[kelp]

Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone.

At this point BTC is a speculative bubble that benefits a very small group to the detriment of the rest of us.

I also have a lot of personal frustration with how mining (more of ETH and others) is impacting the global GPU supply.

A whole cottage industry has cropped up of sites, discords, etc that provide notifications when GPUs come into stock. Not all the issues are related to mining, but it certainly is enough of an issue that Nvidia has announced mining specific cards and is throttling mining on their 3060 series. AMD is rumored to be doing similar soon.

Edit: Replaced 'anti-social Ponzi scheme' with 'speculative bubble' to be more accurate.

[627467]

I can list so many dumb uses of energy out of my head that could be beneficial if banned...

[hudon]

VISA alone processes over 60,000 transactions per second [0] and only uses a tiny subset of the world's data centers. Bitcoin processes a whooping 7 transactions per second and consumes as much energy as *all data centers globally*.

I'm curious to hear what dumb use of energy you have in your head that rivals this level of stupidity.

edit: I'll address the "apple to oranges" replies here: you can combine the energy consumed by VISA and whatever other financial service exists that would together match the feature-set of bitcoin (eg. VISA + Bank of America + ...) and you'd still have energy consumption many orders of magnitude lower than the Bitcoin network.

[0] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...

[Guzba]

This conversation never goes anywhere because it's apples and oranges. VISA connects other intermediaries. It isn't actually transferring money, its basically getting two parties to agree to a transfer with a huge pile of terms and fees. It's just not the same thing.

[rspeele]

I mean, you could just as well say Bitcoin isn't actually transferring money, it's just changing whose private keys are able to move a token around. If you define "money" as something you can pay your rent, taxes, and grocery expenses with, Coinbase and the exchanges are the ones that really settle that into money.

[Guzba]

Do you believe that distinction is on the same scale as the distinction I pointed out between comparing VISA and Bitcoin? Nothing is completely black and white, but I believe your distinction is into the pedantic territory whereas the other is fundamental. One can certainly pay for goods and services directly with Bitcoin.

[rspeele]

I mean, we're never going to get a 1:1 comparison, but I'll put it this way: Visa's not-quite-really transferring money is a whole lot more useful than Bitcoin's not-quite-really transferring money.

And I'm sure that Visa + banks for settlement are still using a lot less energy than Bitcoin if you normalize it to transaction volume. Even if you only count the settlements as "real" transactions.

[627467]

Yes, but it's so easy to bring up as an argument...

[doggosphere]

Is VISA an asset that protects against hyperinflation, is it permissionless to participate in, is it censorship resistant, is it pseudonymous?

You're comparing your bicycle to a cargo ship saying "see how much more energy efficient my bicycle is?". Meanwhile your bicycle can't tow 1000 tonnes of freight across the ocean. That's why is moot to compare them.

[hudon]

Bitcoin is no longer censorship resistant. From the US Government alone being able to track and prosecute domestic and international criminals using Bitcoin such as Ross Ulbricht [0] or the BTC-e founder [1], to censoring bitcoin addresses [2] , and there being a trend of the centralized Bitcoin miners complying with such orders [3]; that ship sailed a few years ago. "Users" today transacting on the Bitcoin network are implicitly asking permission from Uncle Sam with every transaction they make, since un-authorized use of Bitcoin has become so easy to prosecute.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/04/world/americas/silk-road-ross...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/29/16060344/btce-bitcoin-exc...

[2] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm556

[3] https://cointelegraph.com/news/slippery-slope-as-new-bitcoin...

[doggosphere]

- People are not prosecuted for using Bitcoin, they are prosecuted for crimes like drug trafficking or money laundering. Even Ross Ulbricht was not necessarily traced because of his Bitcoins.

- Geographic distribution of nodes and mining is important for decentralization.

- I don't live in the United States. I can wash/tumble my coins, proxy through other networks. Transact through Monero. The power is on the side of the users.

[627467]

How is [3] generalizable to all future mining power will require uncle sam permission?

[hudon]

I'm showing evidence for how censorship is happening today in Bitcoin and therefore we cannot claim it to be "censorship resistant". Whether miners co-operate or not with the prosecutors is beside the point. The example of miner co-operation is just to show how easy censorship can be, but from the government's point of view it is just an optimization, not a necessary function.

[627467]

Ripping myself off from another "bitcoin will destroy the world because climate change" thread:

> But visa doesn't provide most of the functions of bitcoin infrastructure. Visa does[n't] need to hold the balance of my account. Visa does[n't] need to or makes available all of my equity worth of assets for me to transfer. Visa does not custody my assets. This is literally apple to oranges (or visa to bitcoin)

[coderzach]

> Visa does[n't] need to hold the balance of my account.

Yes they do?

> Visa does[n't] need to or makes available all of my equity worth of assets for me to transfer.

This is a horrifying bug, right? A thing that no person would ever want, and it's so rare that visa would make you talk to a person and raise your limit first, or they'd get more people involved to make sure you're not being coerced because it's such an abnormal thing to do. Lawyers in some cases, just because you're being so silly. But if you REALLY wanted to make a $1b debit card transaction, you probably totally could, just call the visa billionaire line.

> Visa does not custody my assets.

But a regular bank can, and visa will send to and from there with a debit card.

[tybit]

So you think those extra functions do account for all data center power consumption added up?

[gruez]

cough ad-tech cough

[romski]

ad-tech runs on a fractional of data centers right? So it's already eclipsed by crypto.

[gruez]

if we're talking about resource usage, we also have to factor in the energy/bandwidth in end-user devices, as well has human labor (bitcoin miners aren't hiring tens/hundreds of thousands of SWEs, for instance).

[korijn]

So... What-about-ism?

[uncletammy]

> Proof of work blockchains should be banned by various governments for this reason alone.

How does one ban a blockchain? Serious question.

Would you only arrest the miners or would you also arrest non-mining full node operators?

How could you tell if regular citizens were transacting with POW coins? Would you subpoena telecom companies for records where customers have visited known sites which transact in POW coins? Or would you go the AT&T route and pipe telecom traffic through a little cabinet that uses deep packet inspection to sniff out POW transactions occurring over RPC?

What about traders? Would you outlaw trading POW coins and make exchange exclude US customers? That could make for some serious arbitrage opportunities for tech savy citizens.

I would genuinely appreciate your answer to any or all of these questions.

I build cryptocurrency software and would gain a lot from additional insight into the threat model I face in the not-so-distant future.

[kelp]

You regulate exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini, so there are no legitimate ways to trade your proof of work cryptocurrency for USD (or your local gov backed currency).

Then the demand for the crypto currency plummets.

In 2010-2011, I traded BTC for USD in person, with a laptop on wifi. And via PayPal with someone I met on IRC, where there was a bot that kept track of your reputation so the BTC sellers would know if it was safe to sell to you.

At that time the price of 1 BTC was about $1 USD.

I think we'd see something similar, if there was an outright ban.

[gruez]

On the other hand:

* cocaine prices aren't $1/kg, even after governments around the world banned it

* exotic/endangered species are still being traded for top dollars, despite anti-poaching and anti-trafficking regulations

* stolen art is still worth millions

[rspeele]

Those things are valued for more than their resale price.

The only reason I would ever want to hold a Bitcoin is that I trust that somebody else will give me something of value for it in the future.

If governments make it very difficult for me to exchange bitcoins for other things, its utility as a "store of value" gets lower. I'd rather store my value in stocks, real estate, gold, or whatever else. The regulation directly interferes with the use case.

On the other hand, all the regulation in the world doesn't interfere with cocaine's use case of getting you high. If governments could make it so that cocaine doesn't get you high, its price would certainly plummet.

[innagadadavida]

Another option is to levy wealth tax in bitcoin holdings. This is definitely less draconian that what you are proposing, but will achieve similar results.

[verdverm]

You don't ban the blockchain, you make it illegal to use the coins. Then the network loses value and mining doesn't pay off. If you don't do KYC or AML, you will likely become part of the banned list.

Also you can look for energy consumption. Towns in upstate New York are banning new permits for mining. So it's already happened.

In short, society has certain expectations and if you violate those there will be consequences. Govt and laws are always behind the publics will, so it's coming for cryptos. Which survive is the real speculative bets that will pay off

[dgellow]

As always, you regulate at the edge: You control that banks do not accept Bitcoin-related money. You regulate exchanges to delist Bitcoin.

[cpach]

Personally, I would rather see a reasonable tax on emissions.

[kelp]

Yeah, when it comes to policy, I think you're right. I'd prefer a tax on the externalities than an outright ban.

[pazimzadeh]

Or, dirty energy should be banned.

[kelp]

Yes, and that doesn't really address the issue of proof of work blockchains wasting energy. With BTC specifically, the incentives are there to waste as much energy as possible as the difficulty and price goes up. Yes, you try to do more work with a unit of electricity, but the net incentive is to add more and more.

Then what? Do you end up with this problem? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26226470

[jennrn]

Honestly, I'm thinking about buying a brand new Silverado with my crypto just because of how much I hate you whiny climate change bitches.

[gruez]

>BTC is an anti-social Ponzi scheme

speculative bubble =/= ponzi scheme

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26203396

[neaden]

To be fair, if Satoshi Nakamoto is still around and has access to 1 million bitcoins, then it's more of a Ponzi scheme.

[gruez]

Even then it's still not really a ponzi scheme unless he promised returns. Just because vitalik buterin is around doesn't mean ethereum is a ponzi scheme.

[kelp]

Yeah, you're right on the definition.

[viklove]

I say we should ban data centers instead. They're clearly a scam and no one should be allowed to use them because they waste so much power!

[kelp]

A lot of datacenters provide substantial utility to others. Like the customers of the services that are hosted in those datacenters.

BTC mining makes the miners more wealthy. In service of the BTC network, which has what utility?

There are quite a number of criminal or at least grey market uses for BTC.

But what are the legitimate uses that are not as well or better served by the traditional payment networks?

[atweiden]

> In service of the BTC network, which has what utility?

The safest safe haven asset. A global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms.

> There are quite a number of criminal or at least grey market uses for BTC.

Criminals the world over prefer cash. Should we ban cash?

> But what are the legitimate uses that are not as well or better served by the traditional payment networks?

A programmable, internet-native inflation-proof store of value with transparent fully-auditable supply metrics. Or to quote Elon Musk, “simply a less dumb form of liquidity than cash”.

[ziml77]

It's less a question of if Bitcoin has utility and more about the proportionality of its utility to resource usage. The problem is that there's always incentives to increase the amount of processing power being thrown at Bitcoin but the utility of Bitcoin is independent of that. You can change the amount of processing power in the network without affecting the rate of transaction processing, rate of minting, or the perceived value of Bitcoin.

[dvh1990]

Bitcoin's true use case hasn't showed itself yet because it is uniquely suited to help us in case of a select few low probability and extreme scenarios, aka black swan events which we can't predict, but will probably happen.

[verdverm]

If those events happen, do you think the infra (electricity generation and telecom interconnection) that it relies upon will still be around?

[dvh1990]

Yes. I'm talking about financial collapse, not destruction of infra.

[gremlinsinc]

I'm pro-blockchain (but not POW) ... and not really as they currently exist. I see a future with UBI, and better taxation of wealthy baked INTO the crypto so that equality is a bit more fair, and everything functions more "automated" so less bureacracy.

However, I've been wondering lately what happens in a future where the grid is destroyed by a sun storm? Say the power grids get knocked off for 21 months (I read this is a very possible scenario with a big sun flare), as well as a lot of satellites.

If we move a lot of the world's monetary systems/value to blockchain, how do we use blockchain with no internet or electricity?

[verdverm]

Without details, the impact of a financial collapse is unknown. Given how BTC moves in connection with the broader market now, one would expect that the value would crash with the system, especially since BTC has no intrinsic value.

[viklove]

Operating data centers makes the data center owners more wealthy. All in service of the data center network, which has what utility?

There are quite a number of criminal and grey market uses for data centers.

What are the legitimate uses of data centers that are not served by traditional pen & paper?

[base698]

And Xbox and other gaming consoles.

[insertnickname]

And Argentina.

[inshadows]

Yeah, pretty much expected these comments would appear soon. How come everytime Bitcoin thread is started, 99% of comments are people absolutely clueless about how difficulty is regulated within Bitcoin protocol?

[Daishiman]

There was no comment about BTC difficulty. It's a comment about the pernicious impact of BTC on the world with practically no benefit to show for it.

[hddu]

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/810859107894008357/

[inshadows]

Yeah, and the truth is Bitcoin doesn't have negative impact on the world. Miners do.

[rspeele]

This is kind of like the old joke that falling from a great height is perfectly safe, it's only landing that's dangerous.

[belltaco]

Almost everything in Bitcoin was intentionally designed around mining.

[jrv]

But Bitcoin can't exist without miners...

[hddu]

Fuck all those people using Bitcoin to circumvent oppressive governments. Fuck your freedom. We need the gov to solve all our problems. We need to ban bit coin now!!! Muh climate change https://www.pinterest.com/pin/810859107894008357/