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Technicalities of the language matter with respect to laws. To the second point, that sounds like a failure of the government to provide clean energy. In Los A
by carom 4y ago
Technicalities of the language matter with respect to laws.
To the second point, that sounds like a failure of the government to provide clean energy. In Los Angeles, we get 16% of our energy from coal and 28% from natural gas. I do not blame Bitcoin miners for this. It is a failure of the government to meet the energy needs of its people with clean sources.
Write legislation that mandates building new nuclear power plants or wind farms off the coast.
- DonHopkins 4y agoNot the subjective definitions and technicalities he's nit-picking about. Words have many different meanings in different contexts, and he's cherry picking one particular interpretation that's completely irrelevant and out of context. And governments can do multiple things at once to solve problems. The fact that they could build more nuclear power plants and wind farms doesn't mean they shouldn't also regulate burning coal to defraud people, commit crimes, and get around banking regulation and international sanctions.
- spinchange 4y agoGovernment cannot create a bottomless supply of renewable energy by pen stroke. Proof of work mining is taking exponentially more resources out of the universe that anything facilitated by it is giving back to the economy or anything. It's terrible trade-off for humanity. This is precisely what mandates are for to stop harmful action not to wish into existence some magical thinking solution so that people can do bad things with negative consequences forever
- doctor_eval 4y agoThat’s crazy. Why should a government spend taxpayer money to build energy supplies to support the “energy needs” of crypto scams? Its a terrible idea, if for no other reason than that a vanishingly small percentage of the population would benefit.
- saalweachter 4y agoThis is also one of the ways a government attempts to promote clean energy: by banning, in part or in whole, a source of dirty energy, people can either do without... or switch to a clean-energy source. Instead of electric vehicle tax credits, which cost the government in question an increasing amount of money as more people use them, you could apply a similar force with an ICE tax on purchasing new ICE vehicles, which raises a decreasing amount of revenue as people stop buying ICEs in response.
- labster 4y agoWhile there is a failure to provide clean energy, increasing demand makes it harder to supply energy to everyone. If the rich keep on pushing demand by using energy on speculative financial products, we can’t make up the supply in time to prevent the worst of climate change. Bitcoin is basically class warfare, except because of climate and air pollution in general, it’s lethal class warfare. I’m not saying to stop all innovation, but crypto is 5+ orders of magnitude more energy inefficient, and it’s killer apps so far have been asset speculation, untaxed remittances, and cyber crime. Governments have no interest in those innovations at all.