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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

#251

Post by laboratorymice »

louloulou wrote: post #47

Ah, the electricity police strike again. You're allowed to use the electricity you paid for for some computations, but not for others. Seems logical and enforceable.

Don't mean to take a side here, but just because a rule sounds hard to enforce doesn't mean it doesn't have an effect in practice. People will often change their behaviour out of sheer societal pressure if something is explicitly banned, even if the ban is not enforceable. Saying "our society does not want/accept this" already accomplishes something, regardless of enforcement. An example would be the banned disposal of certain substances in residential solid waste or sewage systems.

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

#252

Post by amelius »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #30
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So now they are going to blame something else, just like any other politicians in any other country would. but somehow they decided to blame crypto-mining instead of excessive house heating and refusal to wear sweaters indoors. funny that.

People in the developed world consume massive amounts of energy on non-essentials. Energy consumptions is not the problem. In fact, it's strongly correlated with quality of life. The problem is polluting sources of energy. Singling out one non-essential for its use of energy and banning it, while leaving all others legal, makes no sense. Doing so is a case of scapegoating one small facet of a larger phenomenon, inste…

Either way, crypto currencies become impossible.

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

#253

Post by swinglock »

supermatt wrote: post #162
lordnacho wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is it doesn't matter whether there are a few miners or a lot. Bitcoin will continue to mine a block every 10 minutes. It's like an energy sink, you can drip in tiny amounts and get the same, or you can pour in all future fusion power plants, you get the same. So actually it won't affect bitcoin, but it will release the energy to other uses.

> whether there are a few miners or a lot. Bitcoin will continue to mine a block every 10 minutes Thats not exactly true. Every 2016 blocks the network compares the actual blocks mined with the target blocks (at 10 mins per block), and adjusts the difficulty accordingly. If you suddenly had less miners the current difficulty would mean that the time to mine a block would be greater than 10 mins. Depending on where it…

It's every 10 minutes on average.

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

#254

Post by alkonaut »

louloulou wrote: post #131
swman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Who's "we"? Maybe you don't need it. Personally, I don't need golf courses, professional football or a new phone every year.

Those do have negative externalities too. They are extremely regulated in how those externalities are handled though (how many golf courses are built, where, what their environmental impact is and so on).

I don’t see a problem allowing e.g one Bitcoin to be mined but that doesn’t mean it should be any easier to set up a mining shop than to establish a new golf course.

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

#255

Post by alkonaut »

roenxi wrote: post #234
swman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Honestly do we really need cryptocurrency? This is a fundamentally unfair question. People waste lots of resources on things I don't think we need. There is a powerful principle in modern economies that if people have money then they don't need to justify what they think is a good idea to you, me, the government or anyone else unless there are compelling reasons to. "Do you need this?" isn't a question that is aske…

But we do have good reasons to ban it. It does cause measurable harm.

It’s exactly the same argument that led to the ban of CFCs, incandescent light bulbs, direct electric space heating, and cars without catalytic converters the list goes on and on.

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

#256

Post by piva00 »

ENGNR wrote: post #218
TomSwirly wrote: post #168

Earlier 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…

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 t…

I don't think I grasped any of the concepts you tried to expose as benefits of crypto.

It doesn't make sense the jump from keeping state in a distributed, trusted store for a finite state machine to deploying chat rooms, etc., what do you mean? Synchronising those states through a blockchain just to enforce some kind of distributed trust? I really don't get it.

I might be too stupid for this, bear with me. I've heard the argument about L2+ chains for a long time, Lightning has been around since 2017 and I still see this comment popping up, I still see TX fees high as fuck.

I really would like a more clear explanation of what you see as benefits, this whole paragraph reads as pure techno-babble to me.

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

#257

Post by alkonaut »

roenxi wrote: post #10

The 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.

> The basic idea of the economy is people can earn the right to energy, and then direct it to a goal of their choosing.

Or is it that people (through government) decide what’s allowed to do in the market, and things with negative externalities are banned or taxed?

I can’t decide to buy an incandescent lightbulb and put my money towards more electricity to drive it.

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

#258

Post by WanderPanda »

skohan wrote: post #68
tshaddox wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electrical power is only fungible in that sense if significant negative externalities exist which allow units of energy to be priced similarly when their sources vary significantly in total (including societal) costs. If societal costs are internalized (i.e. externalities are eliminated) then fungibility would surely disappear, because a unit of energy produced from coal would surely be more expensive than a unit of…

Is this a distinction without a difference? If the climate impact of mining were truly priced in, is there any chance this activity would be remotely profitable?

Of course it would be remotely profitable for some of the miners. The difficulty adjustment is making the consensus kind of invariant of the total amount of energy used. Even security-wise Bitcoin would probably be fine at 1/10 or even 1/100 of its current power usage

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

#259

Post by kthejoker2 »

GaylordTuring wrote: post #237
TomSwirly wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this. Crypo cannot create or destroy fiat currency. So if you sell your crypto and make a profit in dollars, it's exactly because someone else bought it at a higher price than you did. And they expect someone else will buy it from them, in just the same way... So every dollar that comes out of cryptocurrency is because a later investor put a dollar in. Doesn't that sound like the definition of a Ponzi scheme…

This exact reasoning can be applied to the buying and selling of gold, can it not? I’m not saying that therefore it’s moot, but is there a difference? Would you call gold a ponzu scheme as well or do you see a difference between the two? It can also be applied to, for example, the buying and selling of old watches or art.

The key difference between just pure bubble assets (where extrinsic demand outstrips intrinsic demand) and Ponzi schemes are the representation of the real thing being bought underneath.

In the gold market, you are buying a contract to deliver you physical gold at a point in time.

Similarly with tulips, Beanie babies, fine art, and old watches the underlying asset is what it is.

MLMs and other traditional pyramid schemes also do typically hand you real assets, and so are not inherently Ponzi schemes.

But when that extrinsic demand is driven by fraudulent claims (like Madoff's "beat the market every year" returns), then it can be considered a Ponzi scheme, because they don't even get the tulips or Picassos or whatever, they get nothing.

The gray area, especially with MLMs, is what kind of support and service benefits you get - these are often fraudulent or misleading (Ponzi scheme) but they don't inherently have to be.

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

#260

Post by boppo1 »

cblconfederate wrote: post #231
boppo1 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it will still work. Technically, sure. But without sufficient network capacity, there won't be much demand for it.

> without sufficient network capacity like, today?

Sort of, but exponentially worse.
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