Cryptocurrencies’ Carbon Footprint Underestimated
blog.dshr.org
blog.dshr.org
Fundamentally it's the antithesis to democracy. Say whatever you will about all forms of government, but ultimately no matter the form, there's some level of accountability. Some governments use elections to facilitate this, others use the threat of rulers being killed. One way or another, there's accountability.
The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression.
Even if what I'm saying doesn't come to be, at a minimum you've introduced yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit - our current system isn't here by accident. It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth. Because cryptocurrency doesn't exist in a vacuum, no matter what you're either enriching early adopters, leading to what I described earlier; or you are subject to the same flaws as fiat that it's trying to replace.
No technical solution - cryptocurrency or otherwise - necessary.
I don't really understand your second point. Taxation by definition is involuntary. I won't discuss the merits of taxation (vs. detriments) but a "voluntary taxation" system would result in a prisoners dilemma where no one would pay taxes. Eventually the government that implements such a thing would be no longer able to fund itself and in quick succession find itself literally bankrupt.
I can't see a single reason to stop spending as a politician if you can print money. Your political time horizon is shorter than the detrimental effects of your spending so the voting population is unable to de-obfuscate the cause of their purchasing power falling rapidly. I usually hear people blame the rich as a knee-jerk reaction instead.
If people buy P2P without KYC, how can force be applied?
Further, is there the will to have people's property confiscated via violence? If so, where are we democratically? Where does state power end? Why does state power make sense against non violent non consenting citizens, but not against true oligarchs manipulating our political system?
At some point it becomes obvious the whole system is a farcical power hierarchy. Crypto is one thing this system will struggle to steal.
...yes?
This has been a fairly common practice since the dawn of civilization. If you do bad things, you get your stuff taken away.
The idea that this can be circumvented by creating cryptocurrency, whether or not it can ever be made a de jure currency, is libertarian techbro wishful thinking of the highest order.
Where did you get this strange idea from? You can literally buy anything with your money to save in real assets or at least non monetary savings like bonds. If anything, low interest rates tell you you should stop saving in money but they don't force you to save or stop saving in money. Nobody is here to tell you what you should do as an individual actor.
If the US were forced back to a gold standard could they continue being Keynsian in the way they have been over the last 20 years?
Utterly bizarre...
Taxes work because we can (imperfectly) enforce them. What happens when we can't?
Or is the voluntariness of the "customer relationship" one way?...in which case you would really just be arguing for a global decrease in immigration restrictions.
The fundemental difference between a citizen and a customer is that it's much harder to citizenship status.
For example if we added market dynamics to a wealth tax we could make it viable and fair for all participants. Lets say there is a 7% tax on all assets over 25k USD. You decide the real value of the assets but the rule is they must be on public auction at all times. Most homeowners would price their homes above the market's rate so they are not at risk of being bought out. Large land holders would price close to the market price or below to avoid the tax. Governments could buy up large tracts of land at once without the common problems of putting in the first stake and the next home being worth 3x what it was yesterday. The end result is a truth on assets you couldn't get from central regulation (good luck avoiding taxes when it gets bought by someone else for cheap).
All of these ignore the pragmatics of whether or not people want their homes auctioned 24/7 but the dynamics of the system are better and self regulating from a taxation perspective. That's the thing about these ideas is of course they go against platonist sensibilities that things remain more or less the same forever. The dynamics change so it should be in everyones interest to explore alternatives that don't just assume people will remain as a doscile tax base until we all perish to dust.
To answer you more directly: citizenship as it stands also has a barrier to entry. I'm trying to make the government more reactive, and give people more power to decide what society should spend its money on. I'm not so certain everyone would just vote to stop protecting those around them, we all know someone who needs help.
1) Markets aren't magic coordinators, they take large amounts of human effort to maintain in a functional state. Your system would destroy productivity because it would require a huge increase in market oarticipatio
2) Economic activity needs stability and your system would almost entirely eliminate that.
3) Markets require information to function accurately so to constantly have accurate markets for everything means that you have completely eliminated privacy.
4) Price is not the only important aspect is many transactions. Reputation matters and this system would result in the inability to trust any economic partner because their assets could be bought at any time.
5) You would still need to have massive government regulation to prevent fraudulent collusion. Lets say you seriously underprice your assets to avoid taxes and whenever someone moves to buy the asset, you have a friend who would bid on it until they win. That friend can then sell the asser back to you. Now raise this basic idea by the power of the massive legal and financial efforts that have histoy been put into tax evasion and you have a regulatory problem that dwarfs existing tax enforement problems.
So you would basically tax stability while creating tools that would enable massive fraud and speculation.
Taxation is as voluntary as it can be in democracy given that you elect the government which sets the rate and then pay into commons. You can’t rely on purely voluntary contribution as then people would simply not contribute. Society gets into tragedy of the commons all the time where the global optimum requires contributions that are locally disavantageous, this is why we must have contribution to commons.
Again, you won’t lose real value if you keep your money invested (and for example do TIPS if you want low risk).
Society grows through production. People invest their time and effort in the first place, not money. Consumption is the final non-efficient cause of production. The efficient cause is savings, which represent unconsumed goods and values. Consumption is the end of production, a dead end, as far as the productive process is concerned.
>You will be forced to consume. And you will be happy.
That's literally how the damn economy works. If you don't want to buy anything or save in real assets then why the hell did you work for the money? Have you thought about working less instead of piling up green pieces of paper? Money that is saved cannot be earned by other people, it's that simple. It doesn't drive investment or business activity, it's just dead money doing nothing.
The main purpose of money is saving. That's hard to do since they steal it from you if you do that.
Keynesian economics has done so much damage to people and the world.
They'll probably listen to you as they're giving you a free ride to your new home.
Point is, it's not a balancing weight when the state has the actual power.
Broader point: instead of focusing on changing and improving the actual social/political system, people build fantasy escape solutions through technology.
But it's all based on the assumption that the current liberal, democratic society is an immutable right for everyone. It's not.
Better terms are always very appealing, but the "terms" are about governance as a whole, not just paying taxes. That's what attracts assets from outside. Taxes are just a predictable cost of doing business, but bad governance can easily be a showstopper.
The fundamental outcome of this "voluntary taxation" scheme would be that the wealthy would gain an extra layer of control over the actions of the state, aside from the vast influence this group already has (and the wealthy no doubt would be the ones able to make taxes voluntary in this way, notably).
Which is to say argument accept the fundamentally antidemocratic direction that bitcoin pushes society in but tries to paint a prettier face on it.
I don't think that re-engineering the incentives around taxation means we have to go full Ayn Rand. I also don't think any of these ideas will come about from people deciding. The natural advantage the wealthy have in choosing where to locate their capital will force this outcome with governments coming kicking and screaming the whole way down.
> no system of government can prevent bad actors
Everything's the same! So crypto's no worse then?
that's not how the legislature works. A motivated majority can undo anything via the passing of new legislation via an election of a majority of the house and senate.
> Everything's the same! So crypto's no worse then?
I already explained in the GP. Give it a read.
^ Was responding to this. He really _was_ an actor prior to becoming governor of California. Actor, media mogul, "game show host", why should it be any different? Even Michael Bloomberg served in politics as mayor of NYC.
Reagan had (comparatively) none of the wealth and real political experience at the federal level. He was not an oligarch.
Can you source this or is this your personal opinion of him? I'm trying to understand why you're defining this as a purely oligarchal issue where there are many other such instances of oligarchism in history whether it'd be politics or tech/FAANG.
> ..not because of his political experience.
Well he's certainly no Reagan given his class(ism) progression or upbringing, as described on Wikipedia. Is that really the issue here though, because he lacked "political experience" upon entry into the presidency?
Trump being a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence? Well, yeah I can.
https://libn.com/2016/09/15/taking-a-peek-at-trumps-foundati...
> why you're defining this as a purely oligarchal [sic] issue
That was the topic of the GP
> Is that really the issue here though, because he lacked "political experience" upon entry into the presidency?
No need for quotes, Trump had 0 experience holding any political office at any level, in contrast to Reagan. He was elected because he was a rich celebrity.
Yeah well he certainly does now, however brief it was.
But I'd say the gp is correct that bitcoin 100% hinders them and 0% helps them.
You fell for fake news. Three of the deaths were from natural causes, one was from a drug overdose: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_Capitol_a...
"5 deaths (1 from gunshot, 1 from drug overdose, 3 from natural causes)"
14 suspects in the attack are facing federal charges related to bringing dangerous weapons inside the Capitol, 2 are facing firearms-related charges. Why didn't you tell DC's US Attorney’s Office that they were actually unarmed?!
There hasn't been a single conviction related to insurrection or anything more sinister than rioting or trespassing to date. Don't get your hopes up. Further, note the misleading language used in reporting, "armed", "dangerous weapons", but not guns (save the two facing ambiguous "firearms related charges") which as far as I know had nothing to do with actually bringing firearms onto the premises. The popular idea that the rioters were armed with guns is effectively (and deliberately) misinformation, though you won't find an article outright lying about guns inside the capitol.
As for the alleged pipe bombs, one was found at both Democratic and Republican offices, and there is still no publicly released information as to who planted them.
You'd think with a place as heavily surveilled as the capitol there would be no issue producing images of trespassers with guns on premises, yet you'd be hard pressed to find a single one[1]. Even moreso if you watch the livestreams of the event, where there are no guns brandished. There was one arrest made of a participant who allegedly had a number of guns in his truck.
>Why didn't you tell DC's US Attorney’s Office that they were actually unarmed
If your "insurrection" consists of a population known for owning guns, yet arrives 99% unarmed, then it becomes much more difficult to convince people that they were staging an "insurrection" or "coup". If nothing else, surely we can at least agree that, given the lack of firearms and damage, this was a "fiery, but mostly peaceful protest", right?
This whole story is merely an egregious example of the politicization of our media and justice system.
1. There is to my knowledge a single security video showing a single person wandering into the capitol through a backdoor carrying an AR style rifle for about 15 seconds before walking out.
Most of the rioters were armed. There are a couple videos of the riot if you don't believe me. You're moving the goals posts so that beating a cop with a flagpole until he's dead, throwing fire extinguishers, swinging axes, or planting pipe bombs counts as being "unarmed". Christopher Alberts was caught inside with a loaded handgun.
"DC is no guns," wrote an Oath Keepers member on Facebook, "so mace and gas masks, some batons." They had to remind them to only bring certain weapons to their peaceful protest.
Officer Mike Fanone claims Trump supporters reached for his weapon shouting "kill him with his own gun." He must be exaggerating!
> There hasn't been a single conviction related to insurrection or anything more sinister than rioting or trespassing to date.
Oh wow, you really didn't know. Jon Schaffer plead guilty to entering a restricted building with a dangerous weapon. Why didn't you remind him he was unarmed before he plead guilty?!
> given the lack of firearms and damage
Damage estimates range from $1.5 to $30 million. Do you read the news?
The point once again (the "goalposts") was not whether they were armed, but why they would stage an insurrection without guns. And it is an established fact that save for 1-2 out of, what, 300+? There were no guns. Because this was a protest which turned into a riot, not an insurrection.
>that beating a cop with a flagpole until he's dead, throwing fire extinguisher
The original articles referenced an officer being beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. Note that if you have been keeping up, they have all since been quietly retracted/deleted because the entire story was a fabrication. The officer died of a stroke within days of the protest, not from injuries.
>They had to remind them to only bring certain weapons to their peaceful protest.
This is pure speculation and its quite a stretch. The vast majority of participants weren't actually part of any of the so called "far right" groups (e.g. oathkeepers, boogaloo boys, or whatever the media's boogeyman of the day happens to be).
>"kill him with his own gun." He must be exaggerating
Yet not a single officer was killed so, again, not much of an insurrection.
>Damage estimates range from $1.5 to $30 million. Do you read the news?
From heavily biased sources. If you watched any of the livestreams you'd see protestors constantly telling each other not to damage anything. Can you find me any pictures or videos of damage on that scale?
>Jon Schaffer plead guilty to entering a restricted building with a dangerous weapon
Straight from the horse's mouth[0]:
>admitted that he breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021, wearing a tactical vest and armed with bear repellent
So still no guns and guilty of attempting to obstruct certification. Hardly an insurrection, and only one person. Where is the coup?
You have been mislead by political theatre and are spreading misinformation.
0. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/lifetime-founding-member-oath...
> The vast majority of participants weren't actually part of any of the so called "far right" groups (e.g. oathkeepers)
LOTS of self-recorded evidence shows that isn't true.
"wait for the 6th when we are all in D.C. to insurrection [sic]"
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2021/03/24/capitol-attac...
We know many members of the Proud Bois were there (since arrested). The Oath Keepers even had their little logos printed on their hoodies! You linked to an admission of guilt from a founding member of the Oath Keepers, you...do realize that right?
> The officer died of a stroke within days of the protest, not from injuries.
Strange, the medical examiner disagreed, saying "all that transpired played a role in his condition." Hmm he was pepper-sprayed and beaten by a violent mob, only to die of a stroke hours later. What a cowinky-dink!
The other officers had no history of mental illness. After being beaten by a violent mob, their partners described them as acting unlike their usual selves, shortly before committing suicide. Another chance coincidence I guess!
The medical examiner said of Officer Jeffrey Smith that the "acute, precipitating event that caused the death of Officer Smith was his occupational exposure to the traumatic events he suffered on January 6, 2021." Are you really that gullible?
1. I said vast majority. I didn't day such people weren't present. These are not large groups to begin with.
2. Once again you are twisting the word "armed" to conflate flagpoles and bear mace with guns.
My original point stands. You don't go about an insurrection in 2021 without bringing your guns. The rest of what you wrote is irrelevant. This was neither a coup nor an insurrection, because the vast, vast majority of protestors did not bring guns to the capitol, and in fact I'm not aware of a single such firearms arrest/conviction.
You could say that it was a 99.9% peaceful riot - and again I'm only aware of a single person being shown to have a gun, not "armed" with flagpoles and mace, out of hundreds of protestors.
Calling it an (attempted) "insurection" or a "coup" just doesn't check out. I'm not sure, but I think nobody with any power (who could be forced to pass that power to someone, hence making it a coup) even was there in the building during that time? What would be the point of attacking target like this, if the goal was a "coup"?
Anyway, I'm not that interested in this in the first place, but I think your argument is well laid out, it was a pleasure to read this thread.
2. They were armed with flagpoles, knives, baseball bats, fire extinguishers, mace, and guns.
Thank you for not even trying to continue pretending the officers that died just happened to die of unrelated causes. Luckily you dropped that the second you were called on it. They died because they were beaten by a violent mob, as confirmed by several medical examiners. You disrespect their lives when you argue in bad faith otherwise, and the Blue Lives Matter bumper sticker on your car.
I never argued there was an insurrection. I argued that an armed, violent riot was staged and organized by the far right, resulting in the deaths of 5 police officers, and the injury of at least 138 more, and extensive damage to The Capitol. Or as you put it, "a 99.9% peaceful riot." The commander in chief of the US military was not powerful enough to stop it.
You are fundamentally not arguing in good faith and continue to twist my words and make disingenuous arguments. For the third time, my original point was that this was not an insurrection because the rioters did not bring guns. That they were technically "armed" with flagpoles and mace does not change the argument, nor is it an excuse for you and the media to conflate "armed" with "carrying lethal ranged weapons (guns)". That is my entire argument and everything else you've written is not relevant to this discussion.
Also >They died because they were beaten by a violent mob, as confirmed by several medical examiners
This is one of the many blatant falsehoods that you are regurgitating.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/third-d-c-officer-who-r...
Severe head trauma was unrelated to the suicides of the officers that otherwise acted normally before the "peaceful riot?" Bad faith arguments like that show you have no respect for their lives or the suffering their families are experiencing.
> Are you also blaming nationwide BLM riots for officer suicides
There were no officers that suffered severe head trauma in those riots and then committed suicide, so no. If you read the news you can learn more about that!
You also have no basis for this claim. Yes, there were multiple contingents of so called "far right" (some/most of these groups are explicitly anti-authoritarian, as evidenced by the Gasden flag in addition to their public statements), but as I've said previously, these groups are not large enough to comprise the "vast majority". Most of these were trump supporters who attended a protest. If you want to argue that the named groups instigated the riot, that's certainly a reasonable position. But claiming that a substantial number of attendees belonged to these "far right" groups is at best unsubstantiated and at worst misinformation.
Further, if their communications contained any evidence of an attempted insurrection/coup, you would have seen corresponding convictions already. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of these communications consisted of politically themed shitposting anyway.
But we've veered quite far from the original subject, the argument that a lack of firearms is enough evidence to conclude that this was neither a coup nor an insurrection, but merely an impromptu riot spawned of a protest.
Thank you again for immediately dropping the idea that the police officers that died as a result died of unrelated causes, what a disgusting, gullible view to take of things. An argument in such bad faith it rivaled your "99.9% peaceful riot" one, you might want to look up what "peaceful" and "riot" mean.
Having got the joke out of the way in a sibling comment, a serious one: "Oligarch" is an oddly modern term, usually applied to Russians in the post communist era, and of course they weren't removed. Buying your way into power is highly effective. And can expand into other countries, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Lebedev
Prior to the modern era (20th century), even the democratic countries were only partly democratic (restricted electorates). Most were constitutional monarchs, and of course the traditional way of removing a monarch is execution. Democracy provides a way of getting rid of bad leaders without having to have violence .. but that does also rely on them acquiescing in the result.
It's pseudonymous, but if you can attach an identity to one transaction, you have a good chance of tracing everything else they've done.
And even if you don't know who everyone is today, you might be able to deanonymize it at some point in the future, because all the data is public.
> By definition, bitcoin transactions are not traceable, right?
Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, has some things to say about the use of BTC in crime:
> Based on our research and discussions with industry experts, I have confidence in two conclusions: • The broad generalizations about the use of Bitcoin in illicit finance are significantly overstated. • The blockchain ledger on which Bitcoin transactions are recorded is an underutilized forensic tool that can be used more widely by law enforcement and the intelligence community to identify and disrupt illicit activities. Put simply, blockchain analysis is a highly effective crime fighting and intelligence gathering tool.
Source: https://casebitcoin.com/story/former-cia-director-finds-bitc...
With crypto, you don't have to suffer because of them messing up the economy.
So you won't be affected by unemployment? Poor public services and infrastructure? Corruption? Police brutality? Crime? Because you have crypto. Open your fucking eyes.
It's just so little compared to the oligarchs that it doesn't matter.
"With the privatisation of money creation and the proliferation of decentralised currency fiefdoms, it was in many ways like a return to feudalism..."
I suppose the only difference is our opinions of democracy as it's practiced.
I think you're trying to say that a cryptocurrency fuel regime would have the same problem as current democracies. But just cryptocurrencies added to what exists today and as the gp points out, will act to increase all the problematic qualities of the present situation.
And while this is true in theory, the reality as far as I can tell is that we already have a system of no accountability - for a certain privileged sub-group of society. All crypto does is to level the field, and that's a big net win in my book.
Now if panama and paradise papers had lead to anything other than journalists getting killed, trillion dollar corporations didn't keep buying up and stifling competition, insider trading by CEOs and politicians wasn't rampant, politics as a whole was not a money game and celebrities and high ranking officials didn't get off scoff free for crimes that would put lesser fortunate or connected individuals behind bars for years if not decades, maybe, maybe then accountability would be a valid point.
Until then I will celebrate the fact that the odds are a little more evened out now than they were before.
This isn't true at all.
What you describe isn't really relevant to cryptocurrency. You might as well advocate for the abolition of taxation to "even the playing field." The resulting societal disaster be darned.
No, not at all. Taxation is another broken system that needs to be fixed, not abolished. Voting has proven to do nothing. The act of protesting has done little, and continues to be attacked with nonsense bills.
All that's left is what everyone has been repeating for the past five decades: To vote with our money.
Now people are creating ways to remove their money from systems that are controlled by regulators that continue to disappoint. It's a consequence more than it is anything else. Obviously this, too, has its own set of drawbacks, but "societal disaster" really is not the one I'm worried about, because we're already headed that way with what he have right now.
Is the thinking of some people that problem today is that some very wealthy/powerful have a vast, unfair, advantage over ... other very wealthy people? Or something.
The concept is bizarre. Have you not thought that a process that facilitates unlimited, unbridled competition tends to produce a few winners, the wealthy and powerful, and those winners, having more power, squash the competition following the rules of this unbridled competition, which isn't going to prevent them from using their wealth and power for competition.
Yes. It may not be too worrisome right now, but what if the cryptocurrency phenomena became several orders of magnitude bigger? Couple that with climate wars, failed states, and malignant corporations. I can imagine some very grim outcomes indeed.
If you're the unwilling vassal of the centralized superpower that controls all the money and financial flows, then the malignant entity is the state that keeps you under boot.
We might hope in theory that the democratic state that controls things has the people's best interest at heart, but an honest study of history shows that's never really been true. The state only cares about the well being on the people (and the environment) in so far as it feeds back into their own power on the global stage.
And it almost necessarily has to be this way. Any democratic state that honestly cared about it's people at the expense of it's power would eventually be destroyed or overpowered by an external (or internal) organization that was more ruthless.
the primitives i'd push back on is this though, are these not the anthesis to democracy as well as you've defined it?
- inflation hits the poorest classes the hardest re: devaluing their largely all-cash savings, and they have no accountability measures to change that. who will they call, the fed? their senators who approved the fed chair?
- how do consensus algorithms and the open source nature of cryptocurrencies factor into your judgement? provide provide a visible way for anyone to audit and approve of (via participation in) a currency system of their choice. that's a strong feedback loop.
Inflation generally hurts the middle-class the most. Poor people generally don't have savings and are debtors. Debtors benefit from inflation.
Cryptocurrency being open source isn't really relevant to my point.
To your first point, the current views of holders isn't relevant as personalities are certainly not immutable, and as well all know, power corrupts.
The middle class typically has a mortgage and student loan debt for which inflation benefits them.
The closer you are to the spiket, the more debt based inflation benefits you.
The poor do lose the most.
Whoever can leverage the most debt for assets benefits the most under an inflationary scheme. This tends to be banks and generally wealthy people.
Stated inversly the poorest are hurt the most as they are least a part of this wealth generating scheme.
Cash savings is largely irrelevant. Most Americans are net negative cash wise via credit cards. So stating the middle class is most hurt doesn't follow logically.
I'm basically middle class, but to keep a substantial cash savings would be financial idiocy in this inflationary system.
There is no inflation Inflation is transitory Inflation is actually good
That was priced in? How about in other countries? Where the next day the currency devaluates 50%?
Honestly, I don't want to come across like I'm making an argument in favor of intentional inflation, but provided it isn't runaway levels that wreck an economy, I'm not even sure who it hurts. The poor are debtors. The middle class are the biggest holders of 30-year mortgages, which are about the best assets you can possibly hold when there is inflation. The rich hold their wealth in appreciating assets. Issuers of long-term debt and retirees who moved their savings into bonds and cash seem like the most likely to be hurt, but there are so many simple hedges they could have employed. Banks can issue long-term bonds so they're net zero debt holders rather than creditors. Retirees can move their savings into TIPS rather than cash.
It gives governments a tool to erode its liabilities while continuing to spend irresponsibly.
This hurts everyone not willing or able to take cheap credit.
a lot of them are naively thinking "crypto will become the new world, i believe in it, it's obvious, we have to do it, we have to free the people from <bad past>"
What is this even supposed to mean? Strict state controls on economic activity are more within the realm of authoritarian regimes, rather than democracies.
The entire point is that all institutions in an Authoritarian country are under the control of the authoritarian leader/party.
If the judicial system has independent power and can hold the rulers accountable when the violate the law, it isn't an authoritarian regime.
This is precisely why the US has a system of checks and balances and why the judicial system is an important part of that.
I don't think there's any way to do this without giving trust to some central entity without a public blockchain. The public blockchain does become the source of trust, but you need a resource (like energy), that is finite, to secure that network.
However, going back to your original comment, you said we are assuming a zero carbon footprint, so that would assume some future where this trust could be put on a network in a way that would be environmentally sustainable. All I'm saying is that there are more possibilities to this technology than I think you are acknowledging.
Good luck with that.
If that idenifier is unlinked to their identity, how do they cryptographically prove their identity when voting? How do you audit voter rolls?
This is a red herring anyway since I was specifically talking about cryptocurrency. In a purely decentralized cryptocurrency economy, taxation becomes impossible. You can't prevent pseudonymous economic transactions and the existence of privacy orriented cryptocurrenciesean that transactions can always route through that layer to turn that pseudonymity into anonymity.
The entire current use case for cryptocurrencies is literally evading the rule of law (and speculation.)
I have sympathies with anarchic ideals and issues with democratic processes, but please don't try to pass one off as the other.
You may view state control on economic activity as authoritarian, but that's a pretty extreme view. I personally think that a democratically elected government should be able to control the economy when necessary, even if I don't always agree on how that control is applied. Otherwise, power will inevitably accumulate in increasingly large corporations, to the detriment of everyone else.
Only in Proof of Stake. This is wby Proof of Work is still considered the most secure against centralization.
> Otherwise, power will inevitably accumulate in increasingly large corporations, to the detriment of everyone else.
Pot --- kettle.
How then, if democracy and state authority can check the concentration of power, did we end up here?
A PoS crypto only works if there is an initial pre-sale (many of the ICO cryptos), or starting with a PoW period (like Ethereum did, there was also an ICO) and then moving to PoS.
Without one (or both) of the above the tokens at stake are worth nothing
If we can get back to democracy and genuine state authority, as opposed to increasingly-gerrymandered districts, voter suppression, and "state authority only when it suits the moneyed interests," which is more or less what we have now, then we'll be in much better shape overall.
Is it really? Throughout history it seems to go hand-in-hand with massive human rights abuses. Case studies include the USSR, DPRK, China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc.
Disclaimer: I don't have any opinion on this, just reacting to the "completely illogical" comment.
It depends on whether the word "democracy" has any meaning. In a democracy, we get to vote on how economic activity is regulated. Crypto is a tool to avoid democracy.
Do you consider the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to be a democracy? The people in that country vote overwhelmingly in favor of authoritarian policies there. I believe it's reasonable to argue that true democracy is incompatible with authoritarianism.
only in matters of that cryptocurrency.
>more shares = more votes
Yeah, people without shares have no business (and no interest) in decisions concerned with that cryptocurrency.
It's like saying a game community is not democratic because only players of that game can make decisions about the future of the game and the hardcore players (early adapters) get more votes than the newbies.
I think crypto tech is exploring ways to reinvent democracy/society, but cryptocurrencies are not meant to do it (as the name cryptoCURRENCY suggests).
This is a wildly extreme viewpoint, given that every single country has strict controls on economic activity, where almost every transaction of size needs to be reported.
Can't it be removed by just not using the crypto? Crypto only has value if people buy into it making it a democratic system. People vote which crypto is best based on which they choose to use and pay attention to.
> our current system isn't here by accident.
Is cryptocurrency here "by accident"?
I'm not going to say it will be successful in that aim, but the idea that governments can simply create currency by fiat, donate it to their powerful, insolvent friends, pass the cost along to your grandchildren and/or degrade the value of your savings is not what I consider to be a democratic system.
Was it actually, though?
And ironically it works the same way in crypto. I bet the traditional financial markets wish they could "roll back" financial calamities like the Ethereum DAO hack - the founder of ethereum lost money so oops, hit the undo button, roll back every transaction on the whole network. That's the exact same sort of "socialism for the elites, capitalism for the rest" as crypto boosters complain about with USD.
Some portion of the answers to the objection that cryptocurrency increases the level of unaccountable power seem to be being met with "but look how unaccountable power is now", which misses the power. Boy, yes, power is pretty unaccountable and those with their hands on the levers of power seem to be the wealthy.
Those who benefit from cryptocurrency are also the wealthy, who can use this along with the other levers of power to increase their influence and increase their wealth. There's counter balance to the power of Fed here.
I like to make this joke often: What's the difference between communism and bitcoin?
Communism has actually been tried in practice.
Only to the extent that the coin is premined or that the emission is heavily concentrated on the first few years. This should be much less of a problem with a purely linear emission (never changing block reward), that takes a century to get yearly supply inflation to under 1%.
That's an interesting way of describing open source software, whose existence depends on nodes willingly adopting and agreeing to a set of protocols. I'm guessing its far easier to fork a chain and convince people to join a new network, than it is to overthrow a central bank/government.
Either way, the only way a coin or chain has value is by people participating in it, whether that's buying, transacting, mining, hosting nodes, or developing.
In fact, the system is so open to competition, you can fork a chain and take all its existing data to support your new network. You can't do that with Facebook, Uber, or Paypal.
No one is forced to use crypto. No one is forced to mine it. No one is forced to use it at all. Is this not democratic? The users choose whether they want to use it, miners choose whether to mine it, and the "lack of accountability" you suggest, I just don't agree with at all.
Crypto removes the need for government fiat. There is no need for a central authority any more over money supply. If you don't like it, fork it, or create a new crypto, and market it. See if it catches on. The democracy of the people will decide whether to use it or not.
Some cryptos also have voting / governance rights, so the users can democratically vote on protocols, directly. In comparison, if I want a law to change at the federal level in the US, first of all there has to be a bill created in support of it (which I have almost zero control over), and then I can call my senator and ask that they support that bill. At that point they can choose to listen or not. I assume they will just do whatever is in their interest to stay in power and support their friends in government that supported them before, not to mention the lobbyists. Even my vote for president in the US in the end is decided by the electoral college, not by the popular vote. How is all of that democratic?
I understand the energy concerns with crypto, but since you are figuring in a zero carbon footprint, I disagree and think you completely miss the benefits that crypto offers over existing systems.
In the end, time will tell and I think there's almost no way that blockchain and crypto won't play a major part in future economies and governance.
They're not currencies, they're speculation.
People want to spend currencies, why would you ever spend bitcoin when it's designed to always increase in value?
Governments are their citizens, they're just people we picked. If you hate the people that are running, there's a built in solution, get someone better to run. That's the fundamental part of democracy, anyone can run for office.
Why is a central control over money supply bad? Lets you attempt to control the boom/bust cycle.
Or they see benefits in the technology?
> People want to spend currencies, why would you ever spend bitcoin when it's designed to always increase in value?
It's possible some of the other cryptos are more suited for currencies. Bitcoin may be more of a store of value like gold, or maybe it's volatility will decrease over time and it would be more suited for a currency. Right now we don't know, but I'm not going to write off the whole sector due to that.
> Governments are their citizens, they're just people we picked. If you hate the people that are running, there's a built in solution, get someone better to run. That's the fundamental part of democracy, anyone can run for office.
I think the normal citizen is so far removed at this point. At least in the US, it's essentially a two party system, and they are both rather full of shit. I still vote though, because why not? But I don't think the system is working well.
> Why is a central control over money supply bad? Lets you attempt to control the boom/bust cycle.
I hold USD. I'd like for it to stay valuable. I have a government that seems to value equities more, and wants people to spend their USD. They print and borrow money like there's no tomorrow. I think this is a bad option, and I'd like there to be alternatives.
Land, collectibles, natural resources, Bitcoin: as long as they are priced in USD and USD is constantly devalued year after year - prices will rise.
So a) Bitcoins become harder to make, and b) The total possible number of Bitcoins goes down.
I think a lot of people are missing that cryptocurrency is still a very new concept. Both the bulls and bears. It's going to take some time to work it all out and that's okay, just like with any technology. We're talking about something invented in 2008, that's 12 years. It's unsurprising that there's a lot of kinks to be worked out. It typically takes 20 years for a technology to start to mature. I mean hell, the internet is a lot older and we still have a lot of things to work out.
Will crypto be useful in the long run? Who knows. I think it holds some promise but I do think people vault over sell it and people also dismiss it too quickly.
If you're worried about currency falling under the control of an unaccountable group of oligarchs who can't easily be removed, I have some bad news for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Board_of_Gover...
The most traditional means of removing oligarchs is for an angry mob to murder them and their entire families. Does cryptocurrency prevent that? Maybe if you don't know who the oligarchs are. But cryptocurrency also doesn't really require that, either. A currency is only valuable when enough people believe that it is valuable. If there's an actual problem with a particular coin, people can switch coins--which they can't with fiat.
Oligarchs, or at least powerful elites, are more or less a human universal in cultures of a sufficient size and complexity. The main difference with democracy is that democracy makes it far easier to gain power through demagoguery and propaganda.
> Even if what I'm saying doesn't come to be, at a minimum you've introduced yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit - our current system isn't here by accident. It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth.
To what ends?
Among other things, fiat currency makes individual human beings more governable. Cryptocurrency makes individual human beings less governable. The more governable the private individual becomes, the easier it becomes for an oligarchy to oppress him.
These are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, both of which are elected by people democratically. In addition if any of them were particularly egregious, a motivated populace could amend the constitution via no representatives and kick them out anyway.
So...
Do you know a single person who, in their entire lives, has ever voted for either their President or their Senator primarily on the basis of Federal Reserve Board appointments? Most voters don't even know the constitutional duties of the President. Presidential candidates are (mostly) front men for unaccountable groups of oligarchs who can't easily be removed.
Just like in every country where the printing press has been abused. Literally 0 precedent right?
And dinasaurs weren't on earth by accident. They were part of evolution and then replaced with other species more appropriate for evolving earth and conditions.
Bitcoin (if successful) will serve as an international safe haven from reckless monetary policy. It counterbalances fiat, it doesn't replace it.
1. You need to fill-in paperwork and be on a mercy of a local DHS official to be allowed. At any time regulation will and can change without you knowing about it.
2. Try to move it without paperwork and risk losing it all
3. Try to store it in the bank and risk of government/bank/courts to lock you out of your gold savings.
4. Try to store it on your own and risk losing it all to crime.
5. Entering another country - same risks with their customs as above.
6. Moving bitcoin across borders is a bit easier
It’s not any form of store of wealth that perpetuates the oligarchies, it’s unwillingness and corruptibility of political class that allows them to exist.
Half of fucking london is owned by oligarchs as an investment haven, so until you publicly come out in support of demolishing that atrocity, don’t even utter a sound against cryptocurrencies, that just makes you a laughable hypocrite.
Not to mention that store of wealth is completely orthogonal to political systems and free access to store of wealth and transaction system that isn’t fuckedup-able by “government” should be basic human right.
> The fundamental political issue with cryptocurrency is now you've created some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power cannot be really removed by traditional means. It's just a regression. Instead there is some amorphous group of oligarchs whose power can be removed by force. This is an issue to me. When people talk about "removal of power" always sound authoritarian. I assume that you are ok with Jack Ma "vanishing" for some months after saying the wrong thing?
> yet another layer to our financial systems for no benefit Not another layer added to the current system, but a new system
> It's here due to learnings - learnings about human nature, markets, and so forth. Agree. It's also outdated. At some point in time rai/fei stones were good enough for the yap people. Many of the defi apps are built with knowledge from the centralized finance world. It's an evolution. It doesn't look like it now because we are still at a very early stage.
Absolutely. The current monetary system is controlled by the people. The Fed was created by an act of congress and continues to operate at the whim of Congress. Its mandate is to maintain a low, fixed rate of inflation and maximum employment - while being at arms length of the executive itself to provide predictability and stability across administrations.
The ruling class of Bitcoiners act to manipulate the price both up and down for their own personal gain.
[edit] Doge co-creator Jackson Palmer's analysis is spot on. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/ummjackson/status/1415353984617914370?s=...
Essentially, the financial sector has succeeded so wildly in regulatory capture that we have lost any semblance of democratic control over banks and are unable to dispense punitive consequences for large scale criminal behavior in finance. There have still been no consequences for large banks issuing known bad mortgages in the early 2000s and then reselling those mortgages in bundles with artificially inflated default rate claims. This "trick" was deployed by most major banks and lead to disastrous consequences for people far removed from finance. Having a route to opt out of traditional finance for e.g. savings accounts, loans, and basic investments, feels like it actually improves the health of our democracy.
What works is incentives and design that makes it hard to misuse or obvious how to use.
This is not true at all, lol. How do you think modern civilization came to be?
It doesn't solve anything for anyone, it's just an effective system of slavery.
Democratic governments understand that the solution to _everything_ isn't committees of citizens and votes on everything. Democratic governments rely on experts, private businesses, and regulation to bring welfare to their people. Real democratic governments have to balance many factors for the welfare of their people. I feel your view of democracy is a little too naive and unrealistic.
I'm not sure how a cryptocurrency based financial system, designed so that there can be never be criminal justice consequences for any financial action, is supposed to be an answer to particular abuses without consequences in the ordinary financial system. The state doesn't do a great job regulating bad actors in the financial system - how can "let them do whatever they want" be the answer to that?
If we had an ethereum based loan system, in the ideal, home owners could not get relief for the most abusive contract and those who made those contracts could remain anonymous and inherently immune to consequences.
I don't see why that's true at all, cryptocurrencies are public ledgers with mostly KYC'd on/off ramps. You can pursue criminals, but it's harder to create collusion-based regulatory monopolies. Users of financial products have more choices through self custody and the diversity of decentralized financial products. The merger of decentralized finance with a better regulatory/taxation framework (+ a few safety features) will significantly dis-intermediate mainstream finance and deal a major blow to Wall Street. It's going to be great.
>If we had an ethereum based loan system, in the ideal, home owners could not get relief for the most abusive contract and those who made those contracts could remain anonymous and inherently immune to consequences.
Smaller scale crimes may be harder to track down but large scale institutional crimes will be easier to prosecute since e.g. Aave will never have the regulatory clout of Bank of America. Decentralized finance institutions adding systemic hazard to our financial system will be more vulnerable to governmental actions and individuals will have more choices to not participate in an opaquely corrupt system of finance that manages to ensnare everyone through savings and retirement funds.
I don't want the money I save to be funneled to the investment banking arm of a mega-corp which then destabilizes the entire country with impunity.
Explain how bitcoin has become the go-to tool for ransomware gangs.
Moreover, the intent of cryptocurrency creators and substantial number of cryptocurrency users is to be immune to regulation. You can read the number of posters here who view bitcoin as answer to the power of the Fed. Maybe crypto can be so controlled by regulators that it won't anything, in which case there's no idealistic argument for its existence. Or maybe crypto could make it's users immune to consequences, in which case there are good arguments to follow China's lead and make the system point-blank illegal.
Recent news: * https://www.voanews.com/a/us-treasury-slaps-sanctions-on-cry...
* https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/07/politics/colonial-pipeline-ra...
Since PGP and Bitcoin are speech, they are difficult technologies to stop.
Good. I never consented to capital controls, property confiscation, drug laws and all the other blessings that “democracy” has bestowed on me. Finally there might be a path to opting out.
And none of that has anything whatsoever to do with monetary policy. This is a quixotic quest.
Bitcoin is a transparent, simple currency. There will only ever be 21m Bitcoins and how they're minted is defined up front and everyone knows.
The Fed is combination of officials appointed by elected representatives and official of banks, with appointed officials having something of the lead. Representative democracy involves things like this.
They're now proposing to print more money to solve climate change. That's the opposite of democracy.
The printing of money here is effectively a tax. Taxing the population and using the revenues for programs to benefit people is how a state works (in this case, a (slightly) democratic state).
If anything, it seems you're proposing the wealthy not be subject to taxes oriented towards to common good, which is what the gp was (correctly imo) upset about. The only thing here is you're calling the power of the wealthy "democracy".
> If anything, it seems you're proposing the wealthy not be subject to taxes oriented towards to common good, which is what the op was (correctly imo) upset about.
I'm proposing the opposite. The money printing since 1971 has been one of the major drivers of inequality. If you own a lot of assets like stocks and real estate the last year and half of printing dollars has been tremendously good for you. If you work for a living and your income is mainly your salary, it hasn't. Your rent has gone up while your wages and opportunities have lagged.
Imagine if the wallet addresses of every politician were public and we could all see every donation -and- large donations would be automatically rejected by a smart contract unless they are signed and identified by the keys of a public notary they have disclosed their identity to.
(There is already one public Notary in Washington that can certify identity with their registered RSA key as a form of seal)
Cryptoassets can allow us to write our financial laws into code so we don't have to rely on the honor system as much.
In fact that was the whole selling point for me of cryptocurrencies. Anybody can join and shape the system by agreeing on the type of software and creating a system that can be easily shaped (through software) instead of a system that is quite hard to shape (current financial system).
Make universally applied carbon taxes across all industries and let the market sort it out. I'm a crypto bull, and fully support greening our energy economy. Advocating taxing energy consumption based on use is a recipe for corrupt insider dealing and political favoritism.
Crazy mandated ethanol blending.
Hydrogen "superhighways"
etc
Globally?
A way to enforce this is tariffs.
What's the solution? We should not tax all things equal.
In a perfect market, a global carbon tax would be excellent. Unfortunately we do not live in (anything resembling) a perfect market.
Subsidize the poor as we've always done.
Market value says very little about true value of goods and services globally. Why should we let it decide how to prioritize the little carbon emission we can afford?
Yes, definitely. I could afford paying 50% tax on flights. Most people in the world could not pay 50% more for their transportation.
The problem with a carbon tax is that it values all emissions equally. But on a global scale, some emissions are more essential than others. (Food, shelter, transportation to work etc)
Example: India vs Us carbon emissions per Capita is 4 times higher than India GDP vs Us GDP per Capita.
Any price increase on carbon will be felt 4x more by an Indian than by an American.
So what? These whataboutisms add nothing to the conversation.
People aren't going to stop caring about the carbon costs of crypto because other industries also suck. Think about it as an adoption blocker -- if your particular tech fetish can't address an issue that many, many people care about it is destined to be usurped by something that can. Would be awesome if the 'crypto bulls' would expend as much energy into ways to fix the carbon problem as they do arguing it doesn't matter.
The difference between crypto and things like agriculture or transportation is obvious. People need food and transportation. If crypto was eliminated entirely tomorrow, on average, no one would suffer - some would lose relative wealth but others would gain relative wealth. Unlike conventional financial markets even, it's hard to argue crypto provides any kind of incentive for efficiency.
Indeed, if crypto mining was punishingly taxed but crypto itself continued, almost no one would suffer, including most crypto holders.
Furthermore, millions would be affected if bitcoin were to go offline tomorrow. Particularly people living in authoritarian states[1], or people who do not have access to traditional banking services.
[0] https://twitter.com/gladstein/status/1414065840157347840?s=2... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-of-co...
Nobody here is trying to stop people in authoritarian states from using crypto.
Bringing up the authoritarian states is just a strawman.
Another option would be continually adjusting the block reward to not over subsidize mining.
The amount issued doesn't change, but the expected value of a number of hashes changes significantly.
The issue is that there is now too much electricity & therefore carbon emissions being spent on security the bitcoin blockchain. If the bitcoin community could adjust this down for slightly lower 51% attack defense they might be able to avoid the pressure from outside groups.
But the bitcoin community has shown it's self unable to make changes or establish any consensus outside of what is already believed.
But regardless by allowing transaction outside of state control, crypto may indeed help some hard bitten business people but simultaneously helps a vast array of criminals, from ransomware gangs to corrupt third world officials expatriating bribes and theft.
Not to defend the cruise lines, but that quote appears bogus. The tweet you cite refers to a "carbon footprint", in response to a quote about particulate emissions (using sulfur dioxide as an example).
This [1] puts total cruise line CO2 emissions in 2017 (first source I picked, but I imagine the number won't have changed much) at 21K tons, whereas a recent Reuters article [2] put Bitcoin at 22,000K tons of CO2.
If the above data is correct, then Bitcoin is responsible for more than 1000x as many CO2 emissions as cruise ships.
[1] https://www.tourismdashboard.org/explore-the-data/cruise-shi...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/how-big-is-bitcoins-carbo...
I agree that a general carbon tax would be better, and as a bonus, there's various progress toward just that around the world. But I'd find the argument you're making more compelling as a rebut to focus on cryptocurrency carbon footprint if the players in the cyrptocurrency industry were forcefully lobbying for general carbon taxes. Are there any examples of that?
https://susanfsu.medium.com/think-btc-is-a-dirty-business-co...
The promise of "proof of stake eventually" is just greenwashing.
Whilst I would agree that some types of crypto don't help in this regard as they add to the problem, it's truly very hypocritical to believe to be morally superior or to care about the environment, whilst hardly anybody does, crypto or not.
Said unsustainable industry you despise so much is the very thing making your luxury goods so cheap.
Phone chargers waste more energy than the entire crypto industry, yet you're not outraged by it at all. You're not even willing to take the incredibly tiny action of unplugging them, for a better world.
And I do not see how PS is greenwashing, since it is fundamentally changing the business. This is like going from burning brown coal to solar power, and then you would say solar power is just greenwashing.
I do not mind criticism, so give some.
Even beyond that, a PoS system is still, like all cryptocurrencies, functionally, a pyramid scheme.
PoS chains such as Solana and more efficient L2s are already starting to see wide adoption.
The people making significant money from mining cryptocurrencies are the ones with multiple warehouse-scale operations filled with custom hardware. These people aren't getting rich, they were already rich. Moving to PoS just removes some middlemen, not changes the fundamental economics.
If I have a million bitcoins because I got in on day 3, I don't have an advantage of making them today.
If I have a million PoS coins, because I got in on day 3, am I more likely to get more than someone who just started?
Real estate is a pyramid scheme. So are stocks. And even money itself. Anything of value is ultimately hoarded and concentrated in the hands of a few. It's not an issue unique to crypto.
Clearly with hundreds of billions in economic activity on the POW chain they have to take this very carefully.
PoS is here, has been for years and is extremely successful; Polygon side-chain for instance already has surpassed main net in terms of active addresses. Then there's L2 and PoS L1s like Tezos...
The meme of "when PoS?!" died in 2021.
The reason to hate it is clear: Not having any. The excuse to hate it will have to change though.
What will it be? There's always "inequality", I guess, but that is a bit too transparent and lets us see through to the actual reason.
I guess we will find out, exciting times for the angry blog post market!
Also, due to the existence of proof-of-stake it becomes impossible to shut down trading of proof-of-work coins, because while you can outlaw trading them on conventional exchanges, it's realistically impossible to stop them from being traded on decentralized exchanges. So if you want to get rid of the carbon emissions from proof-of-work, you have to kill proof-of-stake as well. Just make it entirely illegal to convert any crypto to USD or vice versa, and illegal to interact with any entity who doesn't respect said sanctions.
Works pretty well for other financial laws in the US, but it needs to have a sufficiently wide scope. It's not possible to retain "the good crypto" because the good crypto is an enabler for the bad crypto.
As far as i know there are no plans to move Bitcoin away from PoW, a project that would be very likely to fail due to the hopelessly quarrelling Bitcoin community.
So the only way to pay for such a war, is to do extremely heavy taxation on your citizen's Bitcoins.
Good luck with that.
Here's a recent report on the environmental impact of PoS:
http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/blockchain-energy-consumption...
Your link is just another Bitcoin maxi with awful logic. No, pumping money into pointless mining doesn't make a coin actually more valuable. It's just a waste. Out of all the real value crypto can bring - speed, trustlessness, decentralisation - mining isn't actually needed for any of it. It just forces things into a pyramid shape.
The article makes so many assumptions that are basically estimates that even posting this on HN is sad.
There are hundreds of pools and the ones they pick have a stronger China workload. Then, they extrapolate from that limited source of data.
Given that China just turned off everything and hardware moved globally (a lot to the US), it effectively invalidates everything they have been doing.
That said, I agree that the PoW mining reward is excessive.
Right now, a 51% attack on the network costs upwards of $2M/h[1]. That is an obscene amount. I argue this comes from the very high growth not being expected by the creators.
Most of the miner rewards right now come from inflation (in spite of inflation being less than 2% per year). This was intended to allow the network to grow permissionlessly - so, anyone can sacrifice real-world resources for some tokens, and they don't have to buy from someone already owning it.
The reason such a sacrifice is required is that you need a form of scarcity to prevent a Sybil attack[2]. Otherwise, a single person could spin up countless VMs to fake identities, which would be unfair.
Since everyone must have heard of Bitcoin by now, I believe this high reward is no longer warranted, and results in a lot of waste. It should be reduced, to reduce the electricity budget of miners. A larger share of this cost should be borne by people actually using the service - i.e. transaction costs.
I believe that Bitcoin should reduce its block time, in order to trigger the reward halvings more quickly.
Regardless of whether this is a good idea or not, it's not going to happen. This would be a hard fork in the network. Bitcoin already went through a massive civil war over the block size, which is a much less contentious issue than the supply issuance rate. It took years just to get the Segwit softfork out the door and years more to be widely used.
What you're suggesting would start a civil war that would rage for years, if not decades, and by the time it was finally resolved, the network would have already gone through a halving or two and naturally reduced the miner reward.
> What you're suggesting would start a civil war that would rage for years, if not decades
Yes, absolutely. I do believe even governments might react more quickly here, by taxing negative externalities, than this happening.
But I wish it did, so people would stop worrying about the power used.
Our entire lifestyles in the developed world are horrifically carbon heavy. Beating up on things like bitcoin without addressing the actual problem of oil subsidies and the lack of carbon taxes is a waste of political capital that will set back actual effective climate action by years or decades.
We can't afford to waste that time.
That's exactly what I'm saying. Getting tunnel vision on cryptocurrency is totally missing the point. Even if all cryptocurrnecies disappeared tomorrow, nothing would fundamentally change and our civilization would still be hopelessly unsustainable.
The solution to carbon pollution has to apply to all forms of our consumption, or it won't actually matter in the long run.
Miners already are self regulating to a degree by increasingly mining using renewables and where possible, stranded renewables (excess remote energy). This isn't really seen by the media as they love to make a story out of a very dirty exception, like an old coal plant.
However, it's very hard to get a holistic view of this progress. I recently read a pretty credible article that completely undermines the conclusion of this HN article. It stated that Bitcoin's energy mix is 3 times greener than most other industries.
Whom to believe? I don't know. Back on point, a carbon tax makes the green incentive hard, instead an optional moral consideration.
https://twitter.com/ishaheen10/status/1437997024083808257?s=...
[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-fee_to_reward.h...
Haven't they been planning to move to PoS "soon" now for at least several years? I hate to say I'll believe it when I see it, but... the believeability of their PoS timelines is more than a little suspect now.
> Ethereum hopes to do away with mining by early 2017... They're switching to proof of stake.
We've known how to do two-phase transactions for decades, now. We've had Merkle Trees for about the same period of time. The only innovation cryptocurrency offers is that it's decentralized, to avoid the garbage regulations surrounding moving money.
If anybody actually cared about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies, they'd do the obvious thing: advocate for the free, unencumbered movement of money from person X to person Y within the existing system.
A repeal of KYC and AML would immediately kill all cryptocurrencies, particularly privacy coins.
The current value in crypto isn't solely in moving money, there's scarcity (Bitcoin), utility (ether), Defi/staking, NFTs, the metaverse, whatever.
Moving money is a benefit, but the least interesting use case of crypto.
Indeed, because they're there for speculation, not value or utility.
> there's scarcity (Bitcoin), utility (ether), Defi/staking, NFTs, the metaverse, whatever.
Ok, I'll grant scarcity, but it's also part of the previously-mentioned end-run around the worst parts of the current fiat system.
Ether offers no utility beyond token scams. NFTs the same, except double.
> Moving money is a benefit, but the least interesting use case of crypto.
Moving money without the IRS/DOJ/FBI/CIA/NSA/Mossad/PLA peeking over your shoulder is literally the killer app for cryptocurrencies. BTC is obviously failing at this particular task for anyone on a KYC exchange, but cash and tumbler markets are still thriving, and there's always Monero and ZCash, as well.
I would generally agree that most things built on top of Ether are useless, hype-driven or simply scams. But details matters. When the dust clears, I believe there to be a future for some current experiments in a more mature form, but I won't digress too much.
For sure I believe you can still go underground in crypto and dodge everything, but I don't believe it to be the killer app or highly common.
The debt/credit system makes a whole lot of sense and I don't really see any innovation there in the cryptospace. Someone borrows $500k to start a business. The money flows into the hands of people who worked to make the business possible and they then get to redeem their dollars at the business in return. The debt gives the business a pretty good reason to accept USD voluntarily and the money supply is growing with the size of the economy.
The idea that the entrepreneur just buys $500k of Bitcoin and ends up owning $5 million without doing anything doesn't really appeal to me.
We need to send most of traditional energy to our households, cars, manufacturing facilities etc. This cost of transportation to me is the key difference.
Crypocurrencies don't need this. Imagine putting some mining rigs in orbit near the sun and harnessing the already abundant solar energy. All you need to send back to earth is a few bytes.
New coins will come along with greenwash in their rhetoric but ultimately you have to trust the science.
It's funny how everyone trusts the science when it supports their worldview and ignore it when it doesn't.
There exists a natural equilibrium of the value of the miner reward, the cost of energy, and the amount of energy consumed.
Eventually bitcoin will need to pay its own security through transaction fees.
So yeah it doesn't need constantly increasing energy expenditure as long as the amount of commerce using bitcoin stops increasing.
Devastating.
Now imagine if we spent 0.45% more of global electricity on carbon capture (and growing) and how much better off our prospects would be.
I know it doesn't translate, but can anyone look around and say anyone is even trying? (sorry to the few of you that are)
My only problem with bitcoin is, imagine if to own a share of Tesla stock, you had to burn down a hectare of forest.
I think we need to start taxing bloggers. The carbon footprint they are responsible for has been underestimated.