7 ms·

I would rather outlaw cryptocurrencies for being a harm for the planet with their crazy energy demands, besides also fueling criminals.

gjs278 5y ago
randomhodler84 5y ago
- btmiller 5y ago
  That’s a pretty hyperbolic response. There’s always a risk that mismanaged use of energy results in us never reaching Kardashev Type 1 (i.e. we destroy the habitability of the planet before we get there).
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    That is true. However I am responding to another sheer Luddite attitude on a tech forum. Hating a new technology for the sake of it is not progress.
    - ofrzeta 5y ago
      So is liking/hyping a new technology for the sake of it (or for the sake of getting rich).
      - randomhodler84 5y ago
        Sure, but that doesn’t apply here. I am a technical individual who can make a case for the technology, and have for many years. All you precoiners do is complain that everyone else is getting rich and/or destroying the planet. It Just isn’t so!
        newswasboring 5y ago
        What case do you want to make about technology though? That it is cool is I think pretty much accepted by everyone. The objection there being just because something is cool doesn't mean we do it especially if its at the detriment to the planet we live on. That it is useful? If you have time, please make that case. To avoid having a flamewar over it, lets try to be concrete and cite an actual project (even if in progress)
        randomhodler84 5y ago
      - smokey_circles 5y ago
        Sure, but one side can be substantiated. The Satoshi protocol is not about money. It is a distributed, trust-less consensus algorithm. Finance was just a good candidate to start with. But we can expand that much further. Some strange examples I hear about how this is silly: "You can't have a smart contract act as an employer because it doesn't exist" But neither do companies? They're an abstraction that we agree exists, enforced by law. It needs to be enforced by law because of the issue of trust. But if I have a mechanism that removes trust (merkle trees) then what's the issue? The contract will do what it states it does because that's the only option it has. Granted, it's a touch utopian and I'm not advocating for setting this system up tomorrow. But it's absolutely an achievable goal
        eru 5y ago
        Crypto-currencies and smart contracts change some aspects, but they don't remove trust completely. And people don't want it to remove trust completely. Remember when ethereum forked, because a smart contract many people cared about actually specified something different in its code than what the humans intended it to mean? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)
        newswasboring 5y ago
        > But if I have a mechanism that removes trust (merkle trees) then what's the issue? The contract will do what it states it does because that's the only option it has. The problem I have with this line of reasoning is it does not consider the interface between on chain and real world realities. Some of it is easily doable, like money (if I have a token I have a token), but many are not at all easily doable like land use. I can write I have a piece of land on the chain but that does not give me any control over it. If I have to bring in the government to enforce land usage then why not let them do the owner tracking too? If they disagree with the blockchain its not like I can do anything about it.
- gambiting 5y ago
  >>Bitcoin has been around 13 years at this point and you still don’t get why folks need to use energy to secure their money. In those 13 years it has proven to be nothing more than a Ponzi scheme for cryptobros and probably one of the most wasteful endeavours that humanity has ever started. One can only hope that the next 13 years kill it for good, either by imploding internally, or it being outlawed in every country that can.
  - smokey_circles 5y ago
    > Ponzi scheme Doesn't meet the requirement: New investor money to pay old investors. Which is not to say it's problem free, but that problem is at the exchange level. Art suffers the same flaws. And Yachts. And on and on and on. That's why we have regulations. Desperately need regulation at the fiat/crypto exchange
    - lodovic 5y ago
      Yes it does - Bitcoin is mainly used for speculation. Paying for groceries with Bitcoin is too expensive (transaction fees) and you typically cannot use your Bitcoin savings as a collateral for another investment due to the price volatility. This means that if you want to cash out, you need someone else to invest their "new investor money" in Bitcoin.
      - randomhodler84 5y ago
        Nah, a lot of things are that without being a ponzi, like Amazon stock. It pays nothing. Does nothing. Requires you to find someone who will pay more than you paid and sell it to them to make money. It’s not.
  - newswasboring 5y ago
    > it being outlawed in every country that can. Being pedantic for fun. Isn't all crypto currency already outlaws? They operate outside of all the financial laws and regulations we have. In fact I think some proponents are citing this as a feature.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  > There is no better metric of human progress than energy usage. True, but when energy is used to manufacture products or services. When you turn energy into money there's no progress involved and no new jobs are created. The only linked activities which would benefit would be energy creation and the manufacture of mining hardware. Everything else will suffer when more and more money will be diverted to buy more energy (whose prices will of course be dictated by the highest bidder) and more mining farms. Of course I expect people with vested interests in cryptocurrencies to not care at all.
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    Countries are get kicked out of the global banking system, and WESTERN countries start confiscating bank accounts. Inflation at levels not seen in 30 years. And that’s just last month. Bitcoin is a product. It autonomously provides a Service. Sound money. Hard money. Censorship resistance and decentralized peer to peer money. It’s ok if you still are skeptical, but don’t wait too long!
    - leereeves 5y ago
      Are you suggesting that it would be a good thing if Russia used cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions?
      - randomhodler84 5y ago
        I am suggesting a monetary system that is beyond the influence of the state is a good thing.
        leereeves 5y ago
        Good for criminals and rogue states, certainly.
        randomhodler84 5y ago
        Sure, but also the dissident, someone fleeing a war zone, someone having their life savings destroyed by bankers and politicians… It’s ok if you don’t have a use for decentralized money. I hope you never need it, and continue a sheltered life of luxury and convenience.
- bigbluedots 5y ago
  Yeah, let's piss away a bunch of energy for no good reason and then say we're a more advanced society because of it!
  - smokey_circles 5y ago
    You are mostly describing the mineral mining sector though :D "Shiny metal, ug ug, me dig up". Which is not to say gold has no practical use but let's not pretend that's the only reason why we're mining it
schappim 5y ago
Would seem to be a rather misinformed comment even to a crypto-layperson. I’m surprised we don’t have a chorus of cyptofiles informing you that crypto emits less greenhouse gases than the traditional banking system, and there are coins/tokens that don’t require melting chips to establish proof of work. I can’t talk to the use of crypto currencies for crime, but I would be surprised if the total volume of transactions were greater than that of traditional currencies (ie cash).
- larsrc 5y ago
  A couple of million transactions per day: https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-bitcoin-transactions/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b... That's less than the number of private transactions in a moderately sized city, never mind business or financial transactions. Random comparison: NASDAQ alone sees 30-40 million transactions per day. http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummary http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummar...
  - schappim 5y ago
    It’d be real interesting to do an analysis of the last mile power usage of the credit card networks / banking system. I wonder if the giant volume and ubiquity of credit card terminals tips the scales.
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  ...but I would be surprised if the total volume of transactions were greater than that of traditional currencies (ie cash). You cannot compare the two. If you are poor and someone gives you crypto, you still won't have better food or a better apartment until you turn the crypto into cash. It isn't surprising that a less useful, simple form of transaction notation (which is really what money is and always has been) has less transactions than the sort of currency that can almost always buy you food, let you watch a movie, and pay your rent.
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
baby 5y ago
Cryptocurrencies are pretty green besides bitcoin and ethereum
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Also worthless, because they just keep printing them and giving them away to VCs, who then sucker engineers into building em a product/ecosystem. You will see it eventually David!
  - cbozeman 5y ago
    > Also worthless, because they just keep printing them and giving them away to VCs You literally just described what's happened with fiat currencies in the past decade. Endless printing of money and giving it away to big banks. I guess you'll see it eventually randomhodler84.
    - EdwardDiego 5y ago
      Except fiat currencies have a value in the market based on the economies of the countries that issue them. I have yet to see a cryptocurrency that has a value in the market based on anything other than "a bigger fool might come along".
      - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
        I guess you don't understand what value the seal of approval a dollar has - for that is what Bitcoin generates but without the backdoor devaluation and cronyism of private banking.
        EdwardDiego 5y ago
        Sorry, that sentence doesn't make much sense as it is, could you please expand on it?
        5y ago
smokey_circles 5y ago
I'd like to engage with this opinion because I genuinely have no idea how this is the conclusion people reach (that crypto is bad for the environment). The configuration of transistors through which electrons are punched is obviously not the problem (at least I hope it's obvious). So it must be about proof of work chains, right? That they create high demand? That's about the only point I do understand, but I think you'd be hard pressed to meaningfully translate a bitcoin transaction to a carbon cost. There are some mining farms powered by green energy (less altruistic and more about being off grid). But if we're talking about energy usage and environmental damage, we have to talk mining. There is just no debate that mining is THE singular (keyword) greatest threat to the environment. Fracking, acid mine drainage, offshore drilling, sonic bombardments of coastlines, the ridonculous requirements of smelting. The list goes on and on. We are stuck with that industry for a long time though. I'd argue the minerals that constitute the technology you're using to view this comment may have done more damage than bitcoin and co have. In a nutshell, here's my problem with this argument: To suggest that demand is responsible for the damage caused by supply is just a crazy warping of reality. That absolutely does not make sense. There are other, more pressing issues with crypto (like the lack of regulation around fiat exchanges and how they constantly get rugged) and those criticisms are valid, but they get lost in the noise of "how we generate energy is not as bad as how we use it". I just can't get on board with that point of view.
- larsrc 5y ago
  Cryptocurrencies have shown that you can transform energy into money without any of that messy middle step of doing something useful.
  - eru 5y ago
    They prevent double spending attacks. That service is useful for some people. You can of course disagree. Just like you can disagree that building and fueling yachts for rich people is useful.
    - selfportrait 5y ago
0xedd 5y ago
- urthor 5y ago
  > What will you do when the government decides to nullify years of your life spent working? The US Government has nuclear weapons. If the US Government decided one day to start actively screwing me over... I'm fucked. There's no two ways about it. Them zeroing my bank account is going to be the least of my concerns. The argument about "if you use crypto currency you'll be safe from an evil government" holds no sway. The government knows where I sleep. The only way to not get fucked by the US Government, is to make sure the US Government is run by good people. You cannot mitigate an evil government. An evil government has so many tools at its disposal, an individual can do nothing. Hence, I'm forced to trust the US Government. Because if the US Government is untrustworthy, we're all screwed.
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    Good news! Some of the megacorps nowadays have power almost equal to that of governments! /s
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  I'm no fan of banks, but that doesn't mean I'm about to trust the same small group of people that brought us The DAO, MtGox, OpenSea and the endless churn of crypto scams. Your arguments are the same ones that argue for cash, and not more layers of unaccountable middle men or networks that are controlled by a minority of wealthy stakeholders. I even made the argument for cash using that same exact anecdote about Cyprus that you used about a week ago[1]. At any point the government could order exchanges to take a haircut on deposits and transactions. If that happened, 99% of people who hold cryptocurrency would not have the ability to liquidate it without taking a haircut. Even LocalBitcoins needs to follow KYC laws in the US, and will comply with laws of the country as long as they want to operate in the US. If people used any legal exchange in the US, their wallets are associated with their identifying information and there will be a record of transactions on the blockchain that point back to them should they try to escape the haircut. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436347.
ezoe 5y ago
Be careful what you wish for. While I agree the current cryptocurrency is a mess, but prohibiting a pure computation cause more harms than good.
- GreenWatermelon 5y ago
  The computations are ok, but exchange with, well, non-crypto currency could be prohibited. Crypto would lose its worth of you can't convert it to dollars in a feasible way. Much of the market is driven by speculative investment and get-rich-quick type of schemes. Of course, criminal organizations could still use it, but I believe it would be harder to launder money using crypto if banks no longer supported it.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    I think a ban on buying and selling crypto might just be good for the cryptocoin ecosystem. The whole idea of cryptocurrency idealists is that it replaces cash transactions, so if there is any value in the system besides pure speculation, the crypto coins should still work as advertised. Services can still accept the coin and goods can be sold for the coin, but you can't launder money through crypto networks anymore. It's crazy how banks are willing to scrutinise anything related to sex work to an extreme extent yet seem perfectly willing to support the latest weekly pump and dump by letting people exchange money for cryptocurrency at random exchanges.
- paulmd 5y ago
  That ship has sailed. FP64 is artificially limited on AMD 290X graphics cards, as is workstation performance in enterprise software, and neither of those ideas was new at the time. That ship sailed decades ago, in fact. And in none of these cases, by the way, is computation prohibited. LHR cards are still capable of mining. A 290X can still run Solidworks. The choice of "prohibited" here is deliberately inflammatory - a word like "slowed" or "reduced" is more appropriate. (But it is true there are cases like ECC on AMD APUs where it actually is fully prohibited.)
i67vw3 5y ago
Could you tell your daily routine? I would like to calculate your carbon footprint and compare with mine to see whose is higher. By it, we can figure if you or me (an average cryptocurrency user) is harming the planet more.

gjs278 5y ago

randomhodler84 5y ago

btmiller 5y ago
That’s a pretty hyperbolic response. There’s always a risk that mismanaged use of energy results in us never reaching Kardashev Type 1 (i.e. we destroy the habitability of the planet before we get there).
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  That is true. However I am responding to another sheer Luddite attitude on a tech forum. Hating a new technology for the sake of it is not progress.
  - ofrzeta 5y ago
    So is liking/hyping a new technology for the sake of it (or for the sake of getting rich).
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      Sure, but that doesn’t apply here. I am a technical individual who can make a case for the technology, and have for many years. All you precoiners do is complain that everyone else is getting rich and/or destroying the planet. It Just isn’t so!
      - newswasboring 5y ago
        What case do you want to make about technology though? That it is cool is I think pretty much accepted by everyone. The objection there being just because something is cool doesn't mean we do it especially if its at the detriment to the planet we live on. That it is useful? If you have time, please make that case. To avoid having a flamewar over it, lets try to be concrete and cite an actual project (even if in progress)
        randomhodler84 5y ago
    - smokey_circles 5y ago
      Sure, but one side can be substantiated. The Satoshi protocol is not about money. It is a distributed, trust-less consensus algorithm. Finance was just a good candidate to start with. But we can expand that much further. Some strange examples I hear about how this is silly: "You can't have a smart contract act as an employer because it doesn't exist" But neither do companies? They're an abstraction that we agree exists, enforced by law. It needs to be enforced by law because of the issue of trust. But if I have a mechanism that removes trust (merkle trees) then what's the issue? The contract will do what it states it does because that's the only option it has. Granted, it's a touch utopian and I'm not advocating for setting this system up tomorrow. But it's absolutely an achievable goal
      - eru 5y ago
        Crypto-currencies and smart contracts change some aspects, but they don't remove trust completely. And people don't want it to remove trust completely. Remember when ethereum forked, because a smart contract many people cared about actually specified something different in its code than what the humans intended it to mean? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)
      - newswasboring 5y ago
        > But if I have a mechanism that removes trust (merkle trees) then what's the issue? The contract will do what it states it does because that's the only option it has. The problem I have with this line of reasoning is it does not consider the interface between on chain and real world realities. Some of it is easily doable, like money (if I have a token I have a token), but many are not at all easily doable like land use. I can write I have a piece of land on the chain but that does not give me any control over it. If I have to bring in the government to enforce land usage then why not let them do the owner tracking too? If they disagree with the blockchain its not like I can do anything about it.
gambiting 5y ago
>>Bitcoin has been around 13 years at this point and you still don’t get why folks need to use energy to secure their money. In those 13 years it has proven to be nothing more than a Ponzi scheme for cryptobros and probably one of the most wasteful endeavours that humanity has ever started. One can only hope that the next 13 years kill it for good, either by imploding internally, or it being outlawed in every country that can.
- smokey_circles 5y ago
  > Ponzi scheme Doesn't meet the requirement: New investor money to pay old investors. Which is not to say it's problem free, but that problem is at the exchange level. Art suffers the same flaws. And Yachts. And on and on and on. That's why we have regulations. Desperately need regulation at the fiat/crypto exchange
  - lodovic 5y ago
    Yes it does - Bitcoin is mainly used for speculation. Paying for groceries with Bitcoin is too expensive (transaction fees) and you typically cannot use your Bitcoin savings as a collateral for another investment due to the price volatility. This means that if you want to cash out, you need someone else to invest their "new investor money" in Bitcoin.
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      Nah, a lot of things are that without being a ponzi, like Amazon stock. It pays nothing. Does nothing. Requires you to find someone who will pay more than you paid and sell it to them to make money. It’s not.
- newswasboring 5y ago
  > it being outlawed in every country that can. Being pedantic for fun. Isn't all crypto currency already outlaws? They operate outside of all the financial laws and regulations we have. In fact I think some proponents are citing this as a feature.
squarefoot 5y ago
> There is no better metric of human progress than energy usage. True, but when energy is used to manufacture products or services. When you turn energy into money there's no progress involved and no new jobs are created. The only linked activities which would benefit would be energy creation and the manufacture of mining hardware. Everything else will suffer when more and more money will be diverted to buy more energy (whose prices will of course be dictated by the highest bidder) and more mining farms. Of course I expect people with vested interests in cryptocurrencies to not care at all.
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Countries are get kicked out of the global banking system, and WESTERN countries start confiscating bank accounts. Inflation at levels not seen in 30 years. And that’s just last month. Bitcoin is a product. It autonomously provides a Service. Sound money. Hard money. Censorship resistance and decentralized peer to peer money. It’s ok if you still are skeptical, but don’t wait too long!
  - leereeves 5y ago
    Are you suggesting that it would be a good thing if Russia used cryptocurrencies to evade sanctions?
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      I am suggesting a monetary system that is beyond the influence of the state is a good thing.
      - leereeves 5y ago
        Good for criminals and rogue states, certainly.
        randomhodler84 5y ago
        Sure, but also the dissident, someone fleeing a war zone, someone having their life savings destroyed by bankers and politicians… It’s ok if you don’t have a use for decentralized money. I hope you never need it, and continue a sheltered life of luxury and convenience.
bigbluedots 5y ago
Yeah, let's piss away a bunch of energy for no good reason and then say we're a more advanced society because of it!
- smokey_circles 5y ago
  You are mostly describing the mineral mining sector though :D "Shiny metal, ug ug, me dig up". Which is not to say gold has no practical use but let's not pretend that's the only reason why we're mining it

schappim 5y ago

Would seem to be a rather misinformed comment even to a crypto-layperson. I’m surprised we don’t have a chorus of cyptofiles informing you that crypto emits less greenhouse gases than the traditional banking system, and there are coins/tokens that don’t require melting chips to establish proof of work. I can’t talk to the use of crypto currencies for crime, but I would be surprised if the total volume of transactions were greater than that of traditional currencies (ie cash).

larsrc 5y ago
A couple of million transactions per day: https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-bitcoin-transactions/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b... That's less than the number of private transactions in a moderately sized city, never mind business or financial transactions. Random comparison: NASDAQ alone sees 30-40 million transactions per day. http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummary http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummar...
- schappim 5y ago
  It’d be real interesting to do an analysis of the last mile power usage of the credit card networks / banking system. I wonder if the giant volume and ubiquity of credit card terminals tips the scales.
Broken_Hippo 5y ago
...but I would be surprised if the total volume of transactions were greater than that of traditional currencies (ie cash). You cannot compare the two. If you are poor and someone gives you crypto, you still won't have better food or a better apartment until you turn the crypto into cash. It isn't surprising that a less useful, simple form of transaction notation (which is really what money is and always has been) has less transactions than the sort of currency that can almost always buy you food, let you watch a movie, and pay your rent.
- mattwilsonn888 5y ago

baby 5y ago

Cryptocurrencies are pretty green besides bitcoin and ethereum

randomhodler84 5y ago
Also worthless, because they just keep printing them and giving them away to VCs, who then sucker engineers into building em a product/ecosystem. You will see it eventually David!
- cbozeman 5y ago
  > Also worthless, because they just keep printing them and giving them away to VCs You literally just described what's happened with fiat currencies in the past decade. Endless printing of money and giving it away to big banks. I guess you'll see it eventually randomhodler84.
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    Except fiat currencies have a value in the market based on the economies of the countries that issue them. I have yet to see a cryptocurrency that has a value in the market based on anything other than "a bigger fool might come along".
    - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      I guess you don't understand what value the seal of approval a dollar has - for that is what Bitcoin generates but without the backdoor devaluation and cronyism of private banking.
      - EdwardDiego 5y ago
        Sorry, that sentence doesn't make much sense as it is, could you please expand on it?
        5y ago

smokey_circles 5y ago

I'd like to engage with this opinion because I genuinely have no idea how this is the conclusion people reach (that crypto is bad for the environment). The configuration of transistors through which electrons are punched is obviously not the problem (at least I hope it's obvious). So it must be about proof of work chains, right? That they create high demand? That's about the only point I do understand, but I think you'd be hard pressed to meaningfully translate a bitcoin transaction to a carbon cost. There are some mining farms powered by green energy (less altruistic and more about being off grid). But if we're talking about energy usage and environmental damage, we have to talk mining. There is just no debate that mining is THE singular (keyword) greatest threat to the environment. Fracking, acid mine drainage, offshore drilling, sonic bombardments of coastlines, the ridonculous requirements of smelting. The list goes on and on. We are stuck with that industry for a long time though. I'd argue the minerals that constitute the technology you're using to view this comment may have done more damage than bitcoin and co have. In a nutshell, here's my problem with this argument: To suggest that demand is responsible for the damage caused by supply is just a crazy warping of reality. That absolutely does not make sense. There are other, more pressing issues with crypto (like the lack of regulation around fiat exchanges and how they constantly get rugged) and those criticisms are valid, but they get lost in the noise of "how we generate energy is not as bad as how we use it". I just can't get on board with that point of view.

larsrc 5y ago
Cryptocurrencies have shown that you can transform energy into money without any of that messy middle step of doing something useful.
- eru 5y ago
  They prevent double spending attacks. That service is useful for some people. You can of course disagree. Just like you can disagree that building and fueling yachts for rich people is useful.
  - selfportrait 5y ago

0xedd 5y ago

urthor 5y ago
> What will you do when the government decides to nullify years of your life spent working? The US Government has nuclear weapons. If the US Government decided one day to start actively screwing me over... I'm fucked. There's no two ways about it. Them zeroing my bank account is going to be the least of my concerns. The argument about "if you use crypto currency you'll be safe from an evil government" holds no sway. The government knows where I sleep. The only way to not get fucked by the US Government, is to make sure the US Government is run by good people. You cannot mitigate an evil government. An evil government has so many tools at its disposal, an individual can do nothing. Hence, I'm forced to trust the US Government. Because if the US Government is untrustworthy, we're all screwed.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  Good news! Some of the megacorps nowadays have power almost equal to that of governments! /s
heavyset_go 5y ago
I'm no fan of banks, but that doesn't mean I'm about to trust the same small group of people that brought us The DAO, MtGox, OpenSea and the endless churn of crypto scams. Your arguments are the same ones that argue for cash, and not more layers of unaccountable middle men or networks that are controlled by a minority of wealthy stakeholders. I even made the argument for cash using that same exact anecdote about Cyprus that you used about a week ago[1]. At any point the government could order exchanges to take a haircut on deposits and transactions. If that happened, 99% of people who hold cryptocurrency would not have the ability to liquidate it without taking a haircut. Even LocalBitcoins needs to follow KYC laws in the US, and will comply with laws of the country as long as they want to operate in the US. If people used any legal exchange in the US, their wallets are associated with their identifying information and there will be a record of transactions on the blockchain that point back to them should they try to escape the haircut. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30436347.

ezoe 5y ago

Be careful what you wish for. While I agree the current cryptocurrency is a mess, but prohibiting a pure computation cause more harms than good.

GreenWatermelon 5y ago
The computations are ok, but exchange with, well, non-crypto currency could be prohibited. Crypto would lose its worth of you can't convert it to dollars in a feasible way. Much of the market is driven by speculative investment and get-rich-quick type of schemes. Of course, criminal organizations could still use it, but I believe it would be harder to launder money using crypto if banks no longer supported it.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  I think a ban on buying and selling crypto might just be good for the cryptocoin ecosystem. The whole idea of cryptocurrency idealists is that it replaces cash transactions, so if there is any value in the system besides pure speculation, the crypto coins should still work as advertised. Services can still accept the coin and goods can be sold for the coin, but you can't launder money through crypto networks anymore. It's crazy how banks are willing to scrutinise anything related to sex work to an extreme extent yet seem perfectly willing to support the latest weekly pump and dump by letting people exchange money for cryptocurrency at random exchanges.
paulmd 5y ago
That ship has sailed. FP64 is artificially limited on AMD 290X graphics cards, as is workstation performance in enterprise software, and neither of those ideas was new at the time. That ship sailed decades ago, in fact. And in none of these cases, by the way, is computation prohibited. LHR cards are still capable of mining. A 290X can still run Solidworks. The choice of "prohibited" here is deliberately inflammatory - a word like "slowed" or "reduced" is more appropriate. (But it is true there are cases like ECC on AMD APUs where it actually is fully prohibited.)

i67vw3 5y ago

Could you tell your daily routine? I would like to calculate your carbon footprint and compare with mine to see whose is higher. By it, we can figure if you or me (an average cryptocurrency user) is harming the planet more.