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Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

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Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#211

Post by ur-whale »

swarnie wrote: post #193
VMG wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> "Crypto currencies have no place or value in the western world"

If the current demand for it, as measured by the market price is any kind of indicator, you have your work cut out for you trying to convince people.

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#212

Post by VMG »

swarnie wrote: post #193
VMG wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

It hat the same place as encryption for the same reason. And it is being fought like encryption was, for the same reasons.

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#213

Post by Jensson »

ur-whale wrote: post #203
junon wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is purposefully reductio ad absurdum.

> This is purposefully reductio ad absurdum. It's not, he's making a valid point. To put it in a maybe a more arguable way: where do you draw the line at a government deciding what you can and can't run on your computer?

You already can't keep child porn on your computer, nor are you allowed to run programs that requires a license if you don't have one, nor can you share or copy IP protected works etc. Banning crypto mining wouldn't move us noticeably closer to governments regulating everything you do on your computer.

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#214

Post by kitkat_new »

skohan wrote: post #165
kitkat_new wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

taking too long is a fundamental problem here

Some problems are complex. If you asked me in 2012 if fuel cell cars would ever exist I would have called it a pipe-dream, but now you can buy one and use it as a real vehicle in California.

and when did we think we would have got fusion? We can't rely on pipe dreams when solving the climate crisis

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#215

Post by _yo2v »

louloulou wrote: post #150
timwaagh wrote: post #110

Although I'm pretty conservative regarding climate change, it's a real problem that needs adressing so the Swedish government has a legitimate reason to intervene. Maybe we can indeed travel more if we ban crypto. But more importantly I think crypto is the most wasteful, pointless and potentially dangerous development that happened this century and I fully appreciate any government wanting to ban it for literally any…

> most wasteful, pointless and potentially dangerous development that happened this century hypersonic nuclear missiles... nah, it's definitely this open source software for timestamping database changes.

Ballistic missiles are already hypersonic. Nuclear submarines can already fire without exposing themselves. What's the difference?

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#216

Post by capableweb »

boppo1 wrote: post #187
capableweb wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by the comments here in this submission and overall on HN, not everyone is aware that different cryptocurrencies have different strategies for consensus. For example, I've seen calls to action from a lot of HNers to ban all cryptocurrencies because they are destroying the environment, missing completely that PoS even exists and has nowhere near the impact on energy usage as PoW.

Is ETH PoS yet?

Kinda. There are currently two chains that can be called "Ethereum" right now, commonly known as Eth 1 and Eth 2, and funds have started moving to Eth 2 via staking (currently the Eth 2 contract running on Eth 1 is the largest holder of Ethers on the Eth 1 network). You can use Eth 2 already, but can't transfer funds back to Eth 1 yet and the chains haven't been "merged" yet.

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#217

Post by sktrdie »

TomSwirly wrote: post #168
throw298340 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just wrong. The hashrate is proportional to the network security, eg 51% attack. The sentiment on HN against crypto strikes me as odd… it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s … Give it some time to evolve and embrace the future!

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…

I'm also not a fan of cryptocurrency but you seem to be living a privileged life in a country with a stable currency. Crypto is godsend for people where their countries cannot be trusted.

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#218

Post by ENGNR »

TomSwirly wrote: post #168
throw298340 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just wrong. The hashrate is proportional to the network security, eg 51% attack. The sentiment on HN against crypto strikes me as odd… it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s … Give it some time to evolve and embrace the future!

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…

It's a distributed finite state machine, that anyone can engage with on equal footing. The biggest issue right now is just that the fees are still so crazy.

But once they get L2/L3 chains properly into place, so that every interaction is just a fraction of a fraction of the new state, and you can deploy say a little chat room, or a game world, or a marketplace, a collection of router configs, etc, etc, and not have to think too hard about the state, that's getting pretty cool to me. And combine that with the dev experience starting to get good (I recently used hardhat to make a fully typed, hot reload front end, working with hot reloading fully on chain backend) - it's going to be a new frontier for hacking and side projects like the early internet was

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#219

Post by sktrdie »

Does anybody have any real scientific insight into the idea that PoW based Cryptocurrencies can harness energy from far away places that is already being wasted?

We currently need to send most of traditional energy to our households, cars, manufacturing facilities etc. This cost of transportation to me is the key difference.

PoW doesn't need this. Imagine putting some mining rigs in orbit near the sun and harnessing the already abundant solar energy. All you need to send back to earth is a few bytes.

I know this is an utopian future but overall the idea of a people's currency is quite important for society, not just for speculation. Most of us I assume are tech people living privileged lives developing software for super rich companies in places with stable currencies and governments. We should realize this is not the case for many people - especially in societies where people cannot trust their countries' government or currency.

Re: Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned

#220

Post by skohan »

kitkat_new wrote: post #214
skohan wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some problems are complex. If you asked me in 2012 if fuel cell cars would ever exist I would have called it a pipe-dream, but now you can buy one and use it as a real vehicle in California.

and when did we think we would have got fusion? We can't rely on pipe dreams when solving the climate crisis

I'm not saying thorium is a solution to the climate crisis. But I think the balance is a bit far in the other direction: people rule out Nuclear unnecessarily as a part of a larger clean energy strategy because of bad associations with mushroom clouds and Chernobyl/Three Mile Island.
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