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Imposing 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 (uncommo

• mdoms 5y ago
  Machine drying clothes unnecessarily is right up there in the wastefulness stakes.
  • waffle_maniac 5y ago
    Machine washing too.
    • gmac 5y ago
      Ha ha. But clothes dry themselves. Clothes do not wash themselves.
      • waffle_maniac 5y ago
        You would be amazed what can be accomplished when you roll up your sleeves.
      • _whiteCaps_ 5y ago
        Maybe 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 ago
      Machine 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.
      • waffle_maniac 5y ago
        Significant? Who doesn't have 20 minutes to soak and wash their clothes in a bucket? If the goal is to reduce energy usage one should start at the top with large appliances.
• vlovich123 5y ago
  The typical drying machine pulls about 2-6 KW while running. A cryptomining rig pulls about ~1.2 KW while mining. A drying machine runs for an hour a week. Let's say 2 hours a week. That's 12kWh per week at the high end for drying. A cryptomining rig running 24/7 ends up using 201 KWh for the same time period. That's 16x more taking the most pessimistic clothes drying usage, so I'm not sure how you're concluding "uses as much if not more energy".
  • politician 5y ago
    Most people living in the suburbs in the US have a drying machine while not everyone has a cryptomining rig running 24/7, so we could _easily_ be in a situation where drying machines in a region use more power than cryptomining rigs. And a lot of things are like that: Netflix, furnaces, AC, freezers.
  • Scoundreller 5y ago
    You forgot to account for the cost of the damage a dryer does to clothing. And how much conditioned air it pumps outside that needs to get sucked back in through my home’s cracks and re-conditioned. And the fires!
  • xhrpost 5y ago
    OP is probably talking cumulative energy. The vast majority of households probably have dryers in the US. The vast majority of households also DO NOT have crypto mining rigs.
    • vlovich123 5y ago
      It's currently close. Bitcoin alone uses 91 TWh globally [1]. US dryers consume ~60 TWh [2]. However, one of those is seeing exponential energy usage while the others is very mature and stable. I'm also shocked that people do laundry so often. Not sure why people are doing more than one or two loads per week and that's a problem the government could look at tackling (not so much with PoW coins). [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitcoin-carbon-footprint-electricity.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco... [2] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ene_14060901a.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ene_14060901a.pdf
• mrfinn 5y ago
  Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the need of power is steadily bigger each year. Where would be the limit of that? When that requires the energy of a big country? (We are quite away from that as far as I know [1] ) A heavily industrialized continent? More than the whole world? It's absolutely crazy. I know that there's a big lobby behind mining, I absolutely respect what they have being doing protecting Bitcoin i.e. and making the project survive... even if it somehow completely lost it's original purpose. But FFS guys what's the purpose of having cryptocurrencies if the cost of that is aiming to destroy the world, or much more probably, to win a last minute complete cryptocurrency ban from all governments with the handy climate change as an excuse? [1] https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-network-use-391280 https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    >Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the need of power is steadily bigger each year. They don't really require more power, they are just getting more valuable so it's been profitable for more people to increase their mining investments. The limit is that they are not infinitely valuable, and if anything mining rewards are decreasing.
  • the_snooze 5y ago
    >Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the need of power is steadily bigger each year PoW is wasteful by design. The more hash power you throw at the network, the more difficult the PoW becomes. Any efficiency gains necessarily have to go towards more hashing, instead of maintaining the same level of work at a lower power draw.
  • palebluedot 5y ago
    I sometimes wonder if we'll discover a Kardashev Type II civilization, harnessing the power of their sun via a Dyson sphere. And then, upon first-contact, realize they are using all that power to mine Bitcoin.
• vorpalhex 5y ago
  A single miner uses 1,300W (Antminer S9) and runs 24/7. That is 218,400Wh for a week. A gaming computer at ~400W, left on 24/7, is 67,200Wh. That assumes you are playing 24/7 - your idle wattage in sleep is < 100W. If you run your dryer every night of the week for an hour, you are using about 38,400Wh. You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient single miner node. About 50% less! Bitcoin is a huge waste of electricity, and it is WAY worse than anything else you listed.
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    It doesn't make sense to compare 1 person gaming or clothes drying to a specific mining machine. The consideration was about global bans and total outputs from those activities.
    • vorpalhex 5y ago
      Bitcoin mining uses more power than the country of Sweden. [1] - https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-network-use-391280 https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...
      • Xylakant 5y ago
        I have no love for bitcoin, but I always hate this comparison. It’s useless. Sweden uses much more energy than it uses power (as pretty much every country) and it also exports power usage by buying finished products. Why is the power usage not compared to something useful? The power or rather energy usage of the global banking network for example?
        • chii 5y ago
          When people compare energy usage like that, they are making an implicit argument that the energy usage of bitcoin is a "waste". This is what i dislike about the argument that PoW should be banned - that it wastes energy that could otherwise have been used for something else. I argue that it is not a waste, because the person who is paying for the energy does not consider it a waste. No one else can make this judgement. The only weakness of this argument is that some energy sources have externalized the cost of emissions. I would very much like to see an emissions tax to account for it (which makes sense to do, regardless of one's position on PoW).
• cedilla 5y ago
  You severely underestimate the power use of proof-of-work blockchains. It's on the scale of nations. But the main difference is that whatever you compare with those blockchains, it will never have the critical flaw: the automatically increasing difficulty. Your dryer doesn't periodically flood the drum to make it harder because more people are interested in tumble drying.
  • jhasse 5y ago
    Difficulty isn't necessarely increasing. It could also decrease if less people are interested in mining (e.g. when energy prices go up).
    • newbie789 5y ago
    • cedilla 5y ago
      That is true. However, market forces guarantee that the difficulty will go up to the point where it's infeasible to add more hashrate, e.g. because it becomes uneconomical or there's simply no more hardware available. PoW workchains must work at maximum inefficiency. (This bears out in the data, too, I think. BTC had its highest hashrate at the beginning of this month, when energy price were at an all-time high and BTC was at the lowest over 12 months)
• waffle_maniac 5y ago
  You can wash your clothes in a bucket if you want to save even more energy. But I like the convenience of washers and dryers.
• endisneigh 5y ago
  There are plenty of other wasteful activities that should be limited as well. Classic whataboutism. First of all your entire comparison makes no sense, you have to compare alternatives for use. What's the alternative to a dryer. Using a line and hanging your clothes. Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? A ventless dryer? Doesn't use substantially less energy. And so forth. For every conceivable use case there exists alternatives that use orders of magnitude less energy. NFTs, sending money, federated computing, you name it, something already exists. The only reason blockchain is a thing is because cryptocurrencies are booming in terms of how much they're sold for. The end.
  • jrockway 5y ago
    > Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? I dry my clothes on a line in the winter in New York. It's below zero outside, but like 80 degrees and 0% humidity inside my apartment. Clothes dry fast. (And the space was already being heated, because I live in it, and it's against the law for the landlord to allow the temperature to go below 55 degrees, and they are paranoid, so it's more like 80-90 all winter.)
    • netizen-936824 5y ago
      Its 80 in your place? Holy shit, I would just be sweating all the time. And finding a new place to live
      • jrockway 5y ago
        Sometimes I feel like I have a fever and am getting sick, then I realize it's probably just in the 90s and I should open a window. Not great. This is with all my radiators turned off! The heat is on a timer so it's not like this all the time, but I have to wonder what a world where thermostats have been invented would be like.
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    >Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? Large swathes of Europe have winters as bad or even worse than New York's. I've grown up in one of those countries and had never seen a home clothes dryer before visiting the US. I've also almost never seen them in London or Berlin where I lived after that and those have at most marginally warmer winters than New York.
• beloch 5y ago
  Governments could apply a carbon and electronic waste offset tax to declared cryptocurrency income. The people making money from cryptocurrencies should pay enough to fund projects that will fully offset their environmental costs. Of course, those taxes will probably just disappear into general tax revenues and wind up paying for other things, but it would encourage crypto miners to pursue green energy sources and, perhaps, find better uses for obsolete graphics cards.
  • chii 5y ago
    > The people making money from cryptocurrencies should pay enough to fund projects that will fully offset their environmental costs. why should crypto be specifically targeted for an energy use tax (ala, a carbon tax but with extra steps), instead of a general tax on energy use (aka, just implement the aforementioned carbon tax)?
• Justin_K 5y ago
  Would you support Visa and Amex if their next generation networks required you to burn x minutes of natural gas or x pounds of coal to complete a transaction? Why is this an acceptable architecture for Blockchain? It is a race to the bottom.
  • randomhodler84 5y ago
    That’s absurd comparison. No energy user (be it miners or the visa network) requires unclean power. Electricity is fungible. We all want power to be cleanly generated. This demand side bullying needs to stop. Give us clean energy!
    • dasKrokodil 5y ago
      There is no such thing as clean energy.
• 300bps 5y ago
  This comes up every single time banning cryptocurrency for wasting electricity comes up. Using a clothes drying machine and just about anything else that you can think of that uses electricity is fundamentally different than PoW cryptocurrency. If I want to use a machine to dry my clothes, I pay for that electricity. This puts a limit on the amount of electricity I can consume to do it. Cryptocurrency is different. The more electricity you burn, the more money you make. I know this first hand - the computer I'm typing this on is running gminer to mine ETH on flexpool.io with my RTX 3070 card. I've mined $2,800 of ETH in the past 10 months. Something that most people don't understand is that there is a finite amount of ETH that can be mined per day. Hashrate determines the size of the slice of that pie you get. Therefore the incentive is to consume infinite electricity! Of course miners can't do that because mining gear (i.e. GPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, whatever) is hard to purchase and electricity isn't infinite. But that doesn't stop miners from trying. I know people that do anything they can to acquire GPUs - they have bots combing the Internet, they buy whole systems that have GPUs, rip out the GPU and sell the system, they've signed up for every GPU manufacturer's wait list, they stalk Microcenter, whatever they can do. They seek out areas with cheap or even subsidized electricity and latch onto it like a parasite. It is nothing like anything else you spoke of.
  • chii 5y ago
    > The more electricity you burn, the more money you make. there will be a new equilibrium - the more electricity you use, the less of it is available, and thus the price would rise to match the demand. This means there's a limit to how much you can earn (unfortunately you wont know this limit until you reach it, because the full demand for crypto is unknown atm). But high prices of electricity would spur developments in energy production. In any case, energy use is energy use, regardless of the purpose. As long as the person using it is paying for it, then it is a valid use.
• samwillis 5y ago
  There is literal legislation about energy efficiency of consumer goods (such as dryers), our houses have to be built to be environmentally friendly with good insulation to stop wasted energy, governments are banning plastic packaging. But crypto should be except? No, crypto should be legislated so that it’s energy usage is limited. To think otherwise is an enormous step backwards. I cannot understand how this is not a bigger issue being talked about in the media. Right now in the UK we are going through an energy crisis where people can’t afford to heat their own homes (I’m not blaming crypto for this). It’s absolutely maddening that in a world where climate change and energy scarcity is such an issue this would be a controversial topic.
  • IanCal 5y ago
    Those are very different things. My dishwasher is rated based on specific cycles, but I'm legally allowed to use it as frivolously as I want. I can run an A+++ rated dryer with a single sock in and send the photo to the police. We don't limit energy use but inefficiencies. The equivalent in crypto would be to rate hardware by hashes per joule. Crypto things are different because the incentives are different. I'm incentivised to use my appliances efficiently as the energy cost is just a cost. On the other hand with PoW, I'm incentivised to mine efficiently but as much as possible because I can buy a thing that turns electricity into cash.
    • philistine 5y ago
      We are looking down the barrel of a gun. The gun is cryptomining's thirst for electricity destroying all our gains to diminish climate change. Your arguments may be right, but you are on the wrong side of our survival as a civilization.
      • IanCal 5y ago
        The point here is that existing legislation does not cover this and trying to apply it would fail, you would need something new if you want it to work.
• nix0n 5y ago
  > Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US Fine, yes. Ban both.