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Comment by thebean11 | Hacker News Reader

So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources? You can't see the issue with that?

And that still doesn't really answer whose job it is to ban all these things, and what mechanism would be used to enforce it.

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> So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources? You can't see the issue with that?

There is a difference between majority not liking and only like 0.2% of the world consuming more energy than _a whole country_. There are 5million bitcoin users, they are consuming more electricity than 44 million people's daily lives. Think about the scale of imbalance here.

While the phrase "a whole country" sounds dramatic, that doesn't really put the usage into perspective compared to those other examples.

For example MGM claims their properties in Nevada consume 171 MW. That's more than 65 of the countries from this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

Let me rephrase that. 5 million people are using more energy for small parts of their daily transactions than 44 million people in their entire daily lives. Sounds pretty dramatic to me. Even if we say that the argentinian electricity consumption is 10x lower than anywhere else, it will still be 5million people's partial amounts of transaction and 4.4 million people's daily lives (which includes all the transactions they make daily).

It is good practice to question if a technology is worth the social cost of wasting so much electricity. This is literally how Bitcoin is built, as it keeps growing, it keeps consuming an insane amount of electricity, for a very little amount of transactions per day. This is call ethics, doesn't mean it should be illegal, but there is value in questioning it and investigate if perhaps there are better solutions than wasting energy.

If the majority is 99% and that other fraction of 1% use an ENORMOUS amount of resources on their hobby, then yes it is reasonably to consider making it illegal.

You conveniently omit the social cost.

Enforcing could be done via banning any payment with bitcoin.

Well not really. Most people buy coins because they believe the price will climb and never use them for buying. For the retailers who accept bitcoin many are in smaller countries where the law wouldn't apply and many semi-legimate uses (ordering weed by mail) would continue to accept payment this way because their activity is more illegal (carrys a bigger punishment) than the new bitcoin law would.

What is the point of BTC price climbing if you wouldn't be able to convert it to cash or pay for goods?

> So things that the majority don't like / understand should be illegal because they use resources?

If they produce a net negative for the majority and only benefit a small number of people, then yes.

We don't go around driving tanks, do we?

I love tanks, but there's a reason why we can't drive them to go to the mall.

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