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Comment by kybernetikos | Hacker News Reader

Charles Stross recently said it should be outlawed based on the environmental impact of Proof Of Work. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/11/unforsee...

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If we're going to pass a law for that reason, we should pass a meaningful price on carbon. Then all the bitcoin miners using fossil-based electricity will go out of business.

It's true that it's actually the differential in power prices that leads to its rapid expansion. The underlying tech will raise or lower difficulty based upon market incentives. So forcing mining onto renewable sources of energy by putting a price on carbon would benefit everyone.

Except the poor

Make it a fee-and-dividend program and the poor would come out ahead.

Laws have been passed for that, and we should keep passing them, but it hasn't had the effect you posit on bitcoin mining.

We do not have a high, global carbon price. If it's not global, the miners will just relocate to areas that don't have it.

But a ban on bitcoin would just relocate miners to places without the ban so I think it's a fair comparison.

We should ban video games and porn too then. The amount of electricity going into powering all the consoles and computers around then world toward a useless endeavour is immense.

Please explain how video games and porn don't serve a useful purpose. I'm thinking it's possible that porn contributes to a lower birth rate, which would more than offset the amount of power consumed to produce and transmit pornography.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/200904/do...

I don't actually think they should be banned. I'm making a facetious analogy to prove a point. Bitcoin is at least as useful as video games and porn.

Ugh, sorry. In the Age of the Great Orange One, it's almost impossible to tell joking from earnestness.

How is Bitcoin even remotely as useful as video games or porn? It's 99% speculation and 1% buying drugs online.

Tell all the Chinese that successfully expatriated money how useless Bitcoin is.

Just curious: who's taking the other side of those trades (BTC for yuan) and what are they doing with all the yuan?

Bitcoin has the culture of hodling* so I doubt how much of the pre-existing coins go into the market. So mostly the local currency (yuan/etc) would go to cover the mining costs and salaries of employees and owners. Don't know the impact of closing down of exchanges in China some time back.

* - holding but culturally called hodling, perhaps some Grame of Thrones reference(?)...Satoshi did not move their coins and that carries on. So far it has been very resilient. Exchanges hacked and it carried on. But fear remains of some black swan events e.g. Suddenly Satoshi coins on the market etc.

So you have an argument for porn being useful (not that I disagree), but you can't find a single reason for why cryptocurrencies would be useful? Or even Bitcoin alone?

Bitcoin could adopt a proof of stake system if the core devs and users thought there's no other way for Bitcoin to survive. The Bitcoin ecosystem seems to be very conservative and they only make big changes when they are under high outside pressure.

If Proof of Work was banned, Bitcoin would still be here tomorrow, is what I'm saying. Perhaps it's a good idea to ban PoW, but it will not have any significant (long-term) effect on Bitcoin's adoption.

The difference is that they are optimizing for efficiency. They are trying to maximise uselessness while also minimising environmental impact. Bitcoin maximises uselessness while also maximising environmental impact.

If you had a fusion reactor bitcoin would consume all of it's energy output.

I don't play games, but give me something that replaces porn in utility and I'll agree with you.

I think you're saying, "give me something that I value as much as porn and I'll agree with you"

Bitcoin's utility is about as subjective as porn's utility.

Don't know why this is downvoted; utility and value are subjective under basically every modern economic theory there is aside from Marxist ones.

Video games and porn are so precious, though! I wouldn't call them a useless endeavour.

I'm being facetious to make a point.

Reading through the comments it looks like you’re discovering the truth in Poe’s Law [0] which roughly translates to sarcasm inevitably backfires in large persistent distributed contexts like HN or other forums.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Aviation causes a hundred times more greenhouse gas emissions then Bitcoin.[1] (And imagine how large you could make that look if you used "more then x countries" rhethoric.)

[1] https://medium.com/@cryptarchist/how-much-greenhouse-gas-emi...

so in other words... bitcoin produces as much emissions as 1% of every single flight on earth

that's still pretty insane.

yeah, sound money is not nearly 1% as important as getting from one place to another a little faster.

Issues of energy and thermodynamics are pretty darn important:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

I'm frequently annoyed by people who think the unsustainability of exponential growth is somehow specific to Bitcoin, and not the entire global financial system.

Global finance consumes a lot of energy and resources, and encourages businesses to harvest natural resources and find externalities to continue a compounding growth rate. It is mathematically impossible for this to continue unabated on a planet with a fixed amount of resources. Eventually, something will have to give. Hopefully markets will find a graceful solution, but the transition will probably be ugly.

Well, that's pretty much the point of the article, so I'm glad you agree.

Bitcoin, of course, actually introduces additional problems, which is why it sometimes gets particular attention.

Proof of stake will fix that though.

If a workable version is ever created. I don't think it's a solved problem at this point.

By that argument, having children should be outlawed based on the environmental impact.

You are joking, but some people are seriously proposing that.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/children-carbon-foo...

Oh I know. But what these things all share is that the government shouldn't be in the business of regulating freedom. Governments shouldn't be in the business of telling you what you can do, they should be in the business of asking you what's important to you.

Freedom is hard. Actually requiring probable cause before being subjected to the justice system used to be a thing. Then the US government started stealing peoples money without ever even charging them with a crime. So now we have crypto. So the government can't do it anymore. "But but but what if they are committing a crime!" they say. Prove it i say. You know. Rule of law. That's what democracies are supposed to be about aren't they?

And that attack on freedom now has crypto as a response. The thing that it is counter-intuitive about crypto, is that the solution to electronic anonymous and censorship resistant money, turned out being record everything forever. When someone can flick a switch and take everything from you, you don't have freedom. When you can access the ledger from anyone, prove that it it is valid, and be able to send your money to anyone, for whatever purpose, you do.

This technology has been developed as a direct response to the insidious and anti-democratic implementation of AML/KYC laws on a global scale over the past 30 years. The extrapolation of these laws, given a long enough timeline, is slavery. Not figurative slavery, actual slavery.

Bitcoin is the technical response to that problem.

can we also outlaw dollars since basically a huge chunk of them go to bombing third world countries?

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