This setup is straight out of manufacturing consent.
Can you expand on this for me? I'm only loosely familiar.
Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
191–200 of 296 posts
Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
#192I think instituting a significant tax and using it to speed up transition to green energy is better approach, but enforcing would be problematic.
Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do digital payments need replacing? I haven't seen physical cash in almost two years (one exception, a contractor wanted to dodge some tax) and the system just works effortlessly. Tapping a card is easier and faster then counting change. I don't see how paying a $20 gas fee and waiting 15 minutes would improve the situation.
This is because you don't live in a sanctioned country and you have a good social credit score. This is like saying "why do I need encryption, I don't have anything to hide". Many people do not have this privilege.
Sorry, i thought the fact we were discussing a move by Sweden, in English on a website dominated by Americans kind of gave the game away.
We should reopen the thread with a different premise.
"Crypto currencies have no place or value in the western world"
Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it not relevant if growth of hydropower output has ceased? That seems like a perfectly relevant thing to point out.
Nothing has changed about the actual output of hydro power since the 80s. It wasn't growing to begin with, so it's definitely not a cause of very recent price increases.
Population grew by 25% since 1980 though, so now each person has on average 20% less hydro power if it stayed the same.
Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
#195Energy consumption is not an environmental problem (whatever you use said energy for, be it Bitcoin mining, heating your home or powering your massage chair), and all policies that try to limit energy consumption are basically building on quicksand and doomed to fail: the world has and will continue to consume increasing amounts of energy by capita. And anyone who's being an activist towards reducing energy consumpti…
Perhaps leaders have found the problem of scaling energy production intractable. Perhaps partial stone-age reversion is an acceptable solution. I'm seeing lots and lots of support building for efforts to reduce meat consumption.
Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
#196"If we were to allow extensive mining of crypto-assets in Sweden, there is a risk that the renewable energy available to us will be insufficient to cover the required climate transition that we need to make. This energy is urgently required for the development of fossil-free steel, large-scale battery manufacturing and the electrification of our transport sector. Based on estimates from Cambridge University, it is cu…
Honestly do we really need cryptocurrency? I don’t want my transactions public. I like exchanging cash for weed (legal in California) and nobody needs to know regardless. I also don’t understand what’s wrong with USD. I grew up in a third world country so maybe it could help people there but in USA? I’m happy with the dollar fluctuations vs four digit fluctuations daily. Can someone give me a good explain?
It's great for doing cross-border transfers without restrictions as an example. For privacy there are Monero and mixers. The solution for volatility is stablecoins. DeFi can be useful for traders, you can trade without trusting any platform to hold your assets. The most important thing: it's an open source alternative to the traditional financial system, anyone can use it for anything without asking anyone else, and it evolves very fast because there is a lot of competition and no restrictions.
Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
The very first time I saw email, I immediately knew I wanted to have it. Ditto with the web. Ditto with video conferencing. I've known about crypto for almost ten years. I worked in the field writing bits of the rippled code for a couple of years. And I still have no idea why anyone would want to use cryptocurrencies, except of course for crime. > it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s … Hmm, is this…
>car was the Devil's tool, because we are running as fast as we can to devastate our climate by turning fossil fuels into carbon dioxide. To be fair, mankind evolved a lot due to the use of cars. Off-rail transportation has changed the way we live, not just for the worse. The coffee and bananas I bought today was transported by a motor vehicle for the last mile. The ambulance that drove my friend to the hospital was…
Your examples are all commercial trucks, not personal cars.
If so many individual people across America didn't need to own multiple cars to commute long distances to work every day, and could simply take decent government subsidized public transportation, or ride their bike safely on well designed ubiquitous bike paths, like I can where I live in Amsterdam, then the world would be a much better place.
Just as the world would be a better place if cryptocurrency's shrill shills and speculating "investors" didn't gamble their money and buy their drugs by burning huge quantities of coal.
There are much more efficient heath-friendly and eco-friendly ways of gambling money and buying drugs than by burning coal to mine cryptocurrency.
Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
#198The basic idea of the economy is people can earn the right to energy, and then direct it to a goal of their choosing. The government making a value judgement about what type of commercial activity is worthwhile is extremely risky. Countries with innovative financial and credit systems have historically steamrolled those that don't have such innovations. We still don't understand the nature of crypto.
How do we not understand the nature of it? It is a mathematically interesting problem, but the nature of Bitcoin et.al. just makes it useful for speculation and scamming people who think it would become a digital currency. I have yet to meet someone who bought something real with crypto.
> I have yet to meet someone who bought something real with crypto.
I bought a car last year with Bitcoins
Hi, nice to meet you.
Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all crypto is money. ETH for example (which will soon be proof of stake... and more energy efficient) could be considered more accurately as a really large (but relatively slow) computer that never turns off. This plus infrastructure like ipfs enables a brand new internet. Completely decentralized and free of the strangle hold of large tech companies. To me, money and profit is less important than freedom. Web 3.…
> ETH for example (which will soon be proof of stake... and more energy efficient) could be considered more accurately as a really large (but relatively slow) computer that never turns off. Run by babies who will manually change the output of the computer when it calculates something they don’t like.
Not possible unless majority of the nodes accepts the change.
Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
#200Thankfully, crypto mining is adversarial so even if it is cornered into remote islands powered by the sun or nuclear powered siberian mines , it will still work. I understand that "Climate crisis" is becoming the new "Children and Terrorists" wrapping for the next decades' wave of state oppression, but overall this ban may not be a bad idea for sweden and most of the developed world. Westerners being monetarily depen…
> it will still work.
Technically, sure. But without sufficient network capacity, there won't be much demand for it.