Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated • Hacker News Board

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#331

Post by shkkmo » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

nolantait wrote: post #302

shkkmo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... citizenship and rights only for those who can afford it? Or is the voluntariness of the "customer relationship" one way?...in which case you would really just be arguing for a global decrease in immigration restrictions. The fundemental difference between a citizen and a customer is that it's much harder to citizenship status.

Markets are some of the best tools we have at coordinating behavior in a decentralized way. I wouldn't advocate some capitalist wasteland. For example if we added market dynamics to a wealth tax we could make it viable and fair for all participants. Lets say there is a 7% tax on all assets over 25k USD. You decide the real value of the assets but the rule is they must be on public auction at all times. Most homeowner…

Wow, that's a ridiculously silly idea.

1) Markets aren't magic coordinators, they take large amounts of human effort to maintain in a functional state. Your system would destroy productivity because it would require a huge increase in market oarticipatio

2) Economic activity needs stability and your system would almost entirely eliminate that.

3) Markets require information to function accurately so to constantly have accurate markets for everything means that you have completely eliminated privacy.

4) Price is not the only important aspect is many transactions. Reputation matters and this system would result in the inability to trust any economic partner because their assets could be bought at any time.

5) You would still need to have massive government regulation to prevent fraudulent collusion. Lets say you seriously underprice your assets to avoid taxes and whenever someone moves to buy the asset, you have a friend who would bid on it until they win. That friend can then sell the asser back to you. Now raise this basic idea by the power of the massive legal and financial efforts that have histoy been put into tax evasion and you have a regulatory problem that dwarfs existing tax enforement problems.

So you would basically tax stability while creating tools that would enable massive fraud and speculation.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#332

Post by shkkmo » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 1:49 AM UTC

hackingforfun wrote: post #243

endisneigh wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a blockchain to do that, and there's a reason voting records for individuals are not made public. It's to protect against coercion, among other things.

Each individual can have a unique identifier that is not linked to their identity. It could be a public key that they generate from their private key. We'd have to figure out the details of how that would work exactly, i.e. making sure people cannot vote twice, but that's possible to figure out. I don't think there's any way to do this without giving trust to some central entity without a public blockchain. The publi…

> Each individual can have a unique identifier that is not linked to their identity.

If that idenifier is unlinked to their identity, how do they cryptographically prove their identity when voting? How do you audit voter rolls?

This is a red herring anyway since I was specifically talking about cryptocurrency. In a purely decentralized cryptocurrency economy, taxation becomes impossible. You can't prevent pseudonymous economic transactions and the existence of privacy orriented cryptocurrenciesean that transactions can always route through that layer to turn that pseudonymity into anonymity.

The entire current use case for cryptocurrencies is literally evading the rule of law (and speculation.)

I have sympathies with anarchic ideals and issues with democratic processes, but please don't try to pass one off as the other.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#333

Post by UncleMeat » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 2:11 AM UTC

dorgo wrote: post #301

ARandumGuy wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrencies advertise themselves as democratic, but in reality they're only as democratic as a corporate shareholder vote. Only those with shares can vote, and more shares = more votes. You may view state control on economic activity as authoritarian, but that's a pretty extreme view. I personally think that a democratically elected government should be able to control the economy when necessary, even if I don't…

>Cryptocurrencies advertise themselves as democratic only in matters of that cryptocurrency. >more shares = more votes Yeah, people without shares have no business (and no interest) in decisions concerned with that cryptocurrency. It's like saying a game community is not democratic because only players of that game can make decisions about the future of the game and the hardcore players (early adapters) get more vote…

Those "matters of cryptocurrency" matter a lot. A lot of advocates hate inflation. That's a policy position. And it may be reasonable to want democratic control over those policies rather than miner control.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#334

Post by landemva » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 2:32 AM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #333

dorgo wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Cryptocurrencies advertise themselves as democratic only in matters of that cryptocurrency. >more shares = more votes Yeah, people without shares have no business (and no interest) in decisions concerned with that cryptocurrency. It's like saying a game community is not democratic because only players of that game can make decisions about the future of the game and the hardcore players (early adapters) get more vote…

Those "matters of cryptocurrency" matter a lot. A lot of advocates hate inflation. That's a policy position. And it may be reasonable to want democratic control over those policies rather than miner control.

The Bitcoin block size hard fork showed that full nodes and validating nodes have the power to censor miners who don't follow the consensus rules. And the amount of Bitcoin needed to run a node is zero.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#335

Post by landemva » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #254

iskander wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, if not for the real world resource usage, I would be extremely supportive of cryptocurrencies replacing the traditional financial system for reasons that overlap with your reasons for opposing crypto. Essentially, the financial sector has succeeded so wildly in regulatory capture that we have lost any semblance of democratic control over banks and are unable to dispense punitive consequences for large sca…

There have still been no consequences for large banks issuing known bad mortgages in the early 2000s and then reselling those mortgages in bundles with artificially inflated default rate claims. I'm not sure how a cryptocurrency based financial system, designed so that there can be never be criminal justice consequences for any financial action, is supposed to be an answer to particular abuses without consequences in…

The type of payment rail has nothing to do with criminal prosecution. Ask Ross Ulbricht and the federales who were convicted of stealing from him.

Since PGP and Bitcoin are speech, they are difficult technologies to stop.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#336

Post by danaris » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 2:54 AM UTC

reedjosh wrote: post #194

ARandumGuy wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrencies advertise themselves as democratic, but in reality they're only as democratic as a corporate shareholder vote. Only those with shares can vote, and more shares = more votes. You may view state control on economic activity as authoritarian, but that's a pretty extreme view. I personally think that a democratically elected government should be able to control the economy when necessary, even if I don't…

> Only those with shares can vote, and more shares = more votes. Only in Proof of Stake. This is wby Proof of Work is still considered the most secure against centralization. > Otherwise, power will inevitably accumulate in increasingly large corporations, to the detriment of everyone else. Pot --- kettle. How then, if democracy and state authority can check the concentration of power, did we end up here?

Propaganda, regulatory capture, government gridlock, corruption—we got here not because democracy and state authority are worthless and cannot do the job, but because they are imperfect and people found ways to undermine them for their own benefit.

If we can get back to democracy and genuine state authority, as opposed to increasingly-gerrymandered districts, voter suppression, and "state authority only when it suits the moneyed interests," which is more or less what we have now, then we'll be in much better shape overall.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#337

Post by shkkmo » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

chroem- wrote: post #134

shkkmo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Democracy is primarily about representation and individual freedom. "Rule of law" is one of the main selling points of authoritarian ideologies. Are you sure you didn't drop a minus sign somewhere?

Authoritarian regimes don't have "rule of law".

The entire point is that all institutions in an Authoritarian country are under the control of the authoritarian leader/party.

If the judicial system has independent power and can hold the rulers accountable when the violate the law, it isn't an authoritarian regime.

This is precisely why the US has a system of checks and balances and why the judicial system is an important part of that.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#338

Post by lostmsu » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:58 AM UTC

binarymax wrote: post #33

"they estimate 12.94GW or 0.45% of total global electricity consumption, with theoretical bounds of [4.65,31.17]GW" Devastating. Now imagine if we spent 0.45% more of global electricity on carbon capture (and growing) and how much better off our prospects would be.

Let's just select 0.45% of world population randomly, cut off their electricity, and use it on carbon capture. Imagine how much better the prospects of the remaining 99.55% would be!

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#339

Post by tehjoker » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 4:20 AM UTC

dorgo wrote: post #303

tehjoker wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracies can control the economy deliberately. Democracy without economic control is near anarchy and the democracy is debilitated, subject to the whims of the people that own production.

Governments exist to prevent/fix market failure. The only problem is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_failure

Governments have existed before capitalist markets and they will exist after them too.

Re: Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated

#340

Post by chemmail » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 5:41 AM UTC

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…

Democracy only works in very strict conditions. For the educated and the middle class. For everyone else in the world, it just doesn't work. If the world was under that exact condition, it would be considered dystopian.