Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fi.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 296 posts

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

#221

Post by oytis »

Jensson wrote: post #213
ur-whale wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Without advocating for legalization of child porn, we can see how it is being used by the governments for justifying violations of digital privacy on various levels, so it's definitely not a good thing to double down on

I would argue that this proposal does bring it a step further though. Child porn involves a child being abused before it gets to your machine. To crack a piece of software you need to take software written by someone else and modify it to avoid paying the author. It is based o a legal framework of intellectual property, which I don't agree with, but at least it looks like a valid framework of property rights in general. This proposal also covers software that you write yourself. It is also totally arbitrary, because it doesn't even try to pretend that you are violating someone else's rights.

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

#222

Post by speedgoose »

HamburgerEmoji wrote: post #123
speedgoose wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes.

Please furnish a comprehensive list of your uses of electricity. We'd like to go through it and see which of them are wasteful. We'll let you know which ones you won't be allowed to do anymore.

Sometimes I pre-heat my electric car before removing the ice on the windshield because I'm a bit lazy and a prefer to wait until the ice has melted. I hope it's fine.

Otherwise I don't think I have a very wasteful usage of electricity.

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

#224

Post by ilammy »

VMG wrote: post #137
devoutsalsa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then let’s ban this waste of electricity everywhere. I’m all for the idea of crypto currency, but I’m not in support or baking the planet just so a few people can get some virtual goods.

Isn't it interesting that it is never a "waste" if it is the Pentagon that is polluting and poisoning the world. But if there is a technology that threatens government power, suddenly it's suddenly all about the Earth. For many people, Bitcoin is the only reliable technology to prevent their savings to be destroyed by inflation and to evade cruel sanctions. Your opinion has no value to them.

Compare and contrast this with military spending. Arguably, all of it is pure waste since you wouldn't need it in the first place if people weren't using violence as a means to resolve conflict. And yet here we are, so states have to allocate certain spending to maintain healthy military balance and support the walls of peace, so to speak. Even if the military is never going to be used offensively, to seize profit for the state, nations still have to waste resources on its maintenance as a deterrent of foreign aggression. (Oh, and occasionally some military-related or military-funded research results in something with non-military applications.)

Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies are the same thing but for wealth and trade, being a necessary spending on deterrent maintenance. But this time it's not tied to any government, so naturally all governments are pissed off about it to a certain degree.

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

#225

Post by [deleted] »

vadfa wrote: post #115
gefhfff wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is externalizing the cost to the rest of society as there is either no or a too small carbon tax while the estimated cost on society varies between 700 Euros [0] and 100.000$ [1] [0] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/umwelt-wirtschaft/gesel... [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-020-02785-4

If the estimated cost on society "varies between 700 Euros [0] and 100.000$ [1]" then those scientists should be back to the drawing board because those two numbers can't make sense at the same time. Also I don't see why only a small part of society should be paying for that "carbon tax" - all citizens should pay an amount corresponding to their energy spending and then we are back to miners not externalising anythin…

[deleted]

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

#226

Post by Jensson »

oytis wrote: post #221
Jensson wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Without advocating for legalization of child porn, we can see how it is being used by the governments for justifying violations of digital privacy on various levels, so it's definitely not a good thing to double down on I would argue that this proposal does bring it a step further though. Child porn involves a child being abused before it gets to your machine. To crack a piece of software you need to take software wr…

It depends a bit what the proposal looks like. You have to submit papers about your energy use to authorities when you open a business, it could just be that businesses asking for significant energy to run a server cluster has to say that they aren't doing crypto. That would mean that private people can still run their own crypto mining.

But still, crypto mining is such a niche use-case, preventing me from running a file sharing server I wrote myself since people use it to distribute IP seems much more intrusive to me.

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

#227

Post by HamburgerEmoji »

speedgoose wrote: post #222
HamburgerEmoji wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please furnish a comprehensive list of your uses of electricity. We'd like to go through it and see which of them are wasteful. We'll let you know which ones you won't be allowed to do anymore.

Sometimes I pre-heat my electric car before removing the ice on the windshield because I'm a bit lazy and a prefer to wait until the ice has melted. I hope it's fine. Otherwise I don't think I have a very wasteful usage of electricity.

> Otherwise I don't think I have a very wasteful usage of electricity.

Well, of course you don't think it's wasteful. But that's irrelevant. We're talking about putting the power to decide what's "wasteful" in somebody else's hands, maybe some appointed judges somewhere in the government. It doesn't seem like you want to put that power in my hands, though. Still waiting for that list. I'm ready to dictate which of your activities are worthy of electricity.

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

#228

Post by kitkat_new »

skohan wrote: post #220
kitkat_new wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and waste

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

#229

Post by morelisp »

VMG wrote: post #161
morelisp wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by using Bitcoin they are likekly to save 450 USD millions/year in fees. More like shift 450mm/year into the pockets of the people running Chivo while creating a media circus to distract from the president's takeover of the judiciary. Freedom!

This is incorrect. The transaction costs are very low and you are free to choose whatever wallet you want.

> The transaction costs are very low

That's why the government even preemptively allocated $150mm for them, I guess?

> you are free to choose whatever wallet you want.

Unless you want assistance at one of the official facilities, or the promised stimulus. Half the population is supposedly on Chivo. Defaults matter, especially if your goal is graft and not a sustainable and beneficial economic policy.

I also notice you only tried to contradict the parts critical to dear bitcoin, not about growing autocracy.

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

#230

Post by lawn »

TomSwirly wrote: post #181
ur-whale wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t want my transactions public. First, not all cryptos share Bitcoin's open ledger characteristics. Look up Monero, ZCash, Grin, Beam : they all implement untraceable transactions, not just pseudo-anonymous ones like Bitcoin. Second, pseudonymous transactions is far from being the only interesting property of Bitcoin. Among others, no centralized control is a key aspect.

> they all implement untraceable transactions As a non-criminal, what use would I have for untraceable transactions?

Imagine if you have a business and someone uses their tainted coins (from a hack or extortion or whatever) and buys something from you. You then deposit this on an exchange... And get your account locked.

Or worse, imagine using your Bitcoin wallet in a store, and the business owner sees that you have $100k in the wallet you just paid with (because it's public knowledge). He then calls his friends who will follow you and try to kidnap and torture you to hand them over.

Post reply on HN