in countries across the globe

• gameswithgo 5y ago
  Great news! The crypto craze is the most embarrassing waste of energy in the history of our species. The sooner we stop the better.
  • simonebrunozzi 5y ago
    Gold digging is way worse [0]. [0]: https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitive-answer-a010b0826f2a https://simon.medium.com/bitcoin-and-pollution-the-definitiv...
  • bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
    I still think Christmas lights are worse.
    • MikeCapone 5y ago
      They help fight seasonal depression, very very useful.
    • nunez 5y ago
      [x] doubt christmas lights are mostly LEDs now, which are super low power. i think our lighting setup was less than 5W draw total, and they only run for a few hours/day
    • rspeele 5y ago
      The key difference between Christmas lights and Bitcoin mining is that each additional watt-hour spent on Christmas lighting provides more light (and presumably, enjoyment to somebody). Beyond a certain point*, each additional watt-hour spent on Bitcoin mining doesn't make Bitcoin any better. It doesn't deliver more value at all. It's just a rat race between miners trying to get a bigger slice of the rewards pie. It's like if there was a fixed amount of Christmas-lighting in the world, and each new person who plugged in Christmas lights got some of it in proportion to how much power they drew. So when you plug your lights in, everybody else's get a little dimmer, but you all still use electricity. * The "certain point" being the point at which the mining expenses make a 51% attack unprofitable. That's all the security Bitcoin needs, more security than that is waste with no benefit. There is nothing in the Bitcoin protocol that causes mining to stabilize at this level and not overshoot it. Or undershoot it for that matter -- but we can conclude we haven't been undershooting it so far by the lack of attacks.
      • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
        > That's all the security Bitcoin needs, more security than that is waste with no benefit. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of security spend. You just don't know how much is enough. If you could provide a trustless (or.. maybe even useless, trusted) mechanism for determining appropriate security spend, there is many Billion dollar industries that would love to hear it.
        • rspeele 5y ago
          I agree that I don't know how much is enough, and that nobody really can know how much is enough. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to overspend on security. Bitcoin's model for how much to spend is basically just "pick a number". Right now it's 37.5 BTC per hour. In 2024 it will be halved. Is it way too much now? (I suspect so, but I don't know so). Will it be too little after the halving? (Probably not). The next halving, or the one after that? Who knows.
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  That's a good thing because said governments are pushing miners to out of reach regions.
• usrbinbash 5y ago
  What a surprise. Turns out burning through the power demands of a country to run a system of value-token-exchange lagging 4 orders of magnitude behind the capability of credit cards measured in transactions done per year, is not a good Idea. Who could have seen that coming.
  • logicalmonster 5y ago
    So long as centrally managed currencies are designed to rob the public through inflation, nothing else about Bitcoin's weaknesses really matters to its users. Pointing out how it's inefficient means nothing if the alternative means that you're robbed blind.
    • verdverm 5y ago
      What are the cons of a deflationary currency?
      • logicalmonster 5y ago
        I suppose the textbook Keynesian argument would be that everybody would have an incentive to save as much of their money for as long as possible because it goes up in value over time, leading to incentivizing less short-term economic consumption, which would be harmful. Is it harmful though? Whether this is a good or bad thing might come down to how much importance you place on random consumption vs capital investment as the real engine of society. The Keynesian viewpoint is more favorable towards the importance of random consumption, the Austrian mentality would put a lot more weight on the value of saving for future investment and building.
        • verdverm 5y ago
          If people don't spend on goods and services, where do wages come from?
          • logicalmonster 5y ago
• mw888 5y ago
  Articles behind a paywall are not good posts, it is essentially just the posting of a headline on a particularly divisive topic on this board.
  • michaelbrooks 5y ago
    You can remove pay walls by either disabling JavaScript, or visiting arhive.ph and copy/pasting the URL. Here's the result for this article - https://archive.ph/fOncb https://archive.ph/fOncb
    • noway421 5y ago
      Hackernews really should add an archive.is link right next to the article link in the UI, it took me a minute to go through the comments to find it.
  • YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
    We are on Hackernews.
• rvz 5y ago
  Of course everyone knows that Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work coins are the main culprits in incinerating the planet. So the last resort is to 'attempt' to ban them. However: > and threatening the future of crypto No it does not. What does the banning of Bitcoin mining have to do with other coins that do not use mining at all? it is more like the uncertain and unsustainable future of Bitcoin and Proof-of-Work coins rather than all cryptocurrencies. Again, an article who's editors think that all cryptocurrencies have the same characteristics as Bitcoin. It's like thinking that all cars have the same characteristics as petrol cars and having a 'ban' on petrol cars means is a 'threat' to the future of cars in general. Downvoters: Care to explain yourselves as to how every single cryptocurrency shares the same environmental disadvantages as Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work coins?
  • matt3D 5y ago
    I don't think the crypto market as a whole is resilient enough to withstand a Bitcoin cliff drop. Once the money starts leaving Bitcoin, how likely is it that retail investors are going to consider other crypto, based on concepts they don't understand?
    • 7steps2much 5y ago
      > Once the money starts leaving Bitcoin, how likely is it that retail investors are going to consider other crypto, based on concepts they don't understand? If they don't understand, then should they have ever invested at all? Just a stray though of mine, but usually "don't invest in what you don't understand" is a pretty good principle to live by.
      • thatguy0900 5y ago
        I would be pretty shocked if the majority of people who own bitcoin understand it in any real sense.
        • jakupovic 5y ago
          Let's try to rephrase this and see if it still makes sense or is relevant. "I would be pretty shocked if the majority of people who own a computer understand it in any real sense" Or maybe substitute computer for something else, like internet.
• devoutsalsa 5y ago
  It will be banned in all but one country. Then all the miners in that one spot will generate so much heat, they’ll melt the underlying crust and sink beneath the molten lava. Then we’ll have our own version of Atlantis to fuel stories for generations.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• fiftytenhull 5y ago
  Kosovo is not banning mining because they disprove of crypto, it's just the energy crisis - thinking they can improve the situation this way.
  • enkid 5y ago
    Isn't this disapproving of an aspect of BC, namely the PoW requirement?
    • cinntaile 5y ago
      If there wasn't an energy crisis in Kosovo, would they still ban it? If the answer is yes, then yes.
      • WorldMaker 5y ago
        If you have too many streaming services at home, and generally think you should cancel a few, but let inertia take its course and instead wait until a household budget crisis to cancel them, were you not really concerned about having too many streaming services before you had the budget crisis?
        • cinntaile 5y ago
          Sure you might have been concerned if you were already on the edge, but it's not because you disapproved. You just kept the ones with the most utility once it turned into a crisis.
• Proven 5y ago
  [dead]
• vegai_ 5y ago
  Ah, so we're currently dumping. Gotcha. When's the next pump?
  • sandworm101 5y ago
    NFTs. Then it will be whatever the gamestop mob is after. Then investments in e-sports teams.
    • tjbiddle 5y ago
      NFTs and DeFi was this pump. New NFT "drop", someone purchases, takes a DeFi flash loan, "purchases" it from themselves for a ridiculous amount, sells it to the sucker, pays off the loan. I'm bullish on crypto, but this is just another cycle. Same as - what was it, 5 years ago? Maybe 40k BTC will be the bottom... maybe it'll slowly taper down to 30, 25.. then it'll be quiet for a while, then...
      • mikro2nd 5y ago
        S'ok. Remember when 21k was the ATH...
      • throwhauser 5y ago
        Why such a narrow range? Why wouldn't it fluctuate between $0.10 and $10,000,000.00?
      • telxosser 5y ago
        I hate crypto but I think this is a pretty easy trade long at $40k. I am bearish long term though because the narrative that anyone can get rich from crypto has time decay. It doesn't just have to go up but it has to go up so much that the guy investing $10k thinks they will be "rich" from it someday. That is just so unsustainable as price goes up. When that narrative is lost then it is just standard commodity speculation like gold/silver. It took gold and silver 27 years to take out the 1980 high. The oversupply from mining that very high prices create makes the boring bear market longer.
• tamaharbor 5y ago
  Wouldn’t the banning of additional bitcoin production limit supply and drive the price of existing bitcoin up, assuming similar demand?
  • ycIsGarbage 5y ago
  • sedeki 5y ago
    The PoW algorithm's complexity factor is adjusted automatically every two weeks iirc, so the supply of new Bitcoins is steady.
  • enkid 5y ago
    My thoughts on this: This assumes there's no pressure on the demand side. If fewer people have access to the coins, demand could go down faster than supply goes down. Additionally most people who use it don't actually know how BC works. They read BC banned and assume that's the entire architecture, not just mining, and don't want to be stuck with an illegal asset. Alternatively they see the mining bans as a first step toward making the crypto completely illegal, making them want to dump them.
  • q1w2 5y ago
    No, because it does not alter the supply. The algorithm in the blockchain software forces a certain rate of coins minted, regardless of the number of miners. It will just make remaining miners more profitable. It will though reduce the security of the network by reducing the cumulative hashrate, but it's already incredibly secure, so I doubt that would have a big price impact.
  • onion2k 5y ago
    "assuming similar demand" relies on people believing that they'll be able to sell their BTC at an arbitrary point in the future to realize any profit they've made - if they don't believe that then they won't buy. Banning bitcoin mining puts a huge negative pressure on people believing that will be the case. It's likely that would drag the price down more than the limited supply will push the price up.
• anthonyskipper 5y ago
  This is a good thing. Imagine if we kept model-t's as our primary car instead of evolving.
  • howdydoo 5y ago
    Big difference: the government did not outlaw the Model T. Instead better cars were introduced and people switched voluntarily.
    • TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
      In the US it certainly outlawed it, we call them safety and emissions standards.
      • howdydoo 5y ago
        AIUI, old cars are usually grandfathered in to these laws based on the model year. So cars manufactured before 1965 don't have to be retrofitted with seatbelts. And your Model T doesn't have to meet modern emission standards. On emissions, a quick google gives me this: > most states provide some type of exemption specific to older cars. https://www.hagerty.com/media/archived/emissions-and-your-collector-vehicle/ https://www.hagerty.com/media/archived/emissions-and-your-co... But classic cars are not a big interest of mine so I don't know the details.
        • TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
          I wasn't expecting it to be taken so literally, you missed the point.
• cletus 5y ago
  Crypto Andys like to extol the supposed virtues of crypto like being extra-governmental, distributed and robust. A lot of gold bugs have jumped on this, often out of some misunderstanding of what central banks do and that "printing money" isn't the evil it's made out to be. Crypto skeptics (such as myself) point out the flaws in all this. For example: 1. It's not a currency. It's an asset; 2. Reversible transactions for fiat currencies is a feature not a bug; 3. People who can't manage passwords won't be able to manage a wallet so mass appeal is always going to be limited; 4. Crypto has its own vulnerabilities (eg 51% attack); 5. This whole system is hugely energy wasteful; and (here's the big one) 6. Government action could shut down crypto tomorrow so how robust is it really? (6) seems to be contentious but there's a ton of evidence for this. China banned mining, for example, out of energy concerns so all the crypto miners moved to Kazakhstan, a country that may end up being invaded by Russia. What happens to those crypto farms then? Rising energy costs in the developed world are slowly going to turn the eye on crypto mining. You already see the US government cracking down on crypto anonymity and tax reporting. All of this is enough for me to wonder if the solution to the Fermi Paradox isn't just that civilizations end up choking on micro-plastics and cooking themselves to death with crypto-mining. But hey for awhile there they created a lot of shareholder value.
  • cute_boi 5y ago
    Regarding 6 these crypto miners will simply prey for other country that has low electricity price (which may be using tax subsidized by citizen money.) You didn't mentioned one big disadvantage: 7. Cryptos are also used by naughty people for hacking, extorting etc. And we already know how many of them are involved in mlm strategy.
    • cletus 5y ago
      Potential government action goes beyond chasing a friendly regime and low electricity prices. What if the US passed a law tomorrow that said that financial institutions who traded in crypto in any way lost access to the US financial system? That's not fantastical. We already do this with trading with countries that are sanctioned (eg Iran). The US uses this power to exert influence on foreign banks so it's not just a US banking issue. And I agree: governments don't willingly lose control.
• cute_boi 5y ago
  Ahh, finally governments are realizing how unsustainable bitcoin is. I don't understand why it takes so much time for Government that BTC, animal farming, climate change shouldn't be taken lightly. I feel sad for those tax payers whose money were used to subsidize electricity. And it’s so astonishing to me why crytobois don't switch to the better currency that doesn't use POW at least they won’t use exorbitant power.
  • poontang1 5y ago
    Because non PoW algorithms are inferior, and bitcoin can be entirely powered from stranded energy that would not otherwise be used
    • paulgb 5y ago
      I always find it weird that people defend Bitcoin with hypotheticals like this. Sure, it could be, but it isn't, and it largely seems to be going in the other direction. A lot of these arguments assume that price of energy is the only input, but the availability of mining hardware is also a constraint, and once you have it, you have a strong incentive to run it 24/7. There are a few “climate-friendly” miners making a bit of noise, but the players that dominate by hashrate are using coal and natural gas. For example, here's a thread from the other day about one of the largest US miners and the difficulties they encountered bringing an old coal plant back up to capacity: https://mobile.twitter.com/anthonyc3004/status/1479506660200701957 https://mobile.twitter.com/anthonyc3004/status/1479506660200...
  • Terry_Roll 5y ago
    Bitcoins always had its flaw from the start but I wonder if this is just the concerted effort to shift people over to Central Bank Digital Currency having used the existing crypto tokens as a Proof in Concept whilst raising awareness of a new type of mon(k)ey token. China already have their own Digital Currency (DC) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_renminbi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_renminbi and on the 18th the UK unveils this, which people can watch online for free. https://www.rusi.org/events/open-to-all/central-bank-digital-currencies-plotting-path-ahead-uk https://www.rusi.org/events/open-to-all/central-bank-digital... One thing I noted with the Chinese DC, is that the DC can starting expiring in order to stimulate spending in the wider economy, much like the ECB's negative interest rates. Reports suggest the big global corps like Siemens and Phillips are paying to store money in EU banks instead of investing it, but this could also be the mopping up of quantitative easing money being End-of-Lifed. Nothing is ever transparent in global finance and politics.
• naraga 5y ago
  [flagged]
• mabbo 5y ago
  Heard an excellent perspective on the Kazakhstan situation the other day and how it relates to bitcoin. The Kazakhs are protesting and rebelling over high fuel prices. But why would fuel prices be high in a country with large oil and gas reserves? Well, funny enough China banned cryptocurrency mining, and a lot of miners (allegedly) crossed the border into Kazakhstan, where energy is cheap in the form of oil and gas. The proportion of bitcoin mining out of Kazakhstan has massively increased since then. The miners drive up the demand for oil and gas, increasing price, leading to the protests. Now, how true is all of this? No idea. But you can bet that in the coming weeks the Kazakh authorities will blame cryptocurrency for the entire issue, redirecting the anger people are feeling. Then, they too will ban it. And if they're right, and this is what happened, you can expect to see this process repeat again in whatever country has the next cheapest energy,
  • noway421 5y ago
    > why would fuel prices be high in a country with large oil and gas reserves? To prevent arbitraging opportunity. If fuel is subsidised for local citizens, they will start siphoning it out of country to sell overseas and profit off of it. Oil and gas companies would rather do it on their own.
  • eskathos 5y ago
    Scott Manley mentioned it in his latest video, though with no source.
  • davebailey 5y ago
    One of the greatest utilities of cryptocurrency is the ability to monetize energy where it's cheap and expensive to ship it out of country. It effectively monetizes the inefficiencies of the energy markets.
    • mabbo 5y ago
      "Ship it out of country" in what sense? It burns the energy, providing no real value except that the coin 'exists' on the ledger. You can't use the coin for any real purpose. Crypto finds where energy is cheapest and then ensures that it isn't cheap anymore.
• h0nd 5y ago
  Bitcoin mining can be compared with seti@home: There are some computations to be done (in BTC it is in order to verify transactions which creates trust) and results to be sent. What part exactly do they want to ban? Can there be no reward for computations?
  • karpour 5y ago
    You can compare both, and find out that they're radically different. seti@home, folding@home, etc. are just about the complete opposite of POW coin mining. People supply their computational power while expecting no reward, that's why there are also no seti@home data centers sucking up terawatts of energy.
  • neltnerb 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure that if they want to ban Bitcoin mining they will just say it is illegal. They're actively shooting protestors in the streets, I think at some point you stop worrying about the technical details and just put the datacenter admin in prison if they don't do well enough. Especially if it is a scapegoat, really, because then they really just want people in prison to blame for things. Due process needs to exist before legal arguments mean much.
  • tradesurplus 5y ago
    It can indeed be compared. They both utilise computational capacity in an algorithmically distributed fashion as a means to an end. The former requires specialised single purpose hardware, is a profligate waste of resources and mindshare for no sound economic, technological or environmental reason -- whereas the latter piggybacks in the cycle gaps on spare commercial and domestic computing to analyse radio telescope data with the goal of perhaps some day finding genuinely world changing evidence that intelligent alien life is out there in our light cone.
  • whoisterencelee 5y ago
    you need to check gridcoin.us using energy to help scientific projects do computational is both satisfying and rewarding
  • neilalexander 5y ago
• JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  I'm a crypto sceptic, but this is a missed opportunity. Why not apply a mining and transaction tax? Use it to fund carbon mitigation and the de-carbonisation of our grid. Maybe even use it to cut taxes for the poor. Instead, these countries opt to burn pubic funds enforcing a prohibition.
  • mschuster91 5y ago
    Because all that a tax is gonna do is to allow the rich classes to continue their ecologically destructive behaviors, the produced goods are only made a bit more expensive. It's somewhat fine to use taxes to nudge people into certain behaviors (e.g. a tobacco tax to steer people away from smoking to vaping or quitting outright, or alcohol/gambling/other "vice" taxes), but stuff that is as destructive as Bitcoin (ffs, Bitcoin and Ethereum alone consume about 1.2% of all electricity generated worldwide [1]!) should be banned world-wide. We didn't go and tax CFC in the late 80s, we didn't go and tax sulphur and lead in fuels, we banned them for their destructive potential - and we saw drastic results out of these three bans. Despite decades of "small government"/neoliberal propaganda (since the 90s, which is not a coincidence!), governmental action to global problems works. ETA: And obviously, countries like China have to worry about their climate targets, and countries like Khazakhstan have to worry about supplying their citizens with power. They are fully in their right to ban rich foreigners from coming in and making life for their citizens more difficult just for profit. [1]: https://medium.com/gochain/the-truth-about-bitcoin-and-ethereum-energy-consumption-20a325f39b52 https://medium.com/gochain/the-truth-about-bitcoin-and-ether...
  • plussed_reader 5y ago
    Because tax's are just a cost of business; a tacit endorsement. The folks this is intended to regulate will scoff and just assume the tax into the cost of business. I don't see people losing years of their life for mining crypto.
    • howdydoo 5y ago
      Who cares if people "scoff"? The point of a tax is not to affect someone's emotions. The point of a tax is to affect their behavior and collect their money. If that tax affects their planning and finances (aka they recognize it as a cost of doing business), then you achieved your goal.
• orena 5y ago
  For those that think that Bitcoin is not environmental, please read -https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/open-letter-bitcoin-tesla-and-elon-musk https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/open-letter-bitcoin-tes...
• neatze 5y ago
  If only bitcoin mining farms existed in space on similar satellites to starlink.
• scottiebarnes 5y ago
  The "Bitcoin energy problem" has always been a short term issue, as it exposes the problem of under-priced fossil fuel that do not yet capture externalities (fossil fuels are subsidized by governments, and most countries do not implement a carbon tax). Bitcoin comes along and becomes the most profitable way to monetize energy, so of course you have this profit seeking behavior of arbitraging low cost energy for btc. This isn't as big of a problem in the long run because renewable energy from solar, wind, geothermal, are now the cheapest forms of energy, and will probably get even cheaper. This means new capacity from these sources are likely to be built out increasingly in the future, and development would be accelerated by proper pricing of fossil fuels. Combine this with improvements in batteries and other complimentary technologies (solar roofs) and the future of self sustaining, affordable renewable clean energy is very promising. It does not make sense to use fossil fuels for mining in this future when fossil fuel gets priced correctly.
  • cool_dude85 5y ago
    Well then, can you hold off on your bitcoins until the no-carbon future is here please? Today all the carbon dioxide it's putting into the atmosphere is making the planet I live on hotter.
    • howdydoo 5y ago
      We'll hold off on our bitcoins if you hold off on your football stadiums and christmas lights. Deal?
      • Graffur 5y ago
        bitcoin bad! and football good! /s
  • ninkendo 5y ago
    Your comment boils down to "Bitcoin is not a problem now, because someday in the future we'll solve this whole clean energy problem and fix global warming." Do you not see how crazy you sound?
• young_unixer 5y ago
  Would it make sense to ban electric heaters? Well, mining Bitcoin is not more wasteful than an electric heater. If we assume that cryptocurrencies provide no benefits, a computer mining crypto is equivalent to an electric heater. If we assume that cryptocurrencies provide some sort of benefit, then mining Bitcoin is more energy-efficient than electric heaters. So, if you want to ban Bitcoin mining, you should also ban electric heaters, if you want to be morally coherent.
  • rsynnott 5y ago
    Well, first of all, direct electric resistive heaters (as opposed to, say, heat pumps) are likely on the chopping block in many countries in favour of more efficient solutions. But also, in general, the heat produced by mining magical internet money is, generally, not being used; it's waste.
  • go_elmo 5y ago
    Would you get a building permit for electric heaters the size of factories heating the environment anywhere in the world (apart from outlaw places and places where religion > public interests)? I cant think of such a place somehow...
  • snarf21 5y ago
    If all the waste heat was using for heating, then you might have a point. If you have to start burning extra electricity (fans, cooling systems) to keep your GPU or ASIC cool, your argument falls apart. I also don't think people are using mining farms with 1000s of units as a heat source for human habitation. This is the same old straw man, you can make the same argument for Twitter or Hatebook. For all their ills, there is some human benefit from us using them collectively. Crypto is unusable and always will be. Everyone in it is on the pump & dump train. It is all speculation and chasing dumb money.
  • MagnumOpus 5y ago
    Nobody sane and financially literate runs electric resistance heaters if they need heating with any regularity. Heatpumps are 3-4x more efficient for heating. Nobody sane runs electric heaters which heat the great outdoors either.
• brazed_blotch 5y ago
  Why is it up to governments to decide whether Bitcoin is a good idea or not?
  • vorpalhex 5y ago
    They have these people called police who will arrest you if you commit crimes. Then you will go in front of other people, called Judges, who will determine your guilt. Finally you will get to spend a lot of time with the people known as "jailers".
    • brazed_blotch 5y ago
      Why are you so rude?
      • vorpalhex 5y ago
        Many years of careful study and practice. Some people think cutting words are as easy as being sharp, but it's an art form that requires patience and dedication. Also I respond to a lot of crypto bros who think the same old tired mantras are witty replies. Governments didn't become dominant entities by happenstance. Most people don't want broad tax evasion, endless scams and seriously environmentally destructive practices in the name of an asset that isn't actually decentralized, where all transactions are public and where you pay enormous transaction fees along with gaining a serious security burden.
  • lpcvoid 5y ago
    Because governments need to make decisions which hopefully benefit a large amount of people. Banning Bitcoin mining is one of those.
    • brazed_blotch 5y ago
      I just think that it's difficult to have the foresight to know whether something is good or bad. Perhaps if we allowed bitcoin mining in some regions and disallowed it in others, then mining energy usage would decrease on a large scale and we could also see if it were beneficial or not. I'd like to see this on a national scale instead of an international one (which is already the case) so that you wouldn't have to move countries to simply evade a law, which is a very arduous process.
• dagaci 5y ago
  "Banning" bitcoin is interesting since it basically bans factory mining compared to individuals mining. Because: The high power consumption used by a heavy gamer (CPU + GPU) is easily indistinguishable and probably higher than a plain old individual miner since you would have CPU + GPU + Peripherals running. And since there are 1000+ X more gamers than miners, the Bitcoin Inquisitors will have a hard time finding the needle in that haystack by simply examining your electricity bills.
  • ohgodplsno 5y ago
    A single person using their RTX3080 to make money back from it, while slightly problematic, is well within the expected power usage and will pay electricity prices that are expected of individual payers. However, the miners with 150 GPUs, 500 GPUs, thousands of GPUs are absolutely a problem.
    • rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      Problem because... you don't have them? I want to buy a new video card too, but if the market is paying more than they are retailing for, but what can I do? I must compete with the miners. If 150 cards are used to play fortnite, or 150 cards are used to mine, that is entirely the prerogative of the person that bought the cards. Is the problem that you don't like what someone else is doing with their own property?
  • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
    Eventually they will also ban gaming. Who are you to think that your entertainment is more important than the fate of the planet?
    • scottiebarnes 5y ago
      Netflix too. How much wasted screen energy and bandwidth do we need to consume until people recognize that streaming media is a blight on society?
      • 5y ago
• FourHand451 5y ago
  Setting aside the debate over whether it's the right thing to do or not, is it feasible to enforce a ban on mining? Genuinely just curious, as I don't know that much about crypto. I'm sure energy use is one big clue as to who may be running a mining operation, but are there other ways authorities might detect them? Network activity?
  • distances 5y ago
    Some mining facilities have been found by thermal imaging. Unexpected heat output (say, in a barn of a closed farm) is often connected to marijuana growing and may result in a raid.
• FlacoJones 5y ago
  Perhaps I'm missing something but even as a crypto-hopeful this doesn't disturb me too much. Bitcoin et al. is better off without mining becoming consolidated into giant conglomerates. The vision is for mining to be distributed amongst many small to mid-sized, non-colluding teams, the sum of whose hashpower is still greater than that which could be mustered by, say, a government or bank. I hope that one day the UX and hardware for mining and joining mining pools becomes so simple and cheap it just makes sense for many semi-technical people to run a node in their home or contribute their compute/storage to distributed protocols. Even have this built into the operating system, with a simple toggle for turning it on and off. Truly distributed mining is largely a UX problem. I hope that these bans may spur spur development on dead simple mining pools for all.
  • rebuilder 5y ago
    I don’t see how hashpower consolidation is a consequence of anything other than the usual economies of scale that lead to consolidation in different businesses. A large miner can negotiate better prices for hardware and electricity than a smaller one.
    • FlacoJones 5y ago
      That's exactly it - hashpower consolidation does result from economies of scale. At least looking at ASIC-resistant mining algos... it would be a hopeful future if we could get protocol-level compute and storage sharing to distributed mining pools, like https://www.nicehash.com/ https://www.nicehash.com/ Until contributing your unused compute and storage is as easy as clicking a toggle, the economies of scale will prevail. I think crypto + ASIC resistance + seamless edge computing = the original dream of the Internet
      • FlacoJones 5y ago
        TL;DR Maybe regulation of massive mining cartels can have positive externalities by making distributed mining pools more profitable
  • aantix 5y ago
• jetgirl 5y ago
  I can't read the article because of a paywall. If only there was some sort of token gated system to let me connect to the site and view it without an account that hands them my personal/cc data.
  • vinnie-io 5y ago
    what site did you give your government id and cc info to so you could buy tokens in the first place and who do you trust more
• exodust 5y ago
  I sometimes wonder whether a 14yo kid should be mining bitcoins on his home PC, leaving it on all night every night. I don't like it but his parents don't mind - they have no clue what it's about. I'm the Uncle, wondering if I should say anything or let him have fun. So far I haven't said anything. There's not much learning going on mining coins, is there? I might be wrong, but I was hoping he'd be into creative programming and making things on his PC. But for the teenager it's all games, bitcoins and good times!
• hungryforcodes 5y ago
  More HN anti crypto FUD huh? Has anyone clicked on the link? "We could not locate the page you requested. Our apologies. It may have expired or there could be a typo..."
  • TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
    Let's be fair here and not assume any bias on the part of...oh Fortune magazine eh?
• kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  This could even be a net win for Bitcoin, if only sustainable energy remains for mining Bitcoin. Then the one argument against Bitcoin could fall away, and companies like Tesla could start using it again.
• rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
  Forgive my inexperience with crypto, but wouldn’t a solid implementation of Proof of Stake, as Ethereum is attempting, solve a lot of these energy demand issues, and therefore government angst and regulatory shutdowns? TFA didn’t mention PoS, and I have gotten the impression that the crypto community regards it the way people talk about fusion energy, “the future if someone ever figures it out.” HN is more knowledgeable about crypto than the average bear, so I’m wondering if this crowd expects the crypto bans to cool off once PoS is (ever) proven with a mainstream stablecoin, or if I’m missing any crucial details.
• nullsmack 5y ago
  Every country should ban the crypto scams outright. That way no legitimate retailers support it and they can finally collapse. The only "value" in any of them is finding a bigger sucker to give you real money for your fake "money".
  • badRNG 5y ago
    >The only "value" in any of them is finding a bigger sucker to give you real money for your fake "money". What's interesting to me about crypto currency is the ancillary philosophical discussion of what the necessary and sufficient features of "real money" actually are. Crypto shares a lot of the features we'd normally associate with "real money," people use crypto currencies as "real money," and generally people trust, to some degree, that crypto will have ongoing value (regardless of how misguided we may think that is.) Does there ever reach a point where those claiming that crypto currency is "not real money" becomes analogous with the man yelling that US currency is somehow "fake" because it isn't backed by gold? The ongoing utility of both "currencies" seem to make both of these positions appear misguided (this coming from a fellow long time crypto-skeptic.)
  • HeadsUpHigh 5y ago
    Reading through the comments here is pretty entertaining too.