We have banned a ton of things because they are bad for the environment. It has worked and will continue to work. Things like building design and construction standards are set to a minimum environmental standard, why shouldn't cryptocurrencies.
i find views that want to ban anything for energy consumption ridiculous. also what the people advocating for this kind of thing are missing is that it’s all fun and games until something you rely gets banned because of reasons.
here are my proposals:
the entire banking system is obviously using a lot of power. how about we ban banks and go back to using paper money. that’s def more environmental friendly. /s
electric cars run on energy that’s generated with coal. that’s not cool. let’s ban electric cars and keep driving gas cars. they have been around for a long time and the technology is so good that we actually pollute less with a gas car /s
the internet in general and datacenters in particular are using a lot of power. let’s ban datacenters. guaranteed between environment afterwards /s
Also "until something you rely gets banned", what do you rely on bitcoin for besides being a store of value?
my point is that you don’t get to decide what i consume. and banning bitcoin == banning any type of computing that you don’t like. do you understand how much power a modern datacenter sucks? do you also understand that some things that run in a datacenter are straight up dangerous to the fabric of our society?
I am not making any decisions about your consumption. Our democratically elected government is responsible for making the best choices that balance our societal needs. Our government already regulates a lot of things around computing: Child porn/CSAM, export controls around cryptography, data privacy, the computer fraud and abuse act. This isn't novel stuff, having a computer doesn't mean you can do literally anything on it with zero consequences.
democracy? data privacy? thanks for the good laugh
By optimizing around energy conservation at all costs, we have homes that cost 3x, held together with glue, susceptible to mold, and filled with toxic crap like vinyl.
That you only use it to watch videos that bring zero gain to your life is a You problem.
"the internet uses 10% of the total electricity consumption worldwide. How much of that is consumed by Youtube? After Netflix and embedded videos, Youtube is the third biggest global internet bandwidth eater. About 11.4% of global internet traffic is consumed by Youtube"
That figure assumes that the electricity usage of the internet is exactly related to the amount of bandwidth - so if YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total bandwidth, that means that YouTube uses 11.4% of the internet's total electricity consumption.
That is a highly dubious assumption.
VS
An estimate of Bitcoin power consumption by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.
I know which one I’m more prepared to believe.
Even if this were true. I go on YouTube and can learn things: recipes, FreeCad tutorials, coffee nerdery, harmonica lessons.
Bitcoin literally does nothing.
The virtue of energy use argument is just dumb.
As far as I can tell PoW is the most proven consensus mechanism so far. PoS may be promising though. ETH2 successfully switching will be telling.
Electricity is a commodity and a utility. Who are you or I to subjectively decide that a use is valuable or virtuous?
Is YouPorn worthy? Is MLB.tv valuable? What are the criteria that you use to determine worth?
Yes because people like porn and baseball.
Bitcoin is like gold. It’s valuable because other people say it’s valuable. But nothing useful happens when you mine crypto. Was I entertained? Did I learn something? Are they producing a widget? Even gold can be made into jewellery or used in electronics. Crypto literally just uses power.
Except make those little pieces of green paper in your wallet look foolish.
By enabling ransom ware attacks? Creating GPU shortages?
You're advocating for violence against people who do things you don't like. Use your wallet and leave other people alone.
Oh give over, this is ridiculous too.
When other people are causing harm that affects everyone it's perfectly reasonable to look at legislation to kerb the behaviours.
And no, that's not violence. No.