Comment by danvayn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danvayn | Hacker News Reader

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I think widespread institutional adoption of crypto is pretty important in this regard.Operating a photonic miner being hard provides more incentive to be a part of those 'mining' it, as you might expect. So, if it's beyond average user scope but within say .1-1% of a companies budget and could create massive dividends, why shouldn't they invest in this?

It can be a little gross to consider, because no ones like idea of 'the rich getting richer', but that isn't really different from what happens today, anyways. What matters most is that the system has a lot of nodes to work with, and that can still happen here if there's enough adoption in this scenario.

Not to mention that it should be hard to abuse your control in a public blockchain system. Governments could require companies to have an use photonic miner operating license and revoke it if they did something like this, for example. I think its a decent middle ground between centralized and decentralized. And (should?) produce less electric waste overall. I'm not sure, I don't really know much about photonics.

Using PoW crypto at all creates massive waste for no productive use. In a world struggling to avoid catastrophic climate changes, it is completely irresponsible, and should be stopped instantly.

Not to mention, crypto currencies are worse than traditional currencies in every way: much more wasteful than the whole global banking system for a tiny tiny tiny fraction of a percentage of the number of transactions, much more centralized in several ways, deflationary, impossible to control if they spiral. There is no reason to keep this charade going.

> worse than traditional currencies in every way

Yes, they're worse in many ways, but that is exactly the design decision they made in order to be better in one particular way; to be censorship resistant (and permissionless).

Not all are deflationary; many have a tail emission that makes the supply dis-inflationary.

Nothing is censorship resistant against a determined censor. If crypto sees more and more adoption, exchanges and companies accepting it will likely get pushed to implement KYC and AML just as much as banks are.

Proof of work is wasteful in the same sense that having banks is wasteful. Imagine what it takes to operate a banking institution. It's not just electricity. It would be "efficient" to just write the word "bank" on a shack and then have one or two workers "guard" over all the deposits.

Unfortunately, nobody would be willing to use such a bank. Actual banks that people use need to spend a lot of money just on maintaining the charade of being proper custodians. Yet, they can still lose your deposit, in which case they rely on the government to bail them out.

Perhaps proof-of-stake is something that can mostly replace proof-of-work, but the proof is in the pudding.

> Actual banks that people use need to spend a lot of money just on maintaining the charade of being proper custodians. Yet, they can still lose your deposit, in which case they rely on the government to bail them out.

The major difference is that, collectively, the world's banks are a decentralized system that processes billions of times more transactions every hour than Bitcoin and other major PoW coins have ever executed, while offering many services which are impossible to offer through Bitcoin - loans, insurance, the ability to recover your money from a fraudulent transaction, and many others.

Replacing this entire centuries old system is something that no one wants - not the left, not the right, nor the vast vast majority of crypto owners, who are just in it for a quick buck.

"No office", app-only banks exists. One such bank is popular in my country.

If we want to bring climate change under control then coordination and communication tools that cross national borders are necessary. That is what many of us working in crypto are focused on, you might not yet value it, but we do.

How do we collectively, as a planet, decide what is acceptable usage of energy and what isn't? Who gets to use machines and who doesn't? And how do we do that in a way that isn't authoritarian, and held together with violence?

Is it wrong to use my gpu playing video games all day, or is the moral panic only applying to certain uses of computers?

When you say it should be stopped instantly you should clarify what you mean by that, what action do you see being taken?

If every person on the planet were using their GPU to play a few hours every day, they would probably not reach the amount of energy used by the Bitcoin blockchain alone.

All of the things you are citing require cooperation and discussion and democratic discourse. An algorithmically driven opaque protocol controlled by a handful of technocrats (the people developing the major clients and the ones running the major mining pools) is part of the problem, not a model for the solution.

Not to mention, money as a means of exchange is simply not one of the problems standing in the way of stopping global warming. The biggest problems are caused by rich people who have calculated that they will not be personally impacted, who couldn't care less about the poor 90+% of the planet who will, and who have thus decided to prioritize increasing their wealth today over any sort of urgent changes. It is also perpetuated by organizational systems put in place a long time ago (mainly for profit corporations with lobbying power) that have the same goals - short term profit over any other consideration.

Another thing that was put in place for corporations with lobbying power and wealthy people is the current US monetary policy of quantitative easing to infinity. This makes the rich richer and decimates the purchasing power of those who have few assets (poor and/or working class), and the government which you seem to have so much trust in does this knowingly. Note that even outside of the US, this does matter, since the USD is the de facto global reserve currency.

I do not have that much trust in the government. However, the government, unlike corporations or algorithms, is the one thing I have some minute amount of democratic control over, corrupt though it is. Moving things like monetary policy away from corrupt government control directly into private hands, or moving it into completely inflexible algorithmic control (with the algorithm in turn controlled by private individuals) can only make things worse.

And note that, while QE is useful to the rich, it also permits things like giant infrastructure bills that help everyone. We've seen in Greece what can happen when money supply is constrained (in that case, by EU policy preventing one country from just printing euros), and it's definitely not the rich who lost. QE is being used to serve the rich not because it's inherently in their benefit, but because almost everything in our society is being used to help the rich.

>Is it wrong to use my gpu playing video games all day, or is the moral panic only applying to certain uses of computers?

Is it wrong for you to leave a warehouse full of computers idling to play a computer game? Yes. This is one of the more outrageous false equivalences I've seen.

It stops being a moral panic when crypto consumes more electricity than the entire nation of Argentina.

“crypto consumes more electricity than country X” is such a tired and low-effort talking point. There are things more useless than crypto that consume more energy than certain countries.

'Impossible to control'.

Born to a generation that has lost faith in governments, this is why i have crypto.

>>Not to mention, crypto currencies are worse than traditional currencies in every way

You've never been denied financial services due to discriminatory policies, or you would not claim that.

Everything needs to migrate to the public blockchain: banking, online markets, social media platforms, etc. Giving a handful of corporations and governments control over almost every aspect of every one's lives is dangerous and corrupting.

Yes, much better to give such control to an algorithm and protocol written and controlled by a handful of engineers and mining pool owners.

And make no mistake: in a state that allows or encourages financial institutions to discriminate, you will eventually be discriminated against with Bitcoin as well. The state may not have caught up to the technology yet, but social problems can't be fixed with technology.

> social problems can't be fixed with technology.

Do you think that 'social problems can't be caused by technology'? Because if social problems can be caused by technology then surely they can solve them too.

Yes, I also think social problems can't be caused by technology. Technology is neutral - if we're using it to do harm, it's harmful. If we're using it to help, it helps.

Note that this is not 'guns don't kill people, people kill people'. Guns do kill people, so they must be regulated. The gun violence problem in the USA is not the fault of guns, it's the fault of the way US society chooses to regulate access to guns.

The protocol is publicly defined, and immutable. There is no need to trust any engineers, or give them any control, just as you don't need to trust the developers of open source software in order to trust the software.

And it is much harder for a state to ban a blockchain, than impose laws on centralized financial intermediaries that lead to rampant banking discrimination. The former will cost far more, in economic resources and political capital, to enforce.

The protocol is not immutable, and there have been several changes to it in the early days, and several proposed changes that keep being discussed (such as the famous block size limit change). If the people developing the software and the major mining groups agree on a change, who will stop them?

It is extremely hard to organize a protocol change that succeeds in tampering with existing smart contacts, let alone eliminates the permissionless/neutrality guarantees of a public blockchain with significant adoption.

For a public blockchain with as large a userbase as Ethereum, a protocol change that nullifies its neutrality and permissionless-ness would be nearly impossible for any group to push through.

It's absolutely incomparable to traditional banks, with respect to the degree of resistance to interference from governments.

This isn't actually true at all. Climate problems are caused by competition between governments and their pursue for growth, which forces everyone to consume and produce more than is necessary. Under the current economic system, natural catastrophe is inevitable. Bitcoin actually fixes this, because it makes it impossible for governments to enforce growth through money supply manipulation, which they have to do to compete with each other.

The current economic system is compatible with a carbon neutral world. We managed to ban all kinds of destructive things that provide (short-term) economic benefits without changing our economic system.

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