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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

#281

Post by louloulou »

alkonaut wrote: post #278
louloulou wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, all businesses are regulated within the jurisdictions in which they operate. But if I want to set up a mining machine in my house, I don't see how a government can say that running my heater is fine but running the miner is not.. are they monitoring my electricity usage down to the device level? How?

Can you grow a ficus but not cannabis? Are they monitoring your gardening to the plant level? The answer I suppose is that a) what’s legal isn’t necessarily what can be enforced and b) just like no one would find your single cannabis plant, this is probably about industrial level mining where authorities have insight through permits for construction, permits for yearly emissions, use of cooling water and so on.

Well if it only applies practically to industrial level mining, I guess that's a good thing. Since it would decentralise mining and makes it more profitable for individuals who can freely ignore the law à la file sharing, cannabis, etc. Hopefully it will make the network more robust.

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

#282

Post by nickpp »

newaccount74 wrote: post #262
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.

Some governments even force you to put insulation on your home or they won't give you a permit to build it! And then they only let you install an energy efficient furnace! And evil EU even forced appliance manufacturers to stop selling inefficient washing machines! The EU has a long history of regulating energy waste, and outlawing crypto is a logical next step.

> Some governments even force you to put insulation on your home or they won't give you a permit to build it!

And then they point at the "evil foreign/investor buyers" when people complain of the exorbitant house prices.

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

#283

Post by DonHopkins »

VMG wrote: post #272
DonHopkins wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Nobody ever fought encryption because of its environmental impact and contribution to global warming and wasted energy, or because it burns lots of coal and causes cancer and lung disease.

Correct, they picked other excuses.

You're picking other excuses for shilling cryptocurrency to detract from the hard cold sociopathic fact that you don't give a flying fuck about the environment or public health.

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

#284

Post by DonHopkins »

VMG wrote: post #273
morelisp wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yo…

why should I defend an autocrat?

Better question: Why should you shill a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme that destroys the environment, causes climate change, wastes energy, burns coal, and causes cancer and lung disease?

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

#285

Post by dcanelhas »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #172
dcanelhas wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, the Danish wind power is partly made viable due to interconnection with the swedish grid and its hydro power, which can generate on demand to even out the production. We sometimes see the spot price go negative when there is an excess of wind. In those cases the optimal routing of energy is essentially going through as much wire as possible, to incur transmission losses. I don't think the excess energy sh…

> due to interconnection with the swedish grid and its hydro power ... and its hydro and nuclear power.

I don't know what the case is in your part of the world but;

"In Sweden, all nuclear power plants are currently operating in baseload, meaning they are constantly operating at their maximum rated thermal power and maximum rated electrical output." [1]

With hydro serving as a flexible power source to compensate for fluctuations in intermittent sources like wind and solar.

[1] http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9020022

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

#286

Post by morelisp »

DonHopkins wrote: post #284
VMG wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why should I defend an autocrat?

Better question: Why should you shill a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme that destroys the environment, causes climate change, wastes energy, burns coal, and causes cancer and lung disease?

... and despite all its rhetoric about freedom, seems to be associated primarily with oligarchs, autocrats, and the biggest winners of traditional capitalism.

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

#287

Post by bothandeach »

seu wrote: post #3

"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…

Seu, you are absolutely right. "The required climate transition" is 100% on the button. We cannot allow the moneyed class to close the future for humanity IMNSHO. Thanks for such clarity.

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

#288

Post by VMG »

skohan wrote: post #158
VMG wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, let's get rid of the military industrial complex then

Yes I would support this as well. Let's get rid of all the non-contributive activities.

My plan is to take away the governments printing press which funds the destruction. What is yours?

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

#289

Post by wruza »

baby wrote: post #279
wruza wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people think crypto currency==bitcoin Because economically that’s true. There is no crypto (even ETH) which could stay at its price when BTC goes up and down by a magnitude. Of course they are correlated, like INTC may correlate with APPL when markets go crazy, but this link is too rigid for all crypto under bitcoin even when it’s relatively quiet. I don’t understand an exact reason behind this, but I believ…

Have you heard of stablecoins?

Yes, but I don’t trust these contracts in a long term. I’d say neither should you, but that is a personal choice.

The biggest (afaik) of these ETH contract-based coins, USDT, is owned by a single company, which is partially backing it by their BTC and it maintains a list of blocked tokens, which is by design. Of course small money is relatively safe, but for large capitals it’s just a joke.

Any smart contract with a centralized oracle entity has all of the downsides of centralized money. These are much more convenient as a medium to crypto, but that’s it.

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

#290

Post by supermatt »

swinglock wrote: post #253
supermatt wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

IF the global hashrate stays the same as it did for the 2016 blocks prior to the last difficulty change - this thread is about if the hash rate was suddenly changed by miners going offline.
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