Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Government is made out of people. If the people don't want the economy oriented around energy being put into finding hashes, they have the right to vote.

View on HN

People are made out of opinions. If they don't like the way others are voting, they have the right to convince others of theirs.

Which is to say, discussing on HN is a valid way to contribute your opinion to society. Voting is not your only voice.

So why does the buck stop with government then? If enough of us agree that a law should be passed then why not just pass the law? Seems way easier to just make a rule than try to individually convince everyone.

It's an eventually sort-of-consistent system with a lot of buffering and delay.

if enough people agree that a law should be passed, and it's a high enough priority, and the opinion stays that way for a long time, then eventually enough politicians get on board by virtue of pressure from their voting base, and a law gets passed.

It's not great.

But on the other hand, near-immediate direct democracy is also not great, because it leads to knee-jerk reactions causing laws put in place. I'm thinking of stuff like the USAPATRIOT Act, except worse.

The government is made out of people and if history has taught us anything, power corrupts those people. Income inequality has only risen since the last financial crisis. Decentralization of money is the whole point of this exercise, and many believe Proof of Work is superior to Proof of Stake because work is actually scarce. Once you make it cheap to transact, that opens up all sorts of attacks (spam, phishing) and devaluation. Since PoS can be copied very easily, many corrupt governments will do just that.

But this isn't proposed regulation to prevent an "economy oriented around energy being put into finding hashes".

It's literally regulation to stop "Proof of work". Which is a generic algorithm that can be applied to other circumstances.

It could have applications in CAPTCHA's, or anti-spam.

It could be a critical component of other decentralized technologies, not just blockchain crypto currencies.

Making this math illegal JUST to kill cyptocurrencies seems a tad much, right?

Proof of Work used for decentralized consensus is maximally wasteful by design. It has to be a race to burn more resources than anyone else can. It's unfixable.

Governments already have regulations for energy efficiency, waste and pollution, and for most things it's possible to negotiate reasonable limits.

For PoW it's not possible. If you put an upper limit on its wastefulness, it'll be a limit on its security. Even if we had a Dyson Sphere, PoW would eventually eat more than half of it just to be secure.

Isn't proof-of-work intrinsically wasteful though, as a proxy for costing money (e.g. instead of paying money directly for the right to mine BTC, you buy electricity and burn it)? In any context other than cryptocurrencies it seems like microtransactions would be a better choice.

> Government is made out of people.

Maybe in theory but in actuality it is comprised of moneyed interests which is why it needs to be limited to preserve the freedom of the people.

So there's no bounds as to what government should be able to do, ethically or legally?

Obviously the people want to put energy towards finding hashes or they wouldn't be doing it. What you're advocating for is a minority of people who actually vote to influence the government to send people with guns to stop the actions of people who are voting with their labor.

There will come a time when people like you -- who play God over others -- are ousted from society.

"The people" who do it are less than 1% of "the people" a government represents.

There are already laws in most countries forbidding you to litter, and you would never call that "playing God" - it just happens that littering with crypto mining is a multi billion dollar industry.

I do call it playing God. In California there are laws against littering and they are not enforced. You cannot regulate change into the hearts of men.

That's like saying people shouldn't try to ban meth because meth cooks are working hard.

It's just not a realistic outlook on how typical people want society to function. Most people do not believe PoW cryptocurrency is important to society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com