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

Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

codeberg.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 720 posts

Re: Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

#651

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jacooper wrote: post #634
hogwasher wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather companies actually care (or even just care about seeming to care) about ethics, rather than only caring what makes the line go up the fastest, yes. A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too. Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely ev…

The decision to stop hosting such projects on codeberg will change nothing, it will just make it clear that its not a serious competitor. Its like how the EU kneecaps everything related to energy because of the climate while literally the best case scenarios for the EU lawa is to be 0.1 colder, because the EU isn't the bigger emitter. It just doesn't matter.

The biggest problems with energy policy in the EU haven't been about climate. If they were they wouldn't have been shutting down nuclear to burn Russian gas, nor would they have been suffering the high prices when that Russian gas got less available.

Moreover, the EU is a large market. If they e.g. switch to electric cars, it's not just them switching to electric cars, it's all the carmakers who want to continue selling into that market, who in turn design electric rather than ICE cars that they sell everywhere and increase the economies of scale for battery production which makes them more economical everywhere.

Re: Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

#652

Post by jacobjjacob »

tripzilch wrote: post #588
bArray wrote: post #367

I don't think you want to store your source code in a place where they ban projects based on politics [1]: > Allowing these projects is not a neutral stance; the effects to the environment are severe. The "DarkFi" (seemingly some crypto designed for criminals, citing an FBI director) project for example uses a "PoW blockchain" (per their readme). PoW (Proof-Of-Work) projects waste an astonishing amount of computation…

> with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would…

The value of air conditioning is much more than 20x the value of bitcoin. It might be more than 20,000,000x the value.

Re: Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

#653

Post by dlubarov »

jMyles wrote: post #538

Codeberg being transparent about having a political bent - which all projects do even if they claim not to - is fine. Wonderful even. But I think they got this particular political decision wrong, both ethically and factually. Looking at what seems to have passed for "deliberation", it's hard not to walk away with a very poor impression of codeberg (or at least, their process for deciding on such bans). The crux of t…

Moreover, the vast majority of active software development work relates to modern proof-of-stake blockchains like Ethereum, not Bitcoin which is mostly ossified.

Re: Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

#654

Post by AnthonyMouse »

inigyou wrote: post #618
KetoManx64 wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.

That's not correct. The complaint isn't about data processing energy, it's about the energy purposely wasted in the "how much energy can I waste today" e-dick contest that gives you the right to print new bitcoins. Of course everyone is wasting as much energy as they can.

It isn't "as much as they can", it's as much as is profitable. Which currently means that if you're paying more than about $0.08/kWh for electricity, it isn't profitable and there is no financial incentive to do it.

Of course, this means that people with access to cheap electricity still have the incentive to do it, but now who are they? Well, the places with the cheapest electricity fall into two categories. First, the ones like Iraq that heavily subsidize the cost of electricity, but those countries tend to ban cryptocurrency mining because their intention isn't to subsidize it and that's otherwise what they would be doing.

Second, the places with a large amount of hydro or renewable generation, which then have cheap electricity whenever the intermittent sources have high output. So for example, the country that does the most Bitcoin mining by a fair margin is the US, and the top US state for it is Texas, which despite its reputation actually uses significantly more renewable generation than both the US and world average.

Moreover, cryptocurrency mining instantaneously becomes unprofitable when the price of electricity increases, so when those places with a lot of renewable generation see a period of low output and increase the price because they have to switch on fossil fuel peaker plants instead, the Bitcoin miners immediately shut down because paying the higher prices would be losing money. But loads that disappear quickly in response to higher prices like that are exactly what you need to increase the amount of renewable generation in the grid. You have 1GW of Bitcoin miners and 1GW of ordinary consumers and you can use 2GW of solar generation without needing to backstop it with anything because when solar output is at 50% the price goes up some and the Bitcoin miners drop out until the clouds clear.

With the result that mining tends to happen using excess renewable generation and funds and supports the increase in renewables as a percentage of the grid.

Re: Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

#655

Post by AnthonyMouse »

KetoManx64 wrote: post #602
allarm wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. Which is a waste of energy.

You know what's a real waste of energy? The federal reserve increasing the money supply by 50% in the last half decade and inflated away the savings of hundreds of millions of people that spent tens of thousands of hours of their lives earning that money through blood, sweat and tears.

Who is keeping significant savings as cash in a mattress? Anyone holding investment assets sees nominal asset prices increase along with inflation.

The thing that really screws them is that the government calls the nominal but not real asset price increase a capital gain and wants to collect tax on it.

Re: Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

#656

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Y-bar wrote: post #360
duxup wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know what the politics will be next? They banned vibe coded projects too… goodness knows how they think they can determine / enforce that.

> How do you know what the politics will be next? I was very tempted to reply with a ”always has been” astronaut meme, or possibly Morpheus ”what if I told you” meme. But I would not have contributed in a good manner like that. The way I have come to understand it is that everything is indeed political. An I mean it, even driving at the speed limit is in a sense a political act saying ”I respect the laws by our polit…

> Or another example from where I live, there are two major grocery chains, one of which has owners who were recently convicted of insider trading and price fixing, and openly supports anti-LGBTQ movements. Shopping there is a political act implicitly supporting their political cause and accepting their crimes as okay, even though it might seem far removed.

The trouble with this reasoning is that it's always an isolated demand for rigor.

This other of the major grocery store chains, does it sell food produced by factory farms or huge unsavory agribusiness corps? Are any of its major shareholders the Wall St jerks who do all the sort of thing Wall St jerks do, or anyone else who isn't a good person? It probably sells to anyone who walks in the door without checking who they are, so they could be far- extremists. Can you support a company whose customers are such people?

The world is extremely interconnected. As soon as you open up looking not at what some company or person is doing themselves but at what anyone who works for them or supplies them or buys from them is doing, there will be someone you don't like. And then whether you're refusing to do business with them depends not on whether that is the case, since it is always the case, but instead on who is whispering in your ear to tell you who to hate.

Re: Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

#658

Post by no-name-here »

qwm wrote: post #610
bArray wrote: post #367

I don't think you want to store your source code in a place where they ban projects based on politics [1]: > Allowing these projects is not a neutral stance; the effects to the environment are severe. The "DarkFi" (seemingly some crypto designed for criminals, citing an FBI director) project for example uses a "PoW blockchain" (per their readme). PoW (Proof-Of-Work) projects waste an astonishing amount of computation…

Not the biggest fan of crypto myself, but allowing LLMs and "AI" stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious. They should just say they don't like crypto at that point, because LLMs and datacenters for them are causing way more harm. Even if their qualms are fraud and abuse, I have some bad news for them about what people are using LLMs for lol

> allowing LLMs and “AI” stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious.

They ban projects that are mostly AI, and I’d characterize them more as generally against AI: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

Re: Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

#659

Post by nailer »

nailer wrote: post #580
FireInsight wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slippery slope. AI and crypto are legitimetely controversial new technologies, though both have their uses. I can't imagine "offline mapping application" or "Linux CLI utility" or "self-hostable web app" being categories of software that become controversial in the future. Besides, migrating a repo to another Forgejo instance is simple enough.

[flagged]

If it’s unclear to people, this is a direct reply to;

> I can't imagine "Linux CLI utility" being controversial

In the comment above. I do not share the quoted opinions.

Re: Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

#660

Post by no-name-here »

tbrownaw wrote: post #189
duxup wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know what the politics will be next? They banned vibe coded projects too… goodness knows how they think they can determine / enforce that.

> How do you know what the politics will be next? That's the neat part, you don't. (Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?)

> Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?

I think your implication is that Codeberg have recently demonstrated they’re the kind of people who banned multiple significant categories (there’s probably a better word?) of software this week, so they probably will continue and ban a a number of additional software categories in the coming year(s)?

Post reply on HN