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Because most fossil fuel burning is powering homes and factories. You know, useful stuff. Spending 3% of the world's power on sustaining a gambling addiction fo

by _uhtu 4y ago

Because most fossil fuel burning is powering homes and factories. You know, useful stuff. Spending 3% of the world's power on sustaining a gambling addiction for a fringe group of gullible people who can't recognize when a technology, despite being interesting, has presented no social utility whatsoever (besides helping make scams easier) is bad policy.

texasbigdata 4y ago
What’s the fossil fuel burn of Bank of America’a entire IT and anti-fraud department? I don’t care about the merits of bitcoin, but these simplistic crude and inaccurate legislation attempts are fundamentally market distorting and inefficient and restrict our rights.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  Whatever it is, I'm sure it's orders of magnitude more sustainable per transaction than the mighty 7 transaction per seconds of Bitcoin.
  - taolegal 4y ago
    Ok looks like you're going to judge bitcoin on its transaction capacity. There's nearly an infinite number of transactions that can occur nearly instantaneously on L2 with the lightning network for example.
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      Ok, since you are such a big fan of lightning network, can you help me with some quick maths? Imagine we get everyone on the world to adopt Bitcoin + lightning. That means we need to open at least one payment channel for each person. How long would it take to create just that one payment channel per person, if we ignore all other transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain? [Spoiler: it's more than 30 years just for onboarding, for those who are curious. For the unaffiliated bystanders, next time you hear "Lightning network solves all issues, layer 2!" chant from the cult, remember that Bitcoin is still a tired old database at the bottom of it that is still looking for a problem to solve.]
      - taolegal 4y ago
        Lightning works and it's easy for anyone to start using it now. Whether you want to discount it cause it can't immediately onboard the entirety of humanity within an arbitrarily short timeframe is just nitpicking because there certainly will be a protocol capable of achieving that absurd high bar for a trust-less blockchain. Spoiler: eltoo & an upgrade with SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT along with channel factories seems perfectly capable.
        polygamous_bat 4y ago
        > Lightning works and it's easy for anyone But it will NEVER work for everyone. > you want to discount it cause it can't immediately onboard the entirety of humanity within an arbitrarily short timeframe is The "arbitrarily short" timeframe is 30 years. That seems kinda long to me. But then again I keep hearing "We're still early!" after 13 years of Bitcoin, so maybe you guys are targeting sometimes next century, in which case, my apologies. Oh, and also, it's not _just_ to onboard, it's the first transaction. Anytime you want to settle, close a channel, create a new one, it's the same congestion. Unless you propose people initiate a channel for their newborn so the kid can eventually start using lightning when they get their third real job at 30? That _could_ work, hmm. > there certainly will be a protocol capable of achieving that absurd high bar for a trust-less blockchain "My project is gonna be working by the time for the final! I swear!" stopped working for me when I graduated high school and entered what some may call the real life. Seems cute that it's still alive and well in the crypto fantasy land to judge things by the publicity pieces instead of what they actually are. Anyway, I'm not nitpicking. I'm punching holes through your tired arguments about an inefficient database and how it's the savior of humanity (just to pump up your coinz.) To all knee deep bitcoiner, please understand that your future of finance wet dream doesn't actually ever scale to 1% of what's needed, stop burning fossil fuel, and find a new hobby, ffs.
        taolegal 4y ago
        > stopped working for me when I graduated high school and entered what some may call the real life > future of finance wet dream doesn't actually ever scale to 1% of what's needed, stop burning fossil fuel, and find a new hobby, ffs This just seems needlessly vitriolic rather than a substantive argument. I gave you a protocol that doesn't "take 30 years" and you say it's a pipe dream.
- miroljub 4y ago
  > What’s the fossil fuel burn of Bank of America’a entire IT and anti-fraud department? That brings quite a value. Without anti-fraud measures, you wouldn't have a monetary system.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    Unfortunately, an apt description for people shilling alternate monetary systems that I once read was: "For them, the largest problem with the banking crisis of 2008 was that they didn't have a finger in the pie." I often think the lack of anti-fraud features may be a feature and not a bug.
- lightedman 4y ago
  To quote from BofA's site: "We also are making our operations more sustainable – including achieving carbon neutrality and procuring 100% renewable electricity in 2019, a year ahead of schedule." Drastically lower than Bitcoin if this is anything to go by. So low you might as well put BofA into a fossil fuel burn limbo contest. Given that result took less than three seconds of searching, I'm wondering if you have an ulterior motive in targeting BofA specifically.
  - texasbigdata 4y ago
    They’re just big, no real ulterior motive.
danuker 4y ago
The users and buyers of cryptocurrency sponsor that spending, and find it worthwhile. Who is the government to say otherwise?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Normally the government steps in when environmental protections are needed.
- piva00 4y ago
  The government is the ultimate safeguard for a whole society, where it should be the steward of common-action when individual action can't be trusted on due to a combination of perverse incentives and issues arising from the tragedy of the commons. Without that you have an anarchic lawless society where individualism can flourish and people can exploit whatever they want without regards for the 2nd, 3rd, n-th order impact that an action might cause unto others, because it's invisible or severely hidden to them. Or that they simply don't care about said impact because their personal reward is worth more to them than the benefit of society as a whole.
  - squaredot 4y ago
    I wouldn't paint everything in black and white. For what concerns the discussed legislation, I think it would be more correct to legislate about goals and leave everybody free on how to achieve them (when needed).
  - afarrell 4y ago
    I want a government which is humble about its ability to declare an activity valueless to society. It would have been vastly arrogant to declare that cryptocurrency is useless in 2012. In 2022 it is… debatable.
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  The government should step in when the market can't serve the needs of society, in this case it's cryptocurrency enthusiasts and profiteers not paying for the externalities, causing a detriment to society. A carbon tax scheme aimed directly at cryptocurrency could be another solution, but it sounds like something that would be way more work to enforce.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
0x62 4y ago
HN has always been quite anti-crypto, but I'd like to pose a counter argument. I run a remote services-based organisation in a related industry, and we switched to 100% crypto payments across the business. It's massively simplified our processes, and improved UX. Our customer base is already crypto-native, which is what makes this possible. Users pay us simply by sending funds to our wallet. Our entire payment processing engine is under 300 lines, including USD-denominated fees in crypto. Payments arrive instantly, with almost zero fees, from any country. We have no chargebacks or (traditional) payment fraud. Our remote staff are paid in crypto, arriving instantly with no cross-border issues.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  What is the service that you are providing? Because whatever field I am in, being unable to provide a customer a refund is a large no-no.
  - mcherm 4y ago
    The irreversibility of payments in nearly all crypto systems does NOT prevent providing a refund to a customer. That can always be done by making a new payment to the customer. One might argue that crypto makes customers unable to demand a refund, or that it is impossible to send a refund to a customer who is so anonymous that the merchant cannot even communicate with them, but these are less obviously a "no-no" for a business.
  - 0x62 4y ago
    Software development and consulting. None of this prevents us issuing refunds, we can simply reverse a payment by sending the funds back.
- dekhn 4y ago
  none of those details justify egregious waste of power
  - 0x62 4y ago
    YouTube used over 175 times more energy watching Gangnam Style in 2019 than Ethereum uses per year. Paypal uses 100x the power consumed by PoS Ethereum in a year [0]. This argument was (and still is) valid for PoW algorithms, but energy consumption is now barely a factor for Ethereum, which is the main network we take payments on [1]. [0] https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ [1] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption
havnagiggle 4y ago
Just curious if you have considered what level of adoption is needed to change your mind about its utility. If 50% of a country's transactions are through crypto is it now legitimate? If 1% of global transactions are through crypto is it now legitimate? If BTC reaches 100k+ a coin (or a million, idk pick a number) is it now legitimate? Or is it only legitimate once you specifically decide to sell off fiat? If you don't know when you would consider it successful, I am not interested in when you consider it a failure.
- _uhtu 4y ago
  I'd say 15 years of basically completely unregulated time to come up with even a single reliable use case that even a minority of people get social value out of is enough time to decide a carbon spewing "innovation" has not been valuable and it's time to cut our losses. Looking at crypto now and saying "the use case could come any minute!" is just sunk cost fallacy here. It's important to compare crypto with other innovations. The internet wasn't popular for a while but it was immediately useful and obviously powerful to a steadily growing group from the very beginning and it had no major negative externalities. Lithium ion batteries took decades to become widespread but their consumption of world resources scaled in tandem with their use, they didn't start using consuming massive amounts of lithium capacity BEFORE they were usable, unlike crypto. Lithium-ion is a great comparison to because we should, even though there has been adoption of Li batteries, still be willing to say that massive scale lithium strip mining might be worse than having electric cars and it might be worth regulating away. Even if crypto was highly used, doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate it, particularly if it's externalities are worse than the alternatives (and they are). Even if crypto did reach 50% of transactions or any of your other examples, and it can't, trustless environments demand waste so that kind of scale isn't possible without earth shattering waste, but for the sake of argument let's say it did, I'd still argue for it's abolishment at a societal level because it does transactions WORSE than everything else. Higher risk, fewer safeguards (oops wrong address, now my money is gone forever vs oops, I'll just call my bank), more emissions, more dark money, more money laundering, more room for scams... I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point.
  - havnagiggle 4y ago

by _uhtu 4y ago

texasbigdata 4y ago

What’s the fossil fuel burn of Bank of America’a entire IT and anti-fraud department? I don’t care about the merits of bitcoin, but these simplistic crude and inaccurate legislation attempts are fundamentally market distorting and inefficient and restrict our rights.

polygamous_bat 4y ago
Whatever it is, I'm sure it's orders of magnitude more sustainable per transaction than the mighty 7 transaction per seconds of Bitcoin.
- taolegal 4y ago
  Ok looks like you're going to judge bitcoin on its transaction capacity. There's nearly an infinite number of transactions that can occur nearly instantaneously on L2 with the lightning network for example.
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    Ok, since you are such a big fan of lightning network, can you help me with some quick maths? Imagine we get everyone on the world to adopt Bitcoin + lightning. That means we need to open at least one payment channel for each person. How long would it take to create just that one payment channel per person, if we ignore all other transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain? [Spoiler: it's more than 30 years just for onboarding, for those who are curious. For the unaffiliated bystanders, next time you hear "Lightning network solves all issues, layer 2!" chant from the cult, remember that Bitcoin is still a tired old database at the bottom of it that is still looking for a problem to solve.]
    - taolegal 4y ago
      Lightning works and it's easy for anyone to start using it now. Whether you want to discount it cause it can't immediately onboard the entirety of humanity within an arbitrarily short timeframe is just nitpicking because there certainly will be a protocol capable of achieving that absurd high bar for a trust-less blockchain. Spoiler: eltoo & an upgrade with SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT along with channel factories seems perfectly capable.
      - polygamous_bat 4y ago
        > Lightning works and it's easy for anyone But it will NEVER work for everyone. > you want to discount it cause it can't immediately onboard the entirety of humanity within an arbitrarily short timeframe is The "arbitrarily short" timeframe is 30 years. That seems kinda long to me. But then again I keep hearing "We're still early!" after 13 years of Bitcoin, so maybe you guys are targeting sometimes next century, in which case, my apologies. Oh, and also, it's not _just_ to onboard, it's the first transaction. Anytime you want to settle, close a channel, create a new one, it's the same congestion. Unless you propose people initiate a channel for their newborn so the kid can eventually start using lightning when they get their third real job at 30? That _could_ work, hmm. > there certainly will be a protocol capable of achieving that absurd high bar for a trust-less blockchain "My project is gonna be working by the time for the final! I swear!" stopped working for me when I graduated high school and entered what some may call the real life. Seems cute that it's still alive and well in the crypto fantasy land to judge things by the publicity pieces instead of what they actually are. Anyway, I'm not nitpicking. I'm punching holes through your tired arguments about an inefficient database and how it's the savior of humanity (just to pump up your coinz.) To all knee deep bitcoiner, please understand that your future of finance wet dream doesn't actually ever scale to 1% of what's needed, stop burning fossil fuel, and find a new hobby, ffs.
        taolegal 4y ago
        > stopped working for me when I graduated high school and entered what some may call the real life > future of finance wet dream doesn't actually ever scale to 1% of what's needed, stop burning fossil fuel, and find a new hobby, ffs This just seems needlessly vitriolic rather than a substantive argument. I gave you a protocol that doesn't "take 30 years" and you say it's a pipe dream.
miroljub 4y ago
> What’s the fossil fuel burn of Bank of America’a entire IT and anti-fraud department? That brings quite a value. Without anti-fraud measures, you wouldn't have a monetary system.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  Unfortunately, an apt description for people shilling alternate monetary systems that I once read was: "For them, the largest problem with the banking crisis of 2008 was that they didn't have a finger in the pie." I often think the lack of anti-fraud features may be a feature and not a bug.
lightedman 4y ago
To quote from BofA's site: "We also are making our operations more sustainable – including achieving carbon neutrality and procuring 100% renewable electricity in 2019, a year ahead of schedule." Drastically lower than Bitcoin if this is anything to go by. So low you might as well put BofA into a fossil fuel burn limbo contest. Given that result took less than three seconds of searching, I'm wondering if you have an ulterior motive in targeting BofA specifically.
- texasbigdata 4y ago
  They’re just big, no real ulterior motive.

danuker 4y ago

The users and buyers of cryptocurrency sponsor that spending, and find it worthwhile. Who is the government to say otherwise?

smoldesu 4y ago
Normally the government steps in when environmental protections are needed.
piva00 4y ago
The government is the ultimate safeguard for a whole society, where it should be the steward of common-action when individual action can't be trusted on due to a combination of perverse incentives and issues arising from the tragedy of the commons. Without that you have an anarchic lawless society where individualism can flourish and people can exploit whatever they want without regards for the 2nd, 3rd, n-th order impact that an action might cause unto others, because it's invisible or severely hidden to them. Or that they simply don't care about said impact because their personal reward is worth more to them than the benefit of society as a whole.
- squaredot 4y ago
  I wouldn't paint everything in black and white. For what concerns the discussed legislation, I think it would be more correct to legislate about goals and leave everybody free on how to achieve them (when needed).
- afarrell 4y ago
  I want a government which is humble about its ability to declare an activity valueless to society. It would have been vastly arrogant to declare that cryptocurrency is useless in 2012. In 2022 it is… debatable.
forgetfulness 4y ago
The government should step in when the market can't serve the needs of society, in this case it's cryptocurrency enthusiasts and profiteers not paying for the externalities, causing a detriment to society. A carbon tax scheme aimed directly at cryptocurrency could be another solution, but it sounds like something that would be way more work to enforce.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

0x62 4y ago

HN has always been quite anti-crypto, but I'd like to pose a counter argument. I run a remote services-based organisation in a related industry, and we switched to 100% crypto payments across the business. It's massively simplified our processes, and improved UX. Our customer base is already crypto-native, which is what makes this possible. Users pay us simply by sending funds to our wallet. Our entire payment processing engine is under 300 lines, including USD-denominated fees in crypto. Payments arrive instantly, with almost zero fees, from any country. We have no chargebacks or (traditional) payment fraud. Our remote staff are paid in crypto, arriving instantly with no cross-border issues.

polygamous_bat 4y ago
What is the service that you are providing? Because whatever field I am in, being unable to provide a customer a refund is a large no-no.
- mcherm 4y ago
  The irreversibility of payments in nearly all crypto systems does NOT prevent providing a refund to a customer. That can always be done by making a new payment to the customer. One might argue that crypto makes customers unable to demand a refund, or that it is impossible to send a refund to a customer who is so anonymous that the merchant cannot even communicate with them, but these are less obviously a "no-no" for a business.
- 0x62 4y ago
  Software development and consulting. None of this prevents us issuing refunds, we can simply reverse a payment by sending the funds back.
dekhn 4y ago
none of those details justify egregious waste of power
- 0x62 4y ago
  YouTube used over 175 times more energy watching Gangnam Style in 2019 than Ethereum uses per year. Paypal uses 100x the power consumed by PoS Ethereum in a year [0]. This argument was (and still is) valid for PoW algorithms, but energy consumption is now barely a factor for Ethereum, which is the main network we take payments on [1]. [0] https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/ [1] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

havnagiggle 4y ago

Just curious if you have considered what level of adoption is needed to change your mind about its utility. If 50% of a country's transactions are through crypto is it now legitimate? If 1% of global transactions are through crypto is it now legitimate? If BTC reaches 100k+ a coin (or a million, idk pick a number) is it now legitimate? Or is it only legitimate once you specifically decide to sell off fiat? If you don't know when you would consider it successful, I am not interested in when you consider it a failure.

_uhtu 4y ago
I'd say 15 years of basically completely unregulated time to come up with even a single reliable use case that even a minority of people get social value out of is enough time to decide a carbon spewing "innovation" has not been valuable and it's time to cut our losses. Looking at crypto now and saying "the use case could come any minute!" is just sunk cost fallacy here. It's important to compare crypto with other innovations. The internet wasn't popular for a while but it was immediately useful and obviously powerful to a steadily growing group from the very beginning and it had no major negative externalities. Lithium ion batteries took decades to become widespread but their consumption of world resources scaled in tandem with their use, they didn't start using consuming massive amounts of lithium capacity BEFORE they were usable, unlike crypto. Lithium-ion is a great comparison to because we should, even though there has been adoption of Li batteries, still be willing to say that massive scale lithium strip mining might be worse than having electric cars and it might be worth regulating away. Even if crypto was highly used, doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate it, particularly if it's externalities are worse than the alternatives (and they are). Even if crypto did reach 50% of transactions or any of your other examples, and it can't, trustless environments demand waste so that kind of scale isn't possible without earth shattering waste, but for the sake of argument let's say it did, I'd still argue for it's abolishment at a societal level because it does transactions WORSE than everything else. Higher risk, fewer safeguards (oops wrong address, now my money is gone forever vs oops, I'll just call my bank), more emissions, more dark money, more money laundering, more room for scams... I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point.
- havnagiggle 4y ago