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Comment by helmholtz | Hacker News Reader

Why do HN comment threads always end up as Pedantry Pageants where all ye who dare comment must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child comment about failing to do so. It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring. It always follows the same pattern too. "Where do you draw the line?" "Who decides what's the truth?" Always the same fucking slippery slope fallacy. Every fucking time "Regulations" of any kind come up. I think the HN audience wears Being Anal as a kind of badge of honour.

To paraphrase Alan Watts slightly, do you know of a law that set everything to right? Let's just all sit around twiddling our thumbs eh? Since you obviously didn't really offer a counter solution.

View on HN

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Perhaps it's not idle pedantry to observe that many of those who are angry about crypto energy usage couldn't care less about the energy wasted and pollution generated by other endeavors.

It's like an uncle of mine who is outraged that mosques get tax exemptions, but he doesn't care that churches get tax exemptions.

Clearly tax policy isn't a genuine concern for him. He's angry about something else that he won't say out loud.

Fair enough. I love this orange website, but I also despise it. Flying off the handle is rarely a sensible solution.

To your point, though, I'm willing to wager that most of the people whose biggest problem with crypto is energy consumption would happily also support other harsh measures against all manner of pollution generating entities. I know I would.

A pollution tax is really the only viable solution though. Playing whack a mole against individual entities and activities will never solve the problem, and creates a lot of legislation.

So long as pollution and carbon are free or cheap, people will find wasteful ways to generate it.

Incentives work, and taxing carbon and pollution will incentive green alternatives.

a pollution tax will not work. That just becomes the price of doing business and that cost is factored into other areas of the business model. Even worse, it just gives more capital to inefficient governments

> That just becomes the price of doing business and that cost is factored into other areas of the business model.

Yah that's the point and business with less environmental impact will be more competitive. Industries/products with more of an impact will be more expensive, reflecting their true cost.

> Even worse, it just gives more capital to inefficient governments

Most pollution/carbon taxes are proposed to be revenue neutral, i.e. all the proceeds are returned to the tax base. This is also important because like other (non-luxury) consumption taxes, a carbon tax is regressive.

I have a few disagreements with the MMT crowd, but on this one point they are transparently correct: the exact level of taxation has little relationship to government ability to spend. Talk of "giving more capital" to governments shows a deep misunderstanding about the nature of fiscal constraints.

> other areas of the business model

And what are those? District heating?

It becomes the cost of doing dirty business.

Solar is taking off not because we banned coal, but because it's cheaper than coal. If coal and natural gas were taxed according to their carbon output, solar would be even more ahead, nuclear may become more attractive as well.

Aluminum is heavily recycled not because it's green, but because it's significantly cheaper than mining new.

Incentives work. The free market responds to incentives, and works around regulations.

In the specific case of proof-of-work cryptocurrency, I don’t think a carbon tax is directly useful: If it’s unilateral then mining trivially shifts across borders; if it’s global then it’s an inflationary pressure on the coin price which offsets the reduction in mining you might otherwise expect.

> Perhaps it's not idle pedantry to observe that many of those who are angry about crypto energy usage couldn't care less about the energy wasted and pollution generated by other endeavors.

Have you observed this, or are you simply speculating?

Was thinking the same thing... There's no evidence I can see to suggest the parent is not also against other forms of excessive energy consumption.

There's a hidden subjective value judgment built into the word "excessive" that's doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. These "regulation" comments tend to have a high likelihood of boiling down "I want the government to stop things I don't like", where environmental concerns (crypto) or data collection (adtech) is a mere pretense grounded in incomplete information at best, emotion at worst.

Personally speaking I find it just as irritating of a pattern here that knee-jerk calls for "regulation" (i.e. bring in the coercive power of the state) or outright banning are so often floated as a/the solution to every problem. When legal coercion is suggested, it is entirely proper to bring up the existence of the dragons that lay down that road.

I want the government to look seriously at things that are using the energy footprint of a mid-sized country simply to spin up a new financial instrument. Particularly when there appear to be equivalent things that don't.

If cryptocurrencies didn't have the energy footprint, I would find them pretty uninteresting and/or ridiculous for various reasons, but ultimately it wouldn't bother me that people do what they do with them. When they start adding seriously to the global energy load in a time of climate crisis that makes them pretty offensive.

it's not simply a "new financial instrument", it's a whole ecossystem

I don't know whether you're referring to me or some of the other replies, but I am definitely against most forms of excessive energy consumption if they can be avoided.

> Perhaps it's not idle pedantry to observe that many of those who are angry about crypto energy usage couldn't care less about the energy wasted and pollution generated by other endeavors.

I don't think that's correct. I think that it's possible to care about both, but to be dismissive of misdirecting subject changes, i.e. "whataboutism".

So you answered his complaint about the use of "slippery slope fallacy" by deploying the "whatabout" fallacy and created a strawman.

Nicely done, nicely done.

I wish there was a better name for an "order of magnitude fallacy" (but given Roman numerals I can understand why they probably didn't have a fun Latin name for an order of magnitude problem), because we seem to be seeing them all the time right now.

Industrial production of greenhouse gases is nearly an order of magnitude larger than consumer production, but often inordinately the "guilt" burden is pushed to the consumers: Do you have an EV? Have you changed all your light bulbs to more efficient LEDs? Are you Vegan enough?

Here too: Bitcoin alone has risen to an order (or three) of magnitude more energy consumption than Facebook could ever use/do ever use to track people. (Cumulative, the rest of cryptocurrencies only further dwarf Facebook's comparative energy costs.) We can be angry about two things, we can be angry at both, but why can't we discuss the bigger problem first without getting into the weeds of all the smaller problems?

(And of course, the two order of magnitude problems above are inextricably linked: Bitcoin is on track to make many industrial users of electricity look like chumps and dwarf them by an order of magnitude. Nearly all of the consumer-side gains from veganism, LED lightbulbs, EVs has been offset again, if not entirely dwarfed, by cryptocurrency mining.)

People are bad at reasoning things at large enough scales, have a hard time gut understanding order of magnitude problems, so the fallacies keep creeping up, and keep getting weaponized by bad agents (the consumer "green guilt", the consumer "recycling guilt", so many other "demand-side fallacies" that if consumers just bought "smarter", problems would just go away, when really it's the suppliers that are in control).

https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/ << This is the seminal essay on this subject, IMHO.

What is a fair method for determining the amount of acceptable energy for a cryptocurrency or a social network to use?

It seems like you implicitly draw the 'fair' line between FB and BTC.

BTC's market cap is roughly equal to Facebooks. If a POW coin used facebook levels of energy at the same value, would you find that acceptable?

I'm not setting any line here. I'm saying that we could worry about the big problem first without immediately deciding where any "line" needs to be drawn. I'm saying it doesn't matter which side of the "line" Facebook falls on because we could start with the biggest problems first, then circle back to Facebook when it's top of the list (not a whopping log_10 of at least 2 (!) difference from the current worst offenders, such as BTC).

I don't get why anglophones are so obsessed with these "drawing lines" and "moving posts", particularly on recent years. What lines are these exactly? What posts? This is very bad heuristics, actually.

> why can't we discuss the bigger problem first without getting into the weeds of all the smaller problems?

People seem to be intentionally conflating some things. A carbon tax is nice precisely because it avoids getting into weeds and is a general approach that applies equally to everything. Some people are proposing this and others are saying "don't get caught up in the weeds." What? Makes no sense. It just reinforces the poster's point: that some people's real motivation doesn't seem to be environmental, there's a strange focus on crypto specifically that makes it seem like they want it to be reigned in for other reasons.

General solutions are great, but when there's a noticeable log_10 distinction between two examples given, why can't we start at dealing with specific solutions to the biggest problem first and worry about the general approach later? It's a 99%/1% problem: we'd potentially get a huge savings if we dealt with the 99% of cases first and worried about the 1% later.

The raw statistics already tell a story that the difference between "BTC" and "Facebook" is greatly exponential. Wanting to focus first on the (much) bigger exponent isn't necessarily a sign that people's real motivation is "conspiratorial" against crypto.

Because an outright ban is misguided anyway. PoW systems incentivize renewable R&D and investment. If you just straight-up make it illegal, you kill a major driving force of change for the better. If you restrict carbon output instead, you just further challenge the industry to find a way to work inside those bounds, allowing creativity and positive externalities to continue to develop.

There was an article just the other day of a coal plant that was entirely restarted for PoW coin mining. PoW systems are not proven to incentivize renewable energy R&D and investment. There's no proven link there. There's no proof that a PoW coin ban would "kill a major driving force of change for the better". Sure, a restriction on carbon output would be such a driving force, but there is no such restriction today and it is wishful thinking to believe that PoW miners are following anything like one in a market where such externalities continue to be unregulated.

It is orthogonal to the issue at hand that PoW is using far too much energy per transaction/per capita/per GDP/per most metrics you want to point to. Not using the energy in the first place is always going to be greener, no matter how much PoW systems invest in renewables and their R&D! I can't see that as "misguided". An outright ban would get immediate results versus a carbon output tax would incentivize eventual results, maybe. That's not misguided, that's just a different perspective, and a different preference on an ideal time window to address the situation versus wishful thinking and "golly gee, sure hope the market eventually figures it out someday".

How is comparing Bitcoin's energy usage with other endeavors an "order of magnitude fallacy"?

Gold mining uses something like 140 terawatt-hours of energy annually, and produces enormous pollution and environmental destruction in addition to that.

That's greater than Bitcoin's energy usage.

Since gold mining is so much more harmful to the environment, maybe we should outlaw that first before we work on smaller problems.

> Gold mining uses something like 140 terawatt-hours of energy annually, and produces enormous pollution and environmental destruction in addition to that.

The most apropos commentary in this entire thread yet.

> That's greater than Bitcoin's energy usage.

For now. Gold's been around for centuries, Bitcoin not even for two decades. It's got a momentum that Bitcoin may or may not match in the future.

> How is comparing Bitcoin's energy usage with other endeavors an "order of magnitude fallacy"?

The "other endeavors" category above was "digital endeavours" and specifically "Bitcoin versus Facebook", which is an order of magnitude difference.

You've introduced an entirely different category from the above discussion. It's maybe an interesting category [1] to discuss elsewhere, but is off topic from the fallacy we were discussing. Thanks for the non-sequitur, though.

[1] Personally, I'm not so sure it's a useful counter-comparison to Bitcoin: Gold is used in electronics and other industrial needs, beyond its service as a value store/commodity of interest to collectors. Gold is also increasingly rarely the "primary" focus of mines. Most of our Gold today comes from Copper mines and very few would argue we are mining Copper as a value store/solely for greed.

> Why do HN comment threads always end up as Pedantry Pageants where all ye who dare comment must address all the fucking edge cases

Gold mining isn't a fucking edge case if it uses more energy and produces far more environmental damage.

According to the principle you described, Bitcoin is the edge case we should ignore until we solve the gold mining problem.

Gold mining isn't even an edge case in that specific example when the class of problem is explicitly defined as "What digital services use too much energy?" as it had been in the above conversation. Is Gold a digital service? No. Is Gold Mining wasteful? Perhaps. (Though again, as an aside, the better question with specific respect to Gold is: Is Copper Mining wasteful? Most gold is mined as a by product of copper mining.)

It's not an edge case of the "electric waste of Digital Services", because it is an entirely different problem. So not only do we have "pedantry pageants" of edge cases, but we get to address the "pedantry pageants" of all the unrelated but seemingly related problems too?

not to mention human exploitation and harsh working conditions, particularly on illegal gold mines

Are there any estimates of how much power crypto mining has consumed and how much running all of the Facebook/Instagram/whatever servers has consumed?

Best i found for Bitcoin was 40-100 TWh per year: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

And for Facebook it appeared that they used 5140 GWh in 2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-fac...

So essentially:

  Entity    Consumption (GWh)
  Facebook   5 140
  Bitcoin   40 000 - 100 000

I wouldn't have expected Facebook to consume comparatively so little energy, if i'm doing conversions right.

The argument stands for itself. If your uncle gave a good argument against tax exemptions, it's a good argument for tax exemptions. Just pretend somebody else gave it that doesn't have the same alterior motive.

Attacking the motive or whatever is not said out loud is responding to a weaker interpretation

This is not an edge case at all. Who is to decide on what to spend energy or not? This is curing the symptoms only.

The (counter) solution is not to discuss for what to burn coal, but to finally stop burning coal, oil and gas. USA and EU could do that within a few years. And then stop or tax imports from countries that still do burn coal.

But that is inconvenient for many, so they prefer discussing nerdy Bitcoin PoW instead.

I mean, thank you for offering the alternative solution! I couldn't agree more that not burning coal is the only ultimate solution. A severe, possibly overly severe, Carbon tax is maybe the way. But as the great Stephen Schneider once quoted some other great, "Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good". And he was talking about cap and trade vs carbon tax!

The real reason is twofold, first and more importantly, because you don't know the unintended consequences of proposing something like that. Who knows what else would get caught between the regulatory framework needed to prevent someone from doing math, because let's face it, that is impossible so unintended consequences will be the only consequences.

And secondly and most importantly, the government should not decide what products are allowed to be traded: Governments should lift all bans on products currently banned, all drugs, all books, all music, all banned clothing, etc.

You do realize that while sunlight and wind are renewable, lithium-ion batteries are not, right? Nor are solar panels. Cadmium and lithium are highly toxic materials we must mine, just like coal. They have the benefit of not directly adding CO2 to the atmosphere as you use them -- but they come with their own set of issues. There is no free lunch. POW is Proof of Waste, and we shouldn't be blithely wasting any of these non-renewables.

> stop burning coal, oil and gas. USA and EU could do that within a few years.

Is there a concrete plan for how this would work documented somewhere? The ways I can think of doing this in the USA are all politically nonviable.

"politically nonviable"

Which makes it a self-inflicted injury. Like corruotion in Russia - it can't be adressed by anyone else.

Electricity produced in France by coal + gas + oil is around 8% (vs. 70% nuclear, 10% hydro, the rest is wind + solar + bio-energy). It took more than "a few years" to build, though.

If you think the US and EU could completely stop burning coal, oil, and gas in a few years (less than 10?), you must know something no one else knows, or this plan involves a lot of dead people. But I'd love to hear more about it.

Agree. Wasting energy on bitcoin isn't the problem, energy production causing earth to heat up is the problem.

I can think of many things equally or similarly energy wasteful as Bitcoin.

What is something more wasteful than Bitcoin?

It's a nondescript pollution factory from the Captain Planet cartoons.

Every other wasteful activity has just been overconsumptive, decadent, or externalized, not an actual burning of resources for no reason.

What things are similarly energy wasteful as Bitcoin?

American SUVs and trucks come to mind. We can for now ignore the wooden, uninsulated houses built in the desert with the AC on for 6-9 months of the year.

Yes. The weird thing about bitcoin is that at least mining it doesn't create additional waste products.

If you spent the same energy used to mine bitcoin on producing Legos or In-N-Out burgers, then you'd have much bigger problems.

Like lawns. We seriously use way too much water, chemicals, energy and time on a plant crop that is basically only for our visual enjoyment. We often think of the big fixes, which are needed, where there are some low hanging fruit we could pick first that would make an impact.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/06/04/the-problem-of-...

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practic...

> so they prefer discussing nerdy Bitcoin PoW instead

Why not both?

I don't think it's useful to spin up nuclear reactors to run Bitcoin PoW either.

All energy production will have an environmental cost, not just carbon dioxide emitting ones.

Because this is a website full of engineers who write computer software for a living? And finding and solving for those edge cases is literally a core function of what most of us spend the majority of both our work and leisure time doing?

To me the big gripe is not the concern for edge cases but the immediate dismissal of a very productive first step in addressing an issue by resolving the entire conversation before it even happens.

It is very possible to bring up edge cases in a productive manner. Expand the conversation to include them. there's no need to assume the first solution idea posted is meant to be the final form

Making this change would introduce an enormously impactful precedent. Politicians might take it and run with it to places we don't even want to imagine. I'd agree with you in a world without the current style of politics and decision making, but that's not where we live - and sadly alternative to that is unknown to me too.

But is it even a productive first step? There are arguments to be made that proof-of-work mining incentivizes renewable R&D.

By banning that because it uses "too much" energy now - what are we potentially losing? What developments in renewables, energy storage, or grid development simply won't be there, which we won't know we don't have, because we banned the largest for-profit, skin-in-the-game competitive contest for low-cost energy that the world had ever seen 25 years prior?

Banning it outright is short-sighted. Thinking about it from a higher level is a way of addressing the real issue of carbon emissions while allowing a phenomenon that has the potential to massively help, not hurt, to thrive.

The desire for energy is near limitless - PoW simply bends the curve upward. As the price of BTC increases, the drive for less costly energy slackens off.

The issue is clearly a tragedy of the commons - the cost (higher air pollution/higher energy costs) is socialized, while the profits are centralized. So the maximization function is cheap >>> anything else. Why wouldn't we expect more and larger coal plants versus research into fusion reactors?

That's only true so long as the price continually rises. As soon as the price settles, everyone is operating on the margin and can only become more profitable by reducing costs.

Unsubsidized renewables are already the cheapest new source of energy generation. [0] Even if miners wouldn't be doing direct renewable research themselves, their capital investments into renewables in the name of competition and cost-savings would incentivize more efficient technologies.

In this case the immediate marginal profits from mining are centralized, and the larger benefits of more advanced renewable energy are socialized.

Plus - do you believe that the price of Bitcoin will rise forever? If it did, wouldn't that mean to you that it might be doing something important, to constantly have growth and demand for 100 years? Cuz if I thought so then I'd want to preserve it, not throw it away. Sounds important.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/06/15/renewa...

Bitcoin isn't the only option. We've already seen that when the price of Bitcoin dips miners flip over to whatever cryptocoin seems next to bubble, seems next most interesting. Certainly what is called Bitcoin itself (today) has "hard" "deflationary" "caps", but as soon as miners get bored with that, there's always more room for more forks and other coins.

Even if Bitcoin isn't intended to be "growing forever", the ecosystem can and will.

> The desire for energy is near limitless - PoW simply bends the curve upward. As the price of BTC increases, the drive for less costly energy slackens off.

Shameless hijacking here: at what point will the heat consumption/release rate be so great that the Earth becomes unable to support life? I've seen some back of the napkin calculations that estimate a couple hundred years, at our current acceleration.

IIRC (it has been a few years), we only need a few degrees to reach a tipping point. The decay of methane hydrates could push out 1000 GT CO2 equivalent suddenly, accelerating warming by roughly ~40-50 years.

Making renewables isn't actually useful if they're used for something we don't even need to do. We could switch to a low-energy crypto currency and do all the things we were going to do with Bitcoin.

Lighting all the oil and gas in the world on fire will also incentivize renewables. But that's not a good practice for a lot of reasons including increasing the pollution and CO2 levels.

Then offer a counter solution, that you think is better and defend it.

Don't just sit around making the same useless attacks against other people's arguments.

Instead, offer a different proposal and explain why it is better.

CO2 tax.

I'm a software engineer, and I'm probably at least in the 90th percentile for ability to manage (or design not to have) edge cases. I try not to be that pedantic when criticizing coworker's designs, other than perhaps pointing out that lots of edge cases in a design is a common symptom of over-complexity.

On this particular topic, I particularly hate the amount of fossil fuels getting burned on cryptocurrency. I'm less concerned about the amount of energy getting "wasted" on data centers in general. At least in most cases, there's alignment of interests when it comes to efficiency optimization. Facebook has an incentive to make their servers more power efficient over time, and scale their capacity to the size of their customer base. With proof-of-work, there's also incentive to increase power efficiency, but also incentive to scale up to capacity limits.

I think it is possible that proof-of-work cryptocurrency algorithms could be tuned to the point of striking a sustainable balance long term, but that would require the world economy to converge on one or two of them. The issue with that I think is the speculative nature of the currency's distribution of ownership. With large portions of the currency being held by a small number of anonymous people, and no clear path for the majority of normal folk to exchange their wealth, it's just not going to happen without some sort of societal collapse. I also struggle to have faith in a system meant to disrupt the global economy when its existence depends on global scale internet infrastructure.

It's not pedantry, it's calling out issues in armchair proposals. "Why not regulate" and "Why not let the market sort itself out" are kinda intellectually lazy propositions: there are good regulations and bad regulations, and good and bad implementations.

And banning isn't really a proper solution in the first place. It's a literal avenue for tax revenue for countries at this point. The fact that PoS coins like Cardano and L2 solutions like Polygon are bullish despite the crash in Bitcoin shows something about investor sentiment surrounding the whole energy consumption ordeal. Voting with your wallet is a real possible solution and IMHO, people are starting to take the hint.

I don’t understand why you don’t find these “where do you draw the line?” inquiries extremely relevant to this conversation. It seems like everyone here has just assumed that Bitcoin is useless and therefore the externalities from its energy usage should be unacceptable. Personally I’m not a big fan of bitcoin’s energy usage either, but it strikes me as bizarre to recommend banning arbitrary things that use energy rather than, for example, addressing the externality problem directly.

I wouldn't say OP recommended banning anything 'arbitrary'. It was very relevant to the discussion to state that the ban should be on proof-of-work currencies.

Here's my issue. There is such a thing as too-late in environmental matters. Once it's too late, it's a fire that sustains itself. Therefore, acting quickly matters. Addressing the source directly is obviously the superior solution. But I just don't see it happening at a fast enough rate. I see nuclear power in the same way. Yes, it's a little bit of trading one problem for the next, but it's a very necessary stop gap to buy us time.

Because banning outright is stupid, and banning a technology is even stupider. Technologies have both benefits and drawbacks. TAX (not ban) the drawbacks.

In this case, tax carbon. Then people will decide what they want to spend their (expensive) energy on.

I'm actually hopeful that crypto will bring about a carbon tax. I figure the people getting rich in crypto are a different set of people than those getting rich in traditional CO2 emitting industries. So there's a slightly better chance that politicians will enact the necessary legislation.

Unless they do that outside your jurisdiction and/or get tax cuts from the powers to be.

Carbon tax will increase the prices of essentials for the poor and middle class.

Basic income?

Redistribute the proceeds as a tax credit then

It's not a counter-solution, it is a suggestion that the problem isn't really a problem. PoW power usage is high in an absolute sense but lower than many other things which people would consider an obvious waste. So why does PoW power usage have so much contention compared to those other things? I would say because there's too much baggage/hype associated with cryptocurrencies, not because there's a genuine belief that increasing the energy usage of our species is a universally bad thing.

As for the carbon side of the issue, that isn't something which is specific to cryptocurrencies or any other kind of energy usage. I support carbon taxes and import taxes on CO2-producing goods/services, including cryptocurrency services, and I am certain that many cryptocurrency believers feel the same way.

So if ready alternatives didn’t exist, sure PoW is wasteful but has no alternative... but we have an alternative. If there were alternatives to running a social media platform that didn’t spend energy we should also back that option.

Assuming you are talking about PoS systems, I think they are very promising but it's still not obvious that they can achieve the same risk profile as PoW systems. I think they are worthy of further research and I am excited to see how Eth 2.0 works in practice, but I don't think we understand the economic nature of cryptocurrencies well enough to definitively say that it can completely replace Bitcoin.

While I agree with the genral thrust of your tirade, this is not slippery slope, this is hypocracy of the highest degree.

OP proposal to ban cryptocurrencies for 'damaging environment' while we have companies who's entire business model is giving their customers cancer and preying on addicts.

This is classic whataboutism. We can't do anything to improve the world because there are other bad things happening in the world too.

1. We can work on more than one thing at a time and I’d be quite surprised if the original poster didn’t want to do something about those companies, too.

2. For all their many flaws, those industries also provide something of value. If they shut down tomorrow, people would miss having cars, pesticides, fuels, medications, etc. but if every cryptocurrency suddenly halted tomorrow nobody outside of a few speculators would find their daily life any different. That doesn’t mean that those externalities aren’t real and don’t require action but they’re widespread because there is some kind of real value to society and you’d need a transition plan to avoid disrupting a lot of processes.

If a heroin dealer is imprisoned, his customers could have severe withdrawal. Some might even die from it.

I'm gonna bet OP would be happy to ban hammer the hell out of the companies who's entire business model is giving their customers cancer and preying on addicts too

The crowd of HN tends to be more philosophic. Without a moral / ethical / long-term practical view, we're just ships with torn sails floating in the waves, wandering about, making short-term decisions. Decisions often have 2nd, 3rd, 4th-order consequences that can be unpredictable and often counter to the goal we think we're working towards in the short term. It pays to think them through from a high level and apply long-term thinking principles.

Lol, please. The crowd on HN is just as impotent as the crowd on Twitter, Reddit or Facebook. But with more "first principles" thrown in.

If that's how you feel, maybe that's the vibe you're bringing with you.

I agree. Having used Reddit for too long, and Facebook too before I deleted it completely, my experience has been that HN is much better at talking about things, and more careful about wording. Despite the predictable slippery slope comments, there is always some good commentary in most threads. I can't think of anywhere else to go to get discussion on a multitude of complex topics like this.

That doesn't mean that threads on HN can't take a nosedive and become flame wars. But that's what good moderation is here for, and I believe HN has that.

Because it's missing the forest for the trees. Look at total energy usage, across all industries. This is more an indictment of cryptocurrency than it is about actually caring about the environment. Compare it to say, eliminating all gas vehicles for electric cars. Where is the HN thread advocating for that, if the end result would be massively fewer carbon emissions versus this proposal? My criticism is this proposal is like banning plastic straws. It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real solution.

> It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real solution.

modern politics in a nutshell

Are you joking? There are plenty of conversations on Hackernews about electric vehicles, it just so happens that replacing every single car in the world with a totally different energy system is a way harder problem than banning useless cryptocurrencies that are burning energy to fuel equity bubbles.

Only if you just consider how hard it is to ban, not how hard it is to replace while achieving the same utility.

So instead of dolvibg the hard problem well focus on something easy and useless. SV moto in a nutshell

You may have heard of this company Tesla based in Silicon Valley, one of the largest companies by market cap in the world, just led an electric car revolution that's inspired automakers worldwide to shift off IC engines

No, it's addressing the low hanging fruit first. An efficient approach to solving a problem.

This comment isn't productive. The original comment suggests states act to ban wasteful energy use. The comment you're replying to asks "who decides?" , and gives an example of energy use they find particularly wasteful.

You're presupposing this is a problem that needs a solution. I think myself and the commenter you are replying to would agree that either: A) it's not or B) it does not need to be solved by a regulatory body.

Instead of getting annoyed by people pointing out edge cases, it would be more productive to explain what criteria should be used, or admit this is a half baked solution.

> Every fucking time "Regulations" of any kind come up.

unless of course those regulations are about regulating "big tech" for "censorship".

I am not being pedantic. I am simply bringing up two points:

- There are those who are OK with high carbon emissions for various things that are a proven net-negative to the society or the planet - examples being, as I mentioned, social media, user tracking and advertising server farms, plus anything directly related to that. If these things are not a net-negative, then at the very least they could operate at the fraction of their current emissions, were they built with externalities in mind. To be OK with that but not with Bitcoin where it objectively provides some value by directly helping human lives (it is a store of value and a way to transfer money for people whose home currency is unstable or restricted by hostile governments, for instance), is hypocritical.

- Literally all legislation surrounding cryptocurrency (well, anything else too, really) by necessity has to be based on someone's opinions. Whose, is my question. Because that will shape what's allowed and what's not allowed to a great extent. Badly chosen opinion-givers lead to clusterf*cks like Disney, Sony and a few other giants effectively being in charge of worldwide copyright durations, which causes untold damage to the cultural commons.

There's nothing wrong with pointing out problems with a solution and not providing a counter-solution. When one isn't provided, it can simply mean that the offered solution is actually worse than the status quo.

In this particular situation, I may not have the solution, but I know that the offered one is a short-sighted knee-jerk reaction which has terrible implications for other things

Why? Because that's what I bet most people come to HN for. I'd rather find out that my idea is impractical or plain stupid on a HN thread than in some other and expensive way.

> must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child comment about failing to do so.

Because it is an incredibly common fallacy to ignore boundary conditions and unintentional consequences when proposing a pie-in-the-sky regulation that is supposed to just fix things.

Any regulatory mechanism is essentially a machine that will need to work with every input and minimize some class of error, be it precision or coverage or some other system level metric. Turns out the most interesting part of such a system is indeed around the edge cases, and the difficulty of handling such cases is essentially the bulk of the difficulty of building such a system to begin with.

It is like saying "why don't we build a system that punishes criminals", which sounds very agreeable and popular at that level of construal, but is incredibly complex and sophisticated at the actual implementation level; e.g. to have a process to minimize false positive convictions rather than maximize conviction rates.

> It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring

Not to sound harsh but HN does not owe anyone their favorite type of entertainment and honestly criticisms on those metrics are more trite, predictable, wearisome and boring themselves than anything else. Many find intellectual stimulation and systemic thinking entertaining and thus those comments enjoyable.

In my mind its not about figuring out the edge cases, its more about building a framework in which tradeoffs can be analyzed, debated, and mindfully considered before drafting legislation. In order to do this there might need to be a few conversations that some may consider pedantic.

I will say that given the text based medium of HN, it can be hard to gauge whether one wants to have a mindful discussion or if one is just trying to mindlessly ding a poster.

I don't know if that was their intent, but I would actually like a good answer to your parent's question to have a strong argument for backing OP's proposition, which I'd like to happen.

Moral arguments (ones that offer only should and should not with some supporting evidence but no actual solution) are going to be dismissed more regularly because while they may offer perspective, they offer very little value beyond that. That makes them fairly non-actionable.

Choose an argument which requires you to offer a viable and compatible alternative and you'll probably get a lot more ears.

How is that an edge case? The OP said ban all POW crypto and the reply questions whether that is really a wise suggestion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Be kind. Don't be snarky.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

Please don't post shallow dismissals

Yes. In fact perhaps we could automate these, with GPT-3! Unless, err, that's already happened

the thing is that 'simple' solutions are never that. and if you find that boring or whatever than maybe its time to think a bit further before making some arguments. if a case is so easy to dismiss, it might not be a good case after all.

A more apt comparison might be burning fuel to mine copper, nickel and zinc out of the ground for coinage.

That comparison would fit even better if we acquired Cu/Ni/Zn at the same rate no matter how much energy we spent on mining it.

just because you lack an understanding to rebuttal coherently doesn't render the argument useless.

> edge cases

That’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone describe Facebook as an “edge case”.

If $900,000,000,000 of market capitalization counts as an edge case, I’d think you must be hard to please at Christmas - those are some really high standards!

It violates principle of equality to target only one

Just can't escape this mentality.

I literally LOL'd. Thank you and never stop being this way

There is a good reason n-gate exists and endlessly mocks the HN comments

I love n-gate. My best guess is that it's Maciej from Idlewords running it :) I've seen him rant about HN on Twitter as well.

Or is that you refuse to address the complexity of "Regulations"? The easy seduction of oversimplification runs high with those whose argumentation is primarily a fallacious appeal to emotion.

Maybe it's time to grow up and realize that the real world is highly complex and requires sophisticated tools, mathematics, and questions in order to better live in it?

There is a counter solution to advocating for regulation. It's to create an economic system where people are naturally incentivized to do what's best. Vote with your wallet. You don't want energy that produced Co2? Don't buy it and advocate for others not to buy it.

Instead what people are doing is advocating for the government to come and point guns at people who don't do what they want -- even if they happen to be wrong. And when they are wrong, there are disastrous consequences as is currently extremely apparent in California. There are all kinds of perverse incentives which have resulted in the severe homelessness and extreme government waste.

The people advocating for this neither listen to the wisdom of Murphy's law, nor do they understand that when regulation impacts the market that regulation becomes what is bought and sold. Have you never heard of regulatory capture? That has worse human-cost impacts than leaving people to their own devices.

Vote with your wallet. Don't like the environmental cost of beef? Don't buy it. This works -- you can see it playing out.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/BA65/production/...

This idea doesn't apply at all for stupid speculative bubbles like proof-of-work crypocurrency.

As another good counterexample to your "market solutions for everything": I don't want rhinos driven to extinction, so I vote with my wallet by never buying powdered rhino horn or other poached products, and donating to environmental charities to protect them. However, it's very likely that rhinos will be extinct in the wild within our lifetime. Does this mean "the market" has decided to exterminate wild rhinos? Should we eliminate poaching regulations and remove red-tape to stop distorting the free-market price of rhino horn?

Create your own nature reserve for rhinos if you think it's so important. There are huge swaths of the US dedicated to nature reserves.

Infact create your own planet with its own climate if you think it's so importsnt

Rhinos are heritage of mankind abd are woth countless trilions to future generations. Just like forests and climate.

Current 'free market' is just fancy name for barbaric ransaking

This is not a solution in a world in which we have catastrophic global climate instability on the horizon.

Sorry, sometimes there are great reasons for regulation.

Those regulations are going to create as much cost on humans as leaving it to people like yourself who care.

Fixing the problem is up to you.

~"The reason things things never change is that those who stand to lose by change are the ones who hold all the power" -- Machiavelli

> Those regulations are going to create as much cost on humans as leaving it to people like yourself who care.

Humans optimise for short term gain, generally perceived gain over others, and rationalise this over large nebulous things like climate change, environmental health etc. They don't count externalities without being made to. And that's individuals. Companies are downright sociopathic and will happily defecate in their own back yard if they can make a dime out of it.

As a result we can already see what happens when people are left to choose themselves or the environment, they choose their own short term relative gain over the long term prospects of the whole species (before we even look at other species).

> Fixing the problem is up to you.

Yes, in a democracy it is, which is why I vote for political parties which will bring in regulations.

"Fixing the problem is up to you."

Huh? Great newa! I can pollute and create oilspills and its all someone else's problem!

"Vote with your wallet" depends on several micro-economic assumption holding true, that don't hold true here.

One of those is the assumption of perfect competition. Electricity is far, far from being a market with perfect competition. How many electricity providers are you able to choose from at your house? I'm going to guess 1.

Another assumption that doesn't hold here is the absence of externalities. The full cost of damage to the environment is not included in the price you pay for electricity, so people are going to over-consume it.

You rail against laws and regulations but even in the second sentence of your post you assume their necessity with the phrase "create an economic system..." Laws and regulations are how you create such systems.

Regulatory capture is a real thing, but it's not a good argument against all regulation. Maybe it's an argument for relatively less regulation than we'd have otherwise. It's also an argument for doing regulation better.

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