Bill aims to halt Bitcoin mining until its environmental impact can be assessed
markets.businessinsider.com
markets.businessinsider.com
If the price of electricity produced by e.g. coal plants doesn’t include externalities then we need to fix that. But it shouldn’t matter whether this power is used by a Bitcoin miner or an aluminum smelter.
Seems like censorship-happy people are creating a new weapon. Be careful when supporting measures like this.
I’m also pretty burned out on all the crypto fans warning of a slippery slope to tyranny if crypto is not allowed to operate in a libertarian free market. Come on. Not everything is a road to tyranny. We live in a state of laws and sometimes those laws impact you. It doesn’t mean that’s you’re the victim of the early stages of a fascist regime. It’s childish to think so, in my opinion.
Financial transactions/trade is the most honest form of communication. Bitcoin enables unrestricted financial transactions aka free speech.
We rely on markets for information.
Falsely signaling to market participants demand for 1M sheep through a financial transaction costs you the price of 1M sheep. It is the most honest form of communication because the penalty for false/dishonest signaling is built in.
My point is that there's not much value in this honesty beyond the efficiency of markets. It can't be used to express complex ideas, to make logical proofs, or create art. It may be honest, but it is not truthful.
Moreover, though communication in free markets is honest, it does not constitute "speech" in the sense of free speech. It is what it is: trade. Not all actions, even if the action expresses the actor's unique will, are speech.
Markets should not be optimized on the idea that participating in them is speaking freely. Free enterprise is its own good, separate from free speech, and with its own ends. Confusing the two grants undue protections to those with the ability to "speak" loudest via a financial transaction. Confusing the two allows us to turn our political civitas into a parody of a free market, openly allowing the will of public officers to be bought by the "speech" of the rich.
So I must disagree with your assessment.
You're making a claim that something predicated on everyone wasting tons of power to do hashing that just gets thrown away when the first person nails it and starts propagating, and all of that per 100 or so transactions, with at max maybe two to three dozen servers per bank, with full capability to reverse, adjust, reconcile, chargeback, so on, and so forth.
So no.
No, they won't shut down traditional financial processing. They don't need to.
The anti-car movement is truly insufferable, because, at least online, it seems it's mostly spearheaded by people from Europe who have never seen how spread-out America is. I'm not about to bike 30 miles each way to work every day, rain or shine, and yet I get looked at as the villain for suggesting people stop going outside when the weather sucks.
Rant over. I hate people.
That is enormous.
All other things you mentioned deliver real value for much much less.
And btc is not yet even used practically in any real world scenario in any relevant scale
Same applies to indoor cannabis growing power consumption.
So utterly and hopelessly dishonest
A lot of people have scratched their heads about Elon's backing of cryptocurrency while at the same time apparently being concerned about climate change.
What if it actually does make sense? What if increasing energy demand actually will help transition toward lower carbon emissions?
When demand is stable or falling, industries become very conservative. Why invest in anything new if demand is static? Just run that old clunky coal burner plant as long as possible.
But if demand is rising you have to expand. That means deploying new stuff. What new stuff do you build now? Well there's gas, which is mostly lower carbon than coal, but most new capacity being built is solar and wind. So you build that, then you build storage to back it.
Once that's done, then why invest more money in stringing along those ancient coal burners?
If you create net new demand then fill it with renewables you haven't reduced emissions at all because the coal plants are still running.
In theory, higher demand can make new tech cheaper due to economy of scale but the effect isn't linear; it's probably like an S-curve. Where are renewables on that scale? Are they already large enough that diminishing returns are kicking in? How much crypto energy demand would move renewable costs? Would it need to be 10% of existing usage? Higher? Lower?
I mean, what matters is whether replacing the entire financial system with Bitcoin would produce more emissions through mining than the system currently does.
Bitcoin is the settlement layer, tools built on top of it (like 2nd/3rd layer tech that can achieve 100K-1M+ transactions per second) require very little additional energy.
There is a non-zero possibility that the public's perception of coal power plants being associated with Bitcoin mining increases to a point where the support to ban coal power plants reaches an actionable threshold. Consider who benefits from delivering a setback to Bitcoin and see if they enter the arena of public opinion on this issue.
He is definitely egotistical but he obviously has more complex motives.
And frankly, he would not be the richest person on Earth if finance was where the sweet old money is.