Good luck banning internet access. Even if you ban crypto exchanges and money transfers to them, you cannot ban a single entity called Bitcoin Co, nor you can ban individuals from possessing it. You could potentially ban crypto miners from using the electrical energy, but that doesn't ban Bitcoin either. Any other ideas? :)
> Any other ideas? :) Yeah, make it illegal.
And how exactly do you make it illegal?
Arrest people that own Bitcoin? Or ban them from the internet.
We need to ban all proof-of-work and generally all resource intensive cryptocurrencies.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say maybe we should in general ban things that are a certain amount less energy efficient (say, 5x more wasteful) than the best technology we've achieved for a similar purpose so far. And progressively tax anything that's moderately more wasteful (say, 2x-5x). It's bad enough that we have cars on roads that are twice as wasteful as they could be, let alone a transaction processing…
So all websites which are slow will be taxed? Yes please!
We need to ban all proof-of-work and generally all resource intensive cryptocurrencies.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say maybe we should in general ban things that are a certain amount less energy efficient (say, 5x more wasteful) than the best technology we've achieved for a similar purpose so far. And progressively tax anything that's moderately more wasteful (say, 2x-5x). It's bad enough that we have cars on roads that are twice as wasteful as they could be, let alone a transaction processing…
> literally a million times more wasteful than our existing technology
This is not a fair comparison. Did you count all the banking services and data centers? Also, cryptocurrencies provide features which banks can't provide, e.g., independence on a third party.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say maybe we should in general ban things that are a certain amount less energy efficient (say, 5x more wasteful) than the best technology we've achieved for a similar purpose so far. And progressively tax anything that's moderately more wasteful (say, 2x-5x). It's bad enough that we have cars on roads that are twice as wasteful as they could be, let alone a transaction processing…
> literally a million times more wasteful than our existing technology This is not a fair comparison. Did you count all the banking services and data centers? Also, cryptocurrencies provide features which banks can't provide, e.g., independence on a third party.
But a cryptocurrency-backed exchange does not provide independence of a third party; so a in the pretty implausible hypothetical that you'd ban systems so gratuitously inefficient, you could make the argument that peer-to-peer transactions are OK, but that case is harder to make for exchanges.
I mean, not that this kind of ban is likely to happen; it's probably not even a good idea (unless we can be much more specific about what counts as wasteful, and what counts as comparable existing technology, and have a way to make that simple, please no patent prior art search 2.0 nonsense).
...and the US military effectively backs the dollar, which makes this the energy footprint of the dollar. meanwhile, gold stripmines the soil in poor countries, where children die in mines, while the loot is carried off to the west, AND it uses much more energy than bitcoin. and bitcoin is technology to replace, at least partially, those two things. And like a car versus a bike, it does so with more utility: better t…
This makes no sense. Are you suggesting that e.g. the US military wouldn't exist if the US used bitcoin rather than dollars? And similarly for other currency+military combos? That strikes me as really implausible.
Everyone needs to ban Bitcoin... and likely other cryptocurrencies. Not only are they by far the biggest enablers of ransomware (which we're supposedly taking seriously now), but Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C. [1] Bitcoin already consumes 0.55% of energy produced globally. [2] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 [2] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-a…
Well, a country can't _really_ ban bitcoin and other crypto currency because of its decentralised nature. As longs as there is usefulness to it, there will always be people vying to make it a thing. The governments can collectively make it unusable - prevent all financial institutions from recognising it, and never exchange their currency to these crypto coins. This way, sure bitcoins will continue to exist, and there will always be someone stealing power to mine them, but it becomes worthless without the ability to convert to usable currencies you can buy stuff with.
If BTC -> USD/EUR/etc becomes too difficult, bitcoin becomes like Monopoly money right?
Everyone needs to ban Bitcoin... and likely other cryptocurrencies. Not only are they by far the biggest enablers of ransomware (which we're supposedly taking seriously now), but Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C. [1] Bitcoin already consumes 0.55% of energy produced globally. [2] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 [2] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-a…
Bitcoin is a public ledger. I dont understand how a zero-privacy blockchain would be the biggest enabler of ransomware? Isnt TCP/IP a bigger enabler?
SHA-256 came out of the NSA. Didnt the FBI retrieve the Bitcoin from the pipeline ransomware attack? They have lots of tradecraft at their disposal that we cannot know of.
I don’t think this would be a ban from a technology standpoint. It’s from a legal/financial standpoint - so yes, you would still be physically able to download and run the BTC software, but nobody would be allowed to officially deal in it. It’s like how banning murder doesn’t eliminate murder - but that doesn’t mean that the ban doesn’t still dramatically reduce the incidence of it.