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World really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make some money of it, and in the oth
by mrfinn 5y ago
World really needs a ban on PoW cryptocurrencies. I guess on one side lot of people is not caring about it as long as they make some money of it, and in the other side maybe other people in power, is not caring as that would make a perfect excuse to ban any kind of cryptocurrency. I guess too we all will care as soon as the devastation caused by the climate change becomes a massive life threatening issue.
- bluecalm 5y agoYou don't need a specific ban. Just even the playing field for traditional finance. Either make cryptocurrencies follow normal banking/financial laws or make laws for traditional finance more liberal. Cryptocurrencies and especially PoW based ones are a terrible, slow, inefficient and vulnerable technology which wouldn't survive a day of fair competition.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoWhat is “fair competition”? Can you define it?
- bluecalm 5y agoTechnologies being subject you the same rules. The reason I can buy drugs, play online poker, request a ransom or just send money to an unknown at the other end of the world with crypto but can't with a bank transfer isn't technical. The only reason is that banks have to comply to regulation while crypto doesn't. There are a lot of regulatory burden when trying to make a financial service. KYC, anti money laundering, reporting, privacy, data storage etc. There is basically none (that is enforced anyway) with crypto. That's the only reason it got traction. The technology is terrible. It's hard to come up with something more inefficient, expensive and hard to use. The one and only reason it's used for anything is that it evades regulatory burden. It's literally "let's burn a lot of coal to run our steam powered car because steam powered cars are not subject to traffic laws" kind of situation. Fix and enforce the law and the steam car disappears. The same will happen to cryptocurrency.
- beachy 5y agoOr a carbon tax and solve the problem at source.
- acdha 5y agoThat’d only partially solve it: we don’t want to waste renewable power which could be going to something of value.
- xvector 5y agoYou are moving the goalposts. If Bitcoin miners pay for renewable energy, they are no longer harming the environment. Who are you to dictate what someone does with energy they pay for? Just because you do not like what they do, doesn't mean you can ban it if it's not harming you. There is no evidence that Bitcoin's usage of renewables is preventing others from paying for renewables too.
- 1ris 5y agoNo, that's not moving goalposts. If Bitcoin miners waste renewable energy, the users of energy in general move to renewable later. If everybody is using renewable energy exclusivity for everything, is still wastage. PoW only work by adjusting it's consumption upwards to create scarcity, e.g. one block per 10 minutes. At that point we will be useless solar panels, covering land uselessly, etc, etc. Bitcoin is arbitrary scalable wastage to create arbitrary, artificial scarcity. The point is: Energy wasted is energy wasted. Bitcoin will eat everything till the point where some external factor prevents further expansion, e.g. how much are we willing to hurt the environment and ourselfs in exchange of the block reward. The person with the highest threshold wins. It's not really not complicated. This is literally the last scene of the hitchiker, where they plan to kill all trees, so they can use the leaves for currency. The success of bitcoin makes be loose all hope in humanity.
- politician 5y ago"Waste". The parent's point is who are you to say? Maybe we should closely audit your energy usage and ban those activities we find objectionable. Authoritarianism isn't an ideal outcome.
- xvector 5y agoI pay for all my energy to be renewable. I don't see why my crypto mining needs to be banned. In fact, estimates peg Bitcoin's use of renewable energy to be between 50-75%. This is a fact lost on HN, which hates crypto at all costs.
- gambiting 5y agoThat's not how this works. Even if you pay your supplier to buy only renewable energy on the open market, if your house is supplied by a coal power plant then your mining rig is powered by coal, regardless who you're paying for your electricity. Yes it feels good to pay for renewable electricity but ultimately that's not how it works. And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it.
- ls15 5y ago> And crypto needs to be banned because it's all a gigantic scam that has a gigantic environmental cost attached to it. Is it worse than, let's say, Christmas in this regard?
- tick_tock_tick 5y agoYes
- ls15 5y agoHow so? Christmas lights, plastic trash, food waste and transportation combined?
- acdha 5y agoThose do something useful and there's a cap on how much people use: if I put up lights and then my neighbors put up lights, I don't put up twice as many lights so I can out-compete them for carolers and I certainly don't buy another house to put up even more lights. Proof-of-waste effectively requires that of all participants.
- Tenoke 5y agoImposing global technological bans so willy-nilly seems like a nice idea only on the surface. Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US (uncommon in Europe so seems frivolous) uses as much if not more energy. Others might consider gaming or self-hosted servers or who knows what else equally inefficient. Do you really want to put things so easily on the potential chopping block even if this one thing you hear a lot about might be a waste? Now if PoW was using 10% of the world power maybe it'd worth it but I just don't see how you can justify such a ban but only apply it to this one thing.
- mdoms 5y agoMachine drying clothes unnecessarily is right up there in the wastefulness stakes.
- waffle_maniac 5y agoMachine washing too.
- gmac 5y agoHa ha. But clothes dry themselves. Clothes do not wash themselves.
- waffle_maniac 5y agoYou would be amazed what can be accomplished when you roll up your sleeves.
- _whiteCaps_ 5y agoMaybe they meant people wash their clothes too often? https://www.prima.co.uk/fashion-and-beauty/fashion-tips/a26971925/how-often-should-you-wash-jeans/ https://www.prima.co.uk/fashion-and-beauty/fashion-tips/a269...
- javagram 5y agoMachine washing is a significant labor and time saver. People are usually opposed to line drying clothes because of aesthetics and feeling like it makes their neighborhood look “poor”. Luckily quite a few states have passed laws making it illegal for landlords or HOAs to ban putting up clotheslines.
- zozbot234 5y agoPoW cryptocurrencies are still way more energy- and carbon-efficient than armored vans/trucks carrying valuables around, which is the other accepted method of decentralized, trustless value transfer. We shouldn't call for stuff to be "banned" that we can't even be bothered to understand properly.
- kennywinker 5y agoAh yes, I’ll never forget when I purchased my house and the armored truck delivered my money to the buyer. /s Most transactions don’t need a decentralized trust-less value transfer. But bitcoin is not only attempting to displace the small sliver of transactions that DO need trustless/decentralized
- kmkemp 5y agoI put a 20% downpayment on my house and it involved a wire transfer that was scheduled for days in the future that required my physical presence at a centralized authority (bank). With Bitcoin, that process takes less than an hour, with very little "fee", and doesn't involve any of the "trust", which was represented in my example by time delays, scheduling, and traveling.
- kennywinker 5y agoOddly enough making buying a house faster is not really a priority for me. I appreciated that mechanisms of trust kicked in for that transaction - my bank wouldn’t release mortgage money to anyone but a lawyer or notary, and my notary would not have released money to the seller unless they actually owned the place and transferred ownership to me. Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers, and have to trust the seller (who stands to gain if they can trick me) instead of now where i trust the bank and the conveyancers instead.
- zozbot234 5y ago> Making that trustless means I am open to scam sellers Cryptocurrencies support escrow transactions, where a mutually-trusted third party (e.g. an arbitrator) can decide whether the transaction should go forward if buyer and seller disagree. This is still "trustless" compared to other systems because it only depends on mutual trust wrt. each individual transaction, not on a pre-defined central authority.
- gjs278 5y ago
- randomhodler84 5y agoBanning = Authoritarian Madness. Bans are never the answer unless you are a fascist. This is an attack on general purpose computing. You cannot tell people what they can and can’t do with their machines. You can try, but the smart ones will tell you to go f yourself. Deal with the supply side costs, and let people do whatever math they like.
- cedilla 5y agoPoisoning the water supply to increase the margin on bottled water is a valid business plan. Banning that is a good answer, and neither authoritarian nor fascist.
- randomhodler84 5y agoSupply again. Supply!! The analogy would be you telling people they have to drink that water a certain way and banned from drinking it the way they want. That’s fascism. Everybody that wants to ban PoW is an authoritarian fascist. Might be an eco fascist, might be a boot licking state loving fascist… still a fascist.
- cedilla 5y agoI thought that was a simple story. No one is banned from drinking poisoned water. What is banned is poisoning other people's water. Really, this isn't that difficult. If you want to make a point about supply, please make a point about supply instead of just repeating the word randomly.
- randomhodler84 5y agoWe can all agree we want clean power, which is entirely in the hands of the suppliers. Rather than pushing one’s preferences around on users and forcing them to do your will, why not go after the Coal and Gas producers — the supply. People get upset when you want to ban things because it’s a bully move. The bully thinks their opinion is true and correct and others must succumb to their will.
- teawrecks 5y agoPoW really is the tragedy of the commons epitomized. The only way it could be more on the nose is if mining literally required a random human being to die.
- noyeastguy 5y agoThe sad reality is that people will die from the excess carbon and pollution put into the atmosphere by mining crypto.
- nathias 5y agoI'd give you pow ban if you give me a central bank ban
- friendlydog 5y agoIn 2019 the US used 18.27 billion gallons of fuel from airlines. If we limited flights to once a week we would save an amazing amount of fuel and increase flight occupancy, and decrease consumption as people would need to decide if the trip really needed a week layover if they couldn't take care of the problem in a 24 hour period. Much more than crypto consumption unless I am wrong. Edit: Commercial aviation makes up 918 million metric tons of carbon. Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoI'm up for doing both!
- killingtime74 5y agoYour example shows the opposite of what you intend. Civil aviation has many positive effects. Bitcoin is questionable in this regard and yet is a non negligible fraction of a massively socially significant activity like flying
- miohtama 5y agoThere is no need to ban them unless there is a particular local problem, like in Kazakhstan. Because proof of stake is technically superior for network capacity, proof of work blockchains will slowly die away. Users switch to better solutions. For example, there will be only proof of work coin (bitcoin) left in top 10 market cap by the end of this year.
- iszomer 5y agoCan you imagine if PoW cryptocurrencies hadn't of existed, that the climate change narrative would have been adapted to apply as "the world really needs to ban triple-A gaming" instead? This story reminds me of an urban legend that the Sony Playstation 2 consoles almost hit a snag on an export ban because of "potential military applications". Different era, different context I suppose. https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about-weaponized-consoles-almost-sunk-the-ps2 https://www.pcmag.com/news/20-years-later-how-concerns-about...