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Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

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Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#111

Post by reedjosh »

bserge wrote: post #88
nolantait wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, Keynsian economics requires everyone to be forced to save through a central banking system. Otherwise the whole thing collapses. Keynsian economics has dominated the last 100 years of politics. Crypto gives you an escape which puts a check politicians who would be forced to be less spendy. The only other way of enforcing this would attack the ways in which politicians trade favor which seems impossible.…

Oh, why would they be less spendy when they can just take your crypto escape away by physical force?

Can they?

If people buy P2P without KYC, how can force be applied?

Further, is there the will to have people's property confiscated via violence? If so, where are we democratically? Where does state power end? Why does state power make sense against non violent non consenting citizens, but not against true oligarchs manipulating our political system?

At some point it becomes obvious the whole system is a farcical power hierarchy. Crypto is one thing this system will struggle to steal.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#112

Post by DantesKite »

endisneigh wrote: post #3

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…

Agreed.

I like to make this joke often: What's the difference between communism and bitcoin?

Communism has actually been tried in practice.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#113

Post by danuker »

anonporridge wrote: post #105
danuker wrote: post #82

I am a bitcoin owner. That said, I agree that the PoW mining reward is excessive. Right now, a 51% attack on the network costs upwards of $2M/h[1]. That is an obscene amount. I argue this comes from the very high growth not being expected by the creators. Most of the miner rewards right now come from inflation (in spite of inflation being less than 2% per year). This was intended to allow the network to grow permissi…

> I believe that Bitcoin should reduce its block time, in order to trigger the reward halvings more quickly. Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, it's not going to happen. This would be a hard fork in the network. Bitcoin already went through a massive civil war over the block size, which is a much less contentious issue than the supply issuance rate. It took years just to get the Segwit softfork out the…

> This would be a hard fork in the network.

> What you're suggesting would start a civil war that would rage for years, if not decades

Yes, absolutely. I do believe even governments might react more quickly here, by taxing negative externalities, than this happening.

But I wish it did, so people would stop worrying about the power used.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#114

Post by tromp »

endisneigh wrote: post #3

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…

> now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs

Only to the extent that the coin is premined or that the emission is heavily concentrated on the first few years. This should be much less of a problem with a purely linear emission (never changing block reward), that takes a century to get yearly supply inflation to under 1%.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#115

Post by shkkmo »

chroem- wrote: post #94
endisneigh wrote: post #3

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…

> Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. What is this even supposed to mean? Strict state controls on economic activity are more within the realm of authoritarian regimes, rather than democracies.

Democracies depends on transparency, accountability and the rule of law. Cyrptocurrencies are fundementally more anarchic than democratic.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#116

Post by anonporridge »

rblion wrote: post #76

The carbon footprint is the bottleneck for crypto. How can it scale without accelerating further ecological collapse? New coins will come along with greenwash in their rhetoric but ultimately you have to trust the science. It's funny how everyone trusts the science when it supports their worldview and ignore it when it doesn't.

Do you realize that bitcoin doesn't require constantly increasing energy use to scale, right?

There exists a natural equilibrium of the value of the miner reward, the cost of energy, and the amount of energy consumed.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#117

Post by nolantait »

joe_the_user wrote: post #93
nolantait wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the idea that it acts as a balancing weight to the perverse incentives for countries to debase their currency? Radically if the relationship to taxation was more of a voluntary customer relationship it could lead to better outcomes, ignoring how many more problems it might bring. Thoughts?

Radically if the relationship to taxation was more of a voluntary customer relationship it could lead to better outcomes The fundamental outcome of this "voluntary taxation" scheme would be that the wealthy would gain an extra layer of control over the actions of the state, aside from the vast influence this group already has (and the wealthy no doubt would be the ones able to make taxes voluntary in this way, notabl…

Voluntary taxation might be taken as just asking people to pay taxes which I am thinking is a bit of a strawman. If instead you chose to pay for the services you wanted and subsidized services for others you could end up with the same system we have in total expenditure but with an added layer of feedback where government services "compete" for the polity. Naturally reducing the overall bloat of our institutions.

I don't think that re-engineering the incentives around taxation means we have to go full Ayn Rand. I also don't think any of these ideas will come about from people deciding. The natural advantage the wealthy have in choosing where to locate their capital will force this outcome with governments coming kicking and screaming the whole way down.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#118

Post by coralreef »

endisneigh wrote: post #3

There's some good data here - that being said, even if the carbon footprint were literally zero, I couldn't personally support cryptocurrency. Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One wa…

> The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression.

That's an interesting way of describing open source software, whose existence depends on nodes willingly adopting and agreeing to a set of protocols. I'm guessing its far easier to fork a chain and convince people to join a new network, than it is to overthrow a central bank/government.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#119

Post by nolantait »

SantalBlush wrote: post #110
nolantait wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A customer relationship is different in that the feedback loop between your wants/desires and the governing body is more immediate. The rules that were arrived at seem to be less about effectiveness than about special interests. Not to say the ideas I was asking everyones opinion on are a panacea but taxation as ideology is not beyond reproach. Are there alternatives that curb the bad incentives and force a better ga…

No ideology is beyond reproach. That doesn't mean any single person has the right to circumvent the law at will; instead, we discuss it and make a change as a society. Taxes are no different from other laws in this respect. Just because someone doesn't like them doesn't mean they should get to disregard the law. If that were the case, we should be free to ignore any law we don't like.

Right. But every change in the societal order will be illegal by definition. Its more that our capabilities to rebel are increased over time. We would all be in feudal bondage if machines didn't reorganize our relationship between workers and the state. Women would not have the rights they do without birth control, etc...

Taxes work because we can (imperfectly) enforce them. What happens when we can't?

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#120

Post by zaybqp »

I miss the good ol' days when we used simpler terms like air and land pollution, depletion of natural resources, and the destruction of the biosphere instead of "Carbon Footprint." I am nominating cryptocurrency as a Great Filter solution to the Fermi Paradox. It is telling to see the brightest among us advocating for this unmitigated disaster. Maybe, Mars is a perfect place to mine crypto? I am sure someone will market such a coin.
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