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Proof of work is temporarily illegal in New York
- Cyberdog 4y ago> The law will prohibit Environmental Conservation Law permits from being issued for two years to proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining operations that are operated through electric generating facilities that use a carbon-based fuel. Not really clear at what point your mining approaches an "operation" which requires a permit, but perhaps that's spelled out in some other law somewhere. I love the two year time limit. I'd love for it to be constitutionally mandated that all laws have to have a time limit of no more than five years or so. If the time passes and the law isn't renewed, into the incinerator that law goes.
- bragr 4y ago>but perhaps that's spelled out in some other law somewhere. It's literally in the text that you quoted. If they need a permit to operate a fossil fuel powerplant for mining, the answer is now no for 2 years.
- realce 4y agoLegislating would collapse under the simple iterative maintenance of such a policy. Every year would be N+(this year's new legislation).
- sokoloff 4y agoPerhaps society doesn't need an ever linearly-increasing body of laws?
- enraged_camel 4y agoLife today is immensely more complex than it was in the past, and you need to pass new laws (and amend the older ones) to keep up with it.
- throwup 4y agoI don't think the set of laws should be growing boundlessly year after year. Another idea is to adapt the house cleaning rule: to pass a new law, you must first get rid of an old law.
- geysersam 4y agoWhy put such arbitrary restrictions on our elected lawmakers? Reducing regulatory complexity is a worthwhile goal, but that's a bad way of going about it.
- enraged_camel 4y agoJust imagine: the day after the new search feature goes live, the product manager comes to you and asks where the user profiles have gone. You say, "oh, I removed them - I think it's a good idea to remove an existing feature after adding a new one! Complexity, after all, is bad!"
- BlueTemplar 4y agoIf you try to show all the icon bars in Office at the same time, you'll end up with half of your screen buried under them. There are diminishing returns.
- polygamous_bat 4y agoReplace "laws" with "features" or "lines of code" in your comment. Read it again. How much sense does it make?
- tgv 4y agoI'm not in favor of such short time limits. How can you possibly review all laws every couple of years? That would put even more pressure on the legislative branch, with the result that each and every rule is passed unseen, and everyone loses time anyway.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- TheCowboy 4y agoSunset clauses often just end up wasting everyone's time at best, and a common worst case is it creates a platform for political brinkmanship and grandstanding around passing an extension that should be straightforward.
- danuker 4y agoCryptocurrency mining does not cause global warming. Burning fossil fuel does. Why not ban fossil fuel burning, if the concern is pollution? How are all other industries exempt?
- Closi 4y agoOne argument would be that the energy isn’t really creating anything extra for the world as mining crypto is a zero sum game - ie adding compute to the network doesn’t create additional coins it just increases difficulty (thus it’s burning fuel for no gain in output in aggregate). Ideally we want to use/focus our resources to create things which then create net value.
- danuker 4y agoThe "zero-sum" game is sponsored through buying/holding and transaction fees of cryptocurrency. People see value in it, in spite of its costs.
- Closi 4y agoI don’t mean in terms of the value of the coin - I mean that if mining activity increases, power consumption goes up but coins produced remains static. More mining does not provide more coins, only increased fuel burnt per coin. So in total for society, we are burning fuel for nothing in return in aggregate. And let’s be honest - a majority of these coins aren’t going to “citizen crypto miners”, they are typically going to huge scale crypto farms so it’s hardly spreading the wealth.
- danuker 4y agoI got what you meant. But apparently people agree with the >$600k/hour costs [1] it takes to process Bitcoin transactions. This cost is taken from the Bitcoin price (via miners selling) and from transaction fees. Therefore, they must think they are getting at least that much value out of the system. [1] - https://www.crypto51.app/ https://www.crypto51.app/
- none_to_remain 4y agoOther things illegal in New York * Selling weed out of an unlicensed storefront * Punching strangers in the face for no reason * Jaywalking
- wslh 4y agoOne of the reasons software and hardware had a revolutionary growth was because regulators were mainly out of the scope. It is natural that once they are omnipresent regulators appear but the problems with regulations and politicians is they end up with an "accept cookies" checkbox on every web page. When I first read the title, I thought the article was about a work permissions in US and not about the blockchain consensus mechanism. And I have a company in the c̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶ Web3 sector.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mrkeen 4y ago> the problems with regulations and politicians is they end up with an "accept cookies" checkbox on every web page. Like ghastly pictures of people dying on cigarette packages, I'll take informed consent anyday.
- iso1631 4y ago> the problems with regulations and politicians is they end up with an "accept cookies" checkbox on every web page The GDPR does not require these. There are website operators who want to use your personal data without consent to benefit themselves and erroneously believe sticking such a banner on a webpage allows them to. That's entirely on those website operators who make up their own rules.
- davedx 4y agoI know Marathon is mining from a coal plant but that's in Montana. Greenidge mining is apparently mining using a NY based coal plant. They're going to have some... issues.
- me551ah 4y agoIt should be illegal everywhere, all Proof of Work does is to calculate trillions of hashes every minute, to discard all of them but one. It's very similar to a lottery, with energy being used instead of tickets.
- texasbigdata 4y agoWhy not ban lotteries too? And casinos? Or have some committee legislate all activities a human can engage in? Where do you draw the line? Let the government solve how to produce energy and let it keep their fingers out of our personal lives.
- geysersam 4y agoLotteries and Casinos are also heavily regulated
- acomms 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man If this is your best argument for burning $1 of (subsidized) fossil fuels so you can get $1.05 of crypto you need to reevaluate what you're spending your time on.
- dskloet 4y agoIt shouldn't be subsidized. That's the real problem.
- leaf8937 4y agoprice of electricity should be doubled after a certain high use. lots of businesses just leave their ac and lights on despite not needing, all because its too cheap.
- BlueTemplar 4y agoYeah, IMHO it makes no sense that they get cheaper power than residential users (well, it does make financial sense for the electric businesses to attract big customers using low prices, but that's not my point) : the cheapest power should be for the poorest citizens (but with limits to maximum power and lack of guarantees for continuous power supply), while the most expensive power should be for the businesses requiring lots of uninterrupted power ! (Note that cryptominers should be able to deal very well with programmed power cuts...)
- asow92 4y agoLife long upstate and downstate New Yorker here. Our winters are long and cold, and you'd think we'd want to make proof of work home heaters instead of banning the stuff outright. Seems like a missed opportunity to make home heating cost neutral.
- ilyt 4y agoCost neutral to user maybe but still wasting power... typical crypto short-sighteness. Install a heat pump instead, you will save both power and money on heating.
- asow92 4y agoWell, my furnace is wasting potential energy as we speak, and it isn't making me any money. I don't have enough money for a down payment on a new heat pump system... but I might over time if I could offset heating bill with a BTC miner. It's definitely not a waste if my family is warm and my wallet isn't hurting.
- zhte415 4y ago>> Any surplus presumably gets exported downstate, and to the rest of the Eastern grid surely? At least if it is anything like how it works in Scotland. > Nope, we don’t have enough transmission capacity to the NYC area — proposals to build transmission capability have been blocked by the Sierra Club. NYC is almost exclusively powered by natural gas after the closure of our sole nuclear plant. That NYC doesn't have a great amount of national grid connectivity seems surprising.
- woodruffw 4y agoNYSERDA’s current plan is to have the majority (70%) of the downstate power delivery be renewable by 2030[1]. I agree that the lack of connectivity is surprising, though. My understanding was that the city was actually pretty interconnected with both the state and surrounding states, but it’s possible that some of those connections were reduced after the 2005 blackout. That’s speculation in my part, though. [1]: https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/About/Publications/Energy-Analysis-Technical-Reports-and-Studies/Electric-Power-Transmission-and-Distribution-Reports/Electric-Power-Transmission-and-Distribution-Reports---Archive/New-York-Power-Grid-Study/Story-of-Our-Grid https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/About/Publications/Energy-Analysi...
- binarymax 4y agoFor those unfamiliar with the background, this is squarely pointed at operations such as greenridge: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/crypto/new-york-state-denies-air-permit-bitcoin-mining-plant-seneca-lake-rcna36232 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/crypto/new-york-state-denies-ai...
- BlueTemplar 4y agoMore about cryptomining in North America : The [New York State] City That Banned Bitcoin Mining (2018) : https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xk4e4/bitcoin-ban-plattsburgh-coinmint-mining https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xk4e4/bitcoin-ban-plattsbur... This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town (2018) : https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m...
- bumholio 4y agoInstead of banning proof of work they should firewall crypto assets from the traditional financial system. "Let crypto burn" as they say, both figuratively and in the practical sense, let them burn resources but only it they can pay for them by creating value outside their own bubble, services for which people are willing to pay. Currently the massive impetus of the resource burn is crypto speculation, the hope that a substantial part of the traditional financial system will move to crypto systems and take advantage of the low regulations. That's the major promise of crypto that's driving adoption in the traditional space, regulatory arbitrage.
- datadata 4y agoTitle is grossly incorrect and leading to inflammatory comments. Proof of work has not been made illegal, new proof of work operations that use fossil fuel energy are blocked. Existing proof of work operations, and new operations using non fossil fuel energy are not banned at all.
- AustinDev 4y agoI just finished setting up my POW mining rack at the office. We don’t have heat and the rack was unused so now we’re generating heat and hashes. I would think this is just as efficient as an electric heater.
- Areading314 4y agoIts less efficient than a heater because some energy is wasted computing hashes
- BlueTemplar 4y agoEnergy, by definition, cannot be "wasted" like this.
- Areading314 4y agoIf you think of a computer as a heat engine.. some energy goes to heat, and some goes into doing "work". For analyzing the efficiency of a computer as a heater you have to subtract out the "work" which would be the hashing computations, making it less efficient than a pure heating coil (assuming the crypto hashing is 100% worthless)
- BlueTemplar 4y agoMy bad, I should have directly given the explanation : Energy is (by definition) always conserved. What happens in a computer is that in order to do computation (in almost all of the computers we use today) you have to move around electric charges. This requires energy and converts ALL¤ of this energy to heat. ¤ Or almost : a tiny fraction probably ends in physical and chemical changes that slowly accumulate and degrade the computer. It's because a computer is NOT a heat engine : it (typically) runs on electricity and not heat, and it's not the (quantum)"mechanical" work it needs to do in order to do computation that we care about. (Heat engine's mechanical work also often ends up (almost) all dissipated as heat by friction : consider a car moving on a level road.) Also, by the fundamental principle of energo-informatics, it has to transform some of that electric energy into a form of energy that the observer knows less about (like random movements of particles we call "heat"), in order for the observer to carry computation, which involves at some point losing information about the system (you pretty much have to erase bits at some point). (Our computers are still waaay above the limit this creates - but we might hit it this century !)
- throw827474737 4y agoOooh these blind Americans, why did they rely so much on Russian gas, and didn't invest more in new green nuclear energy? Now a lot of them will freeze to death this winter :(
- marcinzm 4y agoReading the background this seems a ban of fossil power plants that are used for on-premise crypto-mining rather than crypto-mining more broadly. Basically expanded regulation on which fossil fuel power plants can be allowed to run . Miners are still free to build a different power plant or buy electricity from the grid.
- SevenNation 4y agoHighly misleading title. The actual text of the bill is available here: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A7389 https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A7389 The subjects of this policy are not miners, but "electric generating facilities": > FOR THE PERIOD COMMENCING ON THE EFFECTIVE DATE OF THIS SECTION AND ENDING TWO YEARS AFTER SUCH DATE, THE DEPARTMENT, AFTER CONSULTATION WITH THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE, SHALL NOT APPROVE A NEW APPLICA- TION FOR OR ISSUE A NEW PERMIT PURSUANT TO THIS ARTICLE, OR ARTICLE SEVENTY OF THIS CHAPTER, FOR AN ELECTRIC GENERATING FACILITY THAT UTILIZES A CARBON-BASED FUEL AND THAT PROVIDES, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, BEHIND-THE-METER ELECTRIC ENERGY CONSUMED OR UTILIZED BY CRYPTOCURRENCY MINING OPERATIONS THAT USE PROOF-OF-WORK AUTHENTICATION METHODS TO VALI- DATE BLOCKCHAIN TRANSACTIONS
- PeterStuer 4y agoSo you can waste energy as long as the result is something that will end up in a landfill the week after?
- jinpa_zangpo 4y agoBanning proof of work is one step from a free market economy towards a socialist economy, where the government decides what will and will not be produced. If you believe that government is wise enough to decide what should and should not be made and kind enough to always consider the need of the people ahead of their own interests, this will seem like a good idea. But anyone who has studied recent history will understand that it is not.