But seeing the HW situation, energy burn, scammers, infra hijacking, etc. there are so many negatives I'm more and more in favour of making it illegal.
Just realize what you're asking for.
Proof of work systems, which by design compete on wasting resources, need to internationally outlawed.
If people want cryptocurrencies to keep going, they can get a move on finally fucking migrating to these alternatives systems they tell us are just around the corner. If none of the major networks are able to do so, they shouldn't exist.
If there is a regulatory route towards reducing / eliminating crypto, I would hope that involves restrictions on the fiat / crypto interchange, not restrictions on what kind of math you can do with a computer.
Math will never be outlawed, but as it stands now it is just too speculative. I don’t have an answer, but as it stands [cryptocurrency / NFT] we need to have a lively debate on what we want it to be.
This is so broad I am not sure which laws you reference. Most of the laws I am aware of talk about how bmuch money you must have to be allowed to speculate.
> Math will never be outlawed,
I wish I shared you certainty. We currently have laws about exporting some types of Math (cryptography) and we have lots politicians interested in placing further restrictions on cryptography.
Laws in general should not be unnecessary broad, most countries have that general rule, and while there is certainly another debate to had on privacy and backdoors, it is a different debate. So when a law comes against Crypto, it should be very specific to curb its problems.
Not as bad as completely misrepresenting real world problems, it isn't! :-D
Meanwhile the rest of us get stuck with externalities - huge energy consumption, hardware supply disruptions, hardware waste, compute hijacking, enabling scammers and extortions schemes.
I don't think crypto should be illegal but the institutions enabling it should
I feel the same about PoN[1]-based currencies! Get rid of the Fed and the military!
[1] Proof of nukes.
World would 100% be a better place without bitcoin.
Crypto / blockchain is great, its current implementation is very much lacking.
I realize what I'm asking for. I'm asking for cryptocurrency speculators to actually pay for the externalities they cause.
Because that's the core of the libertarianism they pretend to support. But of course they don't have libertarian values. The only ideal they stand for is them getting richer by burning everyone else to the ground.
Why? They pay for electricity like everyone else, excepting cases where they're already breaking laws.
Just a thought, I'm probably overlooking something.
Sadly scammers follow both new and old tech and it takes a while for measure to catch up. That's not necessarily a fault of the tech itself.
I have seen no proof that it solves anything the proponents have been touting for 5+ years now - just examples of increases in negative externalities.
Using money online has an obvious utility.
Donations to people where paypal doesn’t work are also easier.
Those are the only uses cases (for me) I encountered and used though ;)
Therefore, you already have to trust them, in which case you might as well just wire the money the old-fashioned way.
Tor is the only network sufficient enough to thwart malicious state actor's efforts.
It comes closest at least. I’m not sure if it’s more than rumors, but they are persistent that NSA and similar actors can de-anonymyze tor users.
Luckily state actors do not play into any of my threat models.
[0] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/06/12/facebook-paid-fo...
"There are financial primitives that cannot exist in traditional finance that I'd call pretty novel. For example flash loans allow uncollateralized loans for millions of dollars[0]. Or take KeeperDAO[1] or Dai[2] or any of the other meta protocols generating returns by providing utility. Also the sheer fact that this is all decentralized/identity-less is already a novel aspect.
[0] https://aave.com/flash-loans/
[1] https://medium.com/keeperdao/a-keepers-guide-to-arbitrage-mi...
that sounds like a massive negative externality to me, not something positive
That's a bad thing, not a good one.
When countries descend into chaos or go full on authoritarian the best option is often to leave, but there might already be capital controls. So what can you take with you? Stocks: good luck if held by a broker in the country. Physical gold or cash: good luck at the border/customs. Foreign accounts: hard to come by for most people even in the first world due to regulations. Any serious amount of money is very hard to move between jurisdictions, especially in times of crisis, through traditional means.
If you believe your host country doesn't own you and you should be able to relocate to wherever you are treated best, Bitcoin can be a good tool if you were unprepared so far (e.g. because you didn't think a crisis could hit _your_ country). This might not be a use case for you today, especially if you are happy with your country and it is stable. But don't discount that the situation of others might differ.
The OP is proposing what is arguably an authoritarian prohibition on an entire class of software.
From the whitepaper:
Loosely speaking, the PoST consists of two phases: an initialization phase (executed once), in which miners “commit” to the data that fills the space S , and an execution phase (executed repeatedly), in which miners prove that they are still storing the data. The time component of the spacetime resource is the elapsed time between successive proofs—if the interval between initialization (or the previous execution phase) and the latest execution phase is T, this proves the miner expended S · T spacetime.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18I9GPebWqgpvusI1kMnAB9nayBb...
> We provide an initial security analysis of the Chia backbone, showing that as long as at least ≈ 61.5% of the space is controlled by honest parties Chia satisfies basic blockchain security properties.
That seems to be a alarming high threshold for control of the network? So as little as 38.6% can attack the network?
The whole idea of creating artificial digital scarcity by basing it on physical scarcity of resources is just horrible.
It’s a terrible plan and very shortsighted. Making hard drives isn’t free of environmental externalities.
> if that case ever came true, the total energy waste would still remain less than PoW by orders of magnitude.
Yes less ongoing energy use, but it does reward creation and effective waste of hard drive space, which isn't without environmental knock-on effects, both some energy use and for chemical byproducts etc.
This is not an 'extremist rationale', if you give people a direct financial incentive to get as much storage as possible, what do you think would happen?
GitHub provides computing resources, for free, to attract users. This is just one of the challenges of that business model. If this is intolerable for GitHub then it's up to them to find a strategy to counter it.
We don't need to ask the government to punish everyone participating in cryptocurrency.
Perhaps we should consider higher-order consequences of doing absolutely nothing. Hypothetically, what happens if free-to-use code collaboration tools are forced out of the market due to rampant abuse and zero regulation? Do we care that there is now a higher barrier of entry to engage in the craft?
Do you want GitHub to start requiring state-issued identification for creating new accounts? That is where this cat-mouse game is going to end up if you allow it to continue naturally.
Don't imagine that GitHub cares about lowering barriers to entry as an end in itself.
It does this as a means to pursue GitHub's business interests.
With credit systems we can have progressive rates i.e food can be a priority while VR and cryto can subsidize carbon neutral transition.
You’re not wrong, Walter.
It may be thin, but it covers most people. Most crypto buyers use fiat exchanges. If those were ruled out, the monetary value of tokens would go down, and with it the mining incentives would lower. It wouldn't be the end of crypto, but it would alleviate many issues (energy, hardware shortage, etc).
PS: I don't think crypto is the only reason for GPU shortage (others being more demand from stay-at-home people, and general semiconductor shortages), but I believe it plays a part.
Then why are only GPUs unavailable?
We can still easily buy CPUs, memory, SSDs, etc.
Because they're harder to build, and there is some serious HPC capacity is being built up right now around the world, which buys these chips buy thousands.
Same entities which hoard Tesla GPUs are not interested in unregistered RAM, consumer SSDs and CPUs. Unfortunately, a run of the mill Tesla is not much different from a GeForce. OTOH, RAM, CPU and SSD for these applications are built from different parts.
Gamers in western countries have to pay slightly higher prices for their high end gaming GPUs. Excuse me while I clutch my pearls!
The cavalier attitude people have about this tech is really disheartening to see.
It may aspire to be/do these things, and that's great, but that’s not the present reality.
What Bitcoin provides is sound money with a fixed predictable supply not at the whims of politicians and fed officials. There is no way to increase the supply of Bitcoin by 23% like we had with the us dollar over the last year
Being "at the whims of politicians and fed officials" seems in practice to provide much better stability than being at the whims of a horde of reddit "investors" (or a cabal of Chinese miners).
Not to mention almost everyone I know who "invests" in crypto does so "at the whims of politicians and fed officials." SEC rulings and the likes.
How many monkey butlers will there be?
> What Bitcoin provides is sound money with a fixed predictable supply not at the whims of politicians and fed officials.
A naturally deflationary currency is such a bad idea that every single country went away from them in a fairly short time period.
This is across the board, not just for high-end cards.
Newegg has a total of one graphics card released in the past 5 years in stock that it sells directly (https://www.newegg.com/p/1DW-001Z-00042), a RX 550 going for $200 (plus $8 shipping) -- the 2GB model launched at a MSRP of $79; I assume the 4GB model's MSRP would be somewhere between that and the $99 MSRP of the RX 560.
The rest of the items for sale are third parties which are often no-name brands/shippers from China (e.g. Yeston which seems to have lackluster reviews about short warranty and sloppy build quality, Corn which has many horror stories about shipping delays or just missing products), and all have similarly drastically hiked prices. Next cheapest card shipped from the US is a 560 at $279+15.
The 550 is by no means a high-end gaming GPU, nor was it when it came out.
No one has a claim on any one product such that they can demand the destruction of something millions of people find value in and that has a market value of a trillion dollars so you can have your GPU return to a price in the past that they found reasonable
I think the root cause is because it's conflated with bitcoin and the PoW system it's built on top of, which is generally considered to be unproductive. Take away PoW, and you remove the incentives for miners to suck up vast amounts of electricity, the supply of graphics cards, probably even infrastructure hijacks to some point.
(And yes, I understand that the graphic card shortage is more strongly tied to Ethereum's ASIC-resistant hash. But that's still a PoW system.)
So it's not fair to look at pure energy used by the Bitcoin network as though its some fungible limited supply that we can just move away from Bitcoin production and move to Texas during the winter storm.
Regarding carbon emission, that's a political problem. If you want to create a tax on carbon, you can do that, although I'd prefer carbon capture tech. But in no way should some governing body try to allocate the validity of carbon emissions based on purpose. That would be no different than central planning where some central authority determines how many X should be produced, when and where. It's been tried and failed.
But look at the point of PoW and the purpose of crypto. Its sound money and has value, and an expense to maintain. Whats the alternative? Create a currency with a trusted central bank, and build an army to defend your organization when someone uses your currency to "fund terrorism"? I imagine there's CO2 emissions w/ maintaining an army as well
The new kind of "geek" in the opposite of the traditional "geek" who was a libertarian / pro freedom.
My guess is that most geeks can't afford to bite the hand that feeds them (google/facebook/twitter...) so they decided to loudly proclaim their allegiance to modern values (environmentalism/social justice/wokeness in general)
> There were leftists among geeks the whole time
Clearly a much smaller proportion.
> The environmentalism and the desire for justice is a genuinely held belief of many scientific oriented people of a humanist bent
Is it not interesting in how this is a new social good, especially for geeks working for large corporations in California?
I believe all behavior is based in self preservation: it would be career suicide for a young googler to be part of the christian right, or pro Trump, or try to pull off a Damore like memo.
So I am not surprise they do not bite the hand that feed. I am only surprised in the convoluted rationalization they engage in, instead of being more honest (at least online where they can be anonymous) and say "I pretend I'm woke because I like my job because I like the money and status it gets me"
The reason why so-called Christians are unpopular is because they are seen as public hypocrites; rather than follow Jesus and condemn praying in public, and instead helping the poor, the widows, and the orphans, they seem to spend their energy seemingly endorsing superstitious racialist ideas that were clearly un-Godly 100 years ago.
Those ideas are horrid and they are rejected because they are horrid. Not because Google is pushing an agenda of the sacredness of all human beings, a mirror of the image of God no matter what history they walked to get here.
And the environmental movement is just the same as the people saying “there is a flood coming from the blocked sewer drain, let’s go unblock it.” The anti-environmentalists are the people saying, naw, don’t worry about it.
So the purpose of cryptocurrency here is to enable people to evade the laws of the society in which they live? Not sure I can regard that as a "legitimate use case".
I do not care about that part, but massive amount of scams around BTC and similar is fueling my growing dislike.
As a moderator on small forum most of the work is blocking cryptocurrency scammers.
The saddest part is that apparently they steal enough money to keep their crime profitable.
What is cash? Paper? Ink? Currency isn't defined by what it's made of.
> there just happen to be transactions on a distributed network, with some people knowing private keys to generate new transactions
Transactions in which digital tokens are exchanged for goods, services, or other currencies, and the recipient of the tokens generally receives no benefit other than the ability to trade those tokens again.
Cryptocurrencies are recognizable by the way they are used.
I have long maintained that cryptocurrencies aren't property: they're speech.
As others said, the answer here is Proof of Stake, not banning crypto outright.
Is it that they are global and decentralized that made them just not take a stance on them, also the same reason it obviously would easily and quickly gain popularity as a global, decentralized MLM-Ponzi structure?
Making something illegal won't stop it from happening. Just because tech can be used for bad purposes doesn't mean you have to or will have any effectiveness in banning it. See encryption.
It's such a lazy take, ignores the freedom aspect and goes for convenience and feels like a concern troll, honestly.
But in the case of cryptocurrency, putting impediments in the way of exchanging it back and forwards with 'fiat' would significantly impact its appeal and demand. Could they stop it entirely? Probably not. Would it stop most people who only care about the easy profit potential and don't care about the idealogy? Probably.