Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
fi.se
fi.se
Could not be clearer: either you allow Bitcoin, benefitting only a few miners and users, or you let society as a whole transition to a more sustainable future.
- you need to store radioactive waste for hundreds of years
- "safe" permanent storage sites often end up not not being actually safe 50 years later
- warming rivers by using the water for cooling may wreck local ecosystems
The only thing that is actually sustainable is not using all the energy in the first place. Bitcoin is the opposite of that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19...
A lot of problems we have with Nuclear is because the tech most widely used was created with a side goal of advancing nuclear weapon production.
I'm by no means a nuclear maximalist, but I could see better nuclear being a component of a larger sustainable energy strategy.
You can’t just buy, trade, and cash out stocks from some random guy online. Crypto is basically no different from stocks at this point—things change in value just because people think others expect the price to change and follow the herd.
This is mining.
But yes, an international treaty banning PoW crypto mining would be more effective. Then confiscate the equipment and use it to attack the networks.
I doubt there will be popular support for military interventions against Bitcoin. But if a "War against Bitcoin" were to happen, it would probably be as successful as the "War on Drugs" and "War on Terror"
What happened to power network neutrality?
But if there is a technology that threatens government power, suddenly it's suddenly all about the Earth.
For many people, Bitcoin is the only reliable technology to prevent their savings to be destroyed by inflation and to evade cruel sanctions. Your opinion has no value to them.
Second point - who are these people, and how much of BTC usage comes from that, vs greedy 'investors'/'evangelists' who have bought in, and get rich by other people buying in?
It's a rich people's plaything. Poor people in third world countries own very little of it, because they are poor. Bitcoin, and crypto as a whole, is a solution in search of a problem. It can be hammered into lots of use cases, but most are solved more quickly and efficiently by a backend and a database.
The people who use it do not have to justify it for you or anyone else. That's what makes it successful.
If you think a government wouldn't ban crypto for environmental reasons, can you believe a country would ban drinking straws for environmental reasons? Yeah, that happened, banning crypto is much more reasonable than banning drinking straws.
Speak for yourself. YOU may not have any environmental concerns because you don't give a shit about the environment, but you can't blame everybody else for being that negligent.
Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies are the same thing but for wealth and trade, being a necessary spending on deterrent maintenance. But this time it's not tied to any government, so naturally all governments are pissed off about it to a certain degree.
Governments ability to print money is a critical component of this system.
Bitcoin can run on completely emission free energy and end the era of money printing.
not a fan of using energy for some peoples private flights of fancy. we should prioritise actual infrastructure with social value.
Bitcoin is being fought by banks and governments because it threatens the dollar and the banking system.
The future they want is a global coin, not a decentralized currency.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
The fact that we aren't banning some things that we should (if we have an alternative) doesn't mean we shouldn't ban anything. To be clear, I'm all for banning climate change activities that we have an alternative for. Also for accelerating research into things for which we don't. Bitcoin can be regulated in order to limit the climate change effects, right now it's a huge tulip mania.
Proof of Work coins are being fought for governments because they committed to goals decided in Paris Agreement and PoW CCs are making it harder to achieve the goals. Swedes discuss banning Bitcoin, but not PoS coins or premined coins that do not have PoS or PoW
What's wrong with the dollar? Just because something is centralized doesn't mean it's bad.
If you were a normal person living in Iran (or any other country to which the US decides to apply arbitrary economic sanctions), you might feel rather different about this.
Can someone give me a good explain?
First, not all cryptos share Bitcoin's open ledger characteristics.
Look up Monero, ZCash, Grin, Beam : they all implement untraceable transactions, not just pseudo-anonymous ones like Bitcoin.
Second, pseudonymous transactions is far from being the only interesting property of Bitcoin. Among others, no centralized control is a key aspect.
As a non-criminal, what use would I have for untraceable transactions?
As a non-criminal, what you would you have a need for privacy?
Or worse, imagine using your Bitcoin wallet in a store, and the business owner sees that you have $100k in the wallet you just paid with (because it's public knowledge). He then calls his friends who will follow you and try to kidnap and torture you to hand them over.
Is that any different than a ponzi/pyramid scheme?
Crypo cannot create or destroy fiat currency. So if you sell your crypto and make a profit in dollars, it's exactly because someone else bought it at a higher price than you did.
And they expect someone else will buy it from them, in just the same way...
So every dollar that comes out of cryptocurrency is because a later investor put a dollar in.
Doesn't that sound like the definition of a Ponzi scheme?
The core of the coin ecosystem are the stable coins, which are generally pegged to fiat, but are only backed by fractional reserves of cash. So the same USD can be recycled many times to buy Bitcoin.
Not only that, but the stable coin operators are under no obligation to exchange their coins back to you for the pegged currency at face value.
Tether is essentially an unregulated bank with nominal deposits totaling 73 billion USD, no obligation to pay depositors, a huge amount of minimally disclosed liabilities, and unaudited financial reserves.
Ponzi was but an amateur.
>but are only backed by fractional reserves of cash.
Maybe tether, but that isn't true of all, or even most stablecoins. Some stablecoins are overcollateralized rather than fractionally lent. As for the obligation, USDC for example is a fully audited system (by firm Grant Horton, who performs weekly audits), backed 1:1 by cash/cash equivalents and redeemable for $1 USD.
https://coinmarketcap.com/view/stablecoin/
However, even USDC is still doing fractional reserve banking because an unspecified amount of its reserves are tied up in securities that have maturities up to 90 days, so they are still susceptible to a bank run. Though, granted they seem to be running a much more respectable operation than Tether.
The third biggest stable coin BUSD, looks pretty shady as well. They release monthly audited accounts (good), but they're terse as hell. What liabilities do they have? Have these reserves been used as collateral in loans? Which banks are they in? What steps have the firm taken to audit these funds? No way to know, we're just get a terse list of aggregate numbers.
In the gold market, you are buying a contract to deliver you physical gold at a point in time.
Similarly with tulips, Beanie babies, fine art, and old watches the underlying asset is what it is.
MLMs and other traditional pyramid schemes also do typically hand you real assets, and so are not inherently Ponzi schemes.
But when that extrinsic demand is driven by fraudulent claims (like Madoff's "beat the market every year" returns), then it can be considered a Ponzi scheme, because they don't even get the tulips or Picassos or whatever, they get nothing.
The gray area, especially with MLMs, is what kind of support and service benefits you get - these are often fraudulent or misleading (Ponzi scheme) but they don't inherently have to be.
Check out GNU Taler (and alternatives), which really are payment systems instead of currency alternatives
I haven't seen physical cash in almost two years (one exception, a contractor wanted to dodge some tax) and the system just works effortlessly.
Tapping a card is easier and faster then counting change.
I don't see how paying a $20 gas fee and waiting 15 minutes would improve the situation.
Second, higher competition in the payments ecosystem would force providers to reduce their fees. The glaring example is what is happening in San Salvador, where by using Bitcoin they are likekly to save 450 USD millions/year in fees.
More like shift 450mm/year into the pockets of the people running Chivo while creating a media circus to distract from the president's takeover of the judiciary.
Freedom!
That's why the government even preemptively allocated $150mm for them, I guess?
> you are free to choose whatever wallet you want.
Unless you want assistance at one of the official facilities, or the promised stimulus. Half the population is supposedly on Chivo. Defaults matter, especially if your goal is graft and not a sustainable and beneficial economic policy.
I also notice you only tried to contradict the parts critical to dear bitcoin, not about growing autocracy.
This is like saying "why do I need encryption, I don't have anything to hide".
Many people do not have this privilege.
We should reopen the thread with a different premise.
"Crypto currencies have no place or value in the western world"
If the current demand for it, as measured by the market price is any kind of indicator, you have your work cut out for you trying to convince people.
Nobody ever fought encryption because of its environmental impact and contribution to global warming and wasted energy, or because it burns lots of coal and causes cancer and lung disease.
the other thing is that (for the 9 billionth time) people are clueless and associating all of crypto with bitcoin.
There are tons of chains that aren't proof of work and there's also nothing suggesting proof of work can't run on renewable energy either, something like 60% of chinese mining was.
You act like we have infinite energy of all types. But we don't - it's close to a zero-sum game.
80% of US energy comes from fossil fuels. If your blockchain uses a huge amount of renewable energy, then some other application is forced to use fossil fuels.
I don’t see a problem allowing e.g one Bitcoin to be mined but that doesn’t mean it should be any easier to set up a mining shop than to establish a new golf course.
The answer I suppose is that a) what’s legal isn’t necessarily what can be enforced and b) just like no one would find your single cannabis plant, this is probably about industrial level mining where authorities have insight through permits for construction, permits for yearly emissions, use of cooling water and so on.
To me, money and profit is less important than freedom. Web 3.0 to me is a chance to build a better future.
(For the record, I have no investments in btc, eth, or any proof of work chains. I am invested in AVAX, which has a more energy efficient consensus protocol)
Run by babies who will manually change the output of the computer when it calculates something they don’t like.
I personally don't believe in cryptocurrency and blockchain in general, but also I must say if I believed in it 10 years ago I would be financially much better off :)
Erlich Bachman Vs Psilocybin. (Making The World a Better Place.):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tLvzyb3_Uc
Silicon Valley: Making the World a Better Place | SXSW Convergence 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE9Dvd_NEBg
OH GOD this is hilarious! Zach Woods is so perfectly in character that I'm afraid he may actually be as deeply disturbed as the character he plays on the show. His impression of the Little Lord Fauntleroy of the Grindr empire was perfect! The setup starts at 3:40.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Woods
I won't transcribe his NFSW joke, but later there's some excellent clean discussion too (starting at 13:18):
Steven Leckart (Moderator, Writer and Filmmaker)> You guys need to understand, these guys get pitched all the time by Silicon Valley. Like, we were in the back room, and there were guys from a -- can I say who it is? Should I say who it is?
(Off Camera)> Naaaaaw!
Leckart> But like this tech company that we've all read about in the news is coming up and like handing business cards, and cornering them, and telling them all about their, like, business strategies. And there is no hint -- it's like a deer in the headlights, right, like? Like you are just going to take this conversation and find a way to weave it into the show. And I sort of wondered, like, does Silicon Valley, are they just completely out to lunch about what you're doing? Like, why does anyone talk to you about this stuff?
Martin Star (Bertram Glfoyle)> They want to be a part of the show.
This is a fundamentally unfair question. People waste lots of resources on things I don't think we need. There is a powerful principle in modern economies that if people have money then they don't need to justify what they think is a good idea to you, me, the government or anyone else unless there are compelling reasons to.
"Do you need this?" isn't a question that is asked anywhere except when there is measurable harm. Mining bitcoins doesn't cause measurable harm. If it does, then that is an argument that we shut down the electricity grid - a different debate.
We may as well ban half the technology we have. People don't need any of it.
That doesn’t mean we need to ban Bitcoin as a country mandating all computation bound proof of work coins on date X would allow for a transition. However existing miners already have significant investments and are going to keep trying to profit from them which makes such transitions problematic.
It’s exactly the same argument that led to the ban of CFCs, incandescent light bulbs, direct electric space heating, and cars without catalytic converters the list goes on and on.
For instance, there are tons of stories of PayPal randomly pulling the rug under legitimate businesses, and destroying them in the process.
Or how the US government blocked payments to WikiLeaks when they presented proof of war crimes US committed.
Crypto is like digital cash in this sense, as nobody can prevent you from paying with it.
The decentralization is only useful in a world where the central authority (e.g. banking system, governments) are not trustworthy, and this excludes legal activities where a legal remedy is enormously valuable. I've heard that international transactions are a use case, but realistically if a country reneged on a financial transaction the remedy is and always would be soft- or hard-power based (diplomacy, sanctions, military).
The pseudonymity is only useful to the extent that you don't want the government to track you. But our societies have generally decided that the government should have oversight into how we spend our money to stop criminal activity. Agree or not, this is the consensus: so it makes no sense to argue that the government should then tolerate a system that undermines its rules.
If we wanted to allow anonymous transactions, we could do so much more efficiently by simply removing KYC regulations on the banks. We aren't going to do that, and in fact KYC is broadly being implemented at crypto exchanges so for the overwhelming majority of crypto users there is no real benefit: you're already centralized and everyone already knows what you're doing.
Even for the speculative investors there is limited utility: they could simply invest in derivative securities on traditional markets without incurring the incredible cost of performing crypto transactions.
And humanity is not on the verge of climate extinction, although it is the dogma of our times.
The marketing industry has turned into such a global exploitative scam with the tools that have today.
There is even a successful Korean TV show depicting this current situation.
So actually it won't affect bitcoin, but it will release the energy to other uses.
The sentiment on HN against crypto strikes me as odd… it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s …
Give it some time to evolve and embrace the future!
I've known about crypto for almost ten years. I worked in the field writing bits of the rippled code for a couple of years. And I still have no idea why anyone would want to use cryptocurrencies, except of course for crime.
> it’s like saying cars are the devils tool in the 1900s …
Hmm, is this comment intended to be a parody? Well, it certainly turned out that the car was the Devil's tool, because we are running as fast as we can to devastate our climate by turning fossil fuels into carbon dioxide.
To be fair, mankind evolved a lot due to the use of cars. Off-rail transportation has changed the way we live, not just for the worse. The coffee and bananas I bought today was transported by a motor vehicle for the last mile. The ambulance that drove my friend to the hospital was also a motor vehicle.
Most of our agriculture that is responsible for us having cheap food, is also powered by motor vehicles.
Motor vehicles have benefited nearly everyone, whereas crypto currencies haven't benefited almost anyone so far except the speculators who advocate for more people to buy in, to push the price up, so they can cash out (in fiat of course) at a higher price.
If so many individual people across America didn't need to own multiple cars to commute long distances to work every day, and could simply take decent government subsidized public transportation, or ride their bike safely on well designed ubiquitous bike paths, like I can where I live in Amsterdam, then the world would be a much better place.
Just as the world would be a better place if cryptocurrency's shrill shills and speculating "investors" didn't gamble their money and buy their drugs by burning huge quantities of coal.
There are much more efficient heath-friendly and eco-friendly ways of gambling money and buying drugs than by burning coal to mine cryptocurrency.
That sounds preachy and pretentious. Like Paris Hilton saying homeless people should just stop being poor and go to an ATM and take out money to buy a house like she did. Not everyone has access to Amsterdam like infrastructure since not everyone lives in Amsterdam and usually people have no direct say in the public infrastructure of the place they live so they adapt in way that improves their live, the best way they can, usually by owning cars.
Have you considered why 85% of Germans own cars and drive almost everywhere? Same in Austria, outside of Vienna or the city center of the other "bigger" cities, you absolutely need a private car to get anywhere in a timely manner as public transport is sparse and infrequent.
You can't just come in on your high horse flat and dense rich city with top infrastructure and preach that everyone else is doing it wrong and should live like you do, because most people don't have that luxury of such choices where they live and instead have to deal as best they can with poor infrastructure choices made by governments and interest groups way before they were even born, choices which take decades and millions to reverse, if they ever even do.
So please consider this next time.
But once they get L2/L3 chains properly into place, so that every interaction is just a fraction of a fraction of the new state, and you can deploy say a little chat room, or a game world, or a marketplace, a collection of router configs, etc, etc, and not have to think too hard about the state, that's getting pretty cool to me. And combine that with the dev experience starting to get good (I recently used hardhat to make a fully typed, hot reload front end, working with hot reloading fully on chain backend) - it's going to be a new frontier for hacking and side projects like the early internet was
It doesn't make sense the jump from keeping state in a distributed, trusted store for a finite state machine to deploying chat rooms, etc., what do you mean? Synchronising those states through a blockchain just to enforce some kind of distributed trust? I really don't get it.
I might be too stupid for this, bear with me. I've heard the argument about L2+ chains for a long time, Lightning has been around since 2017 and I still see this comment popping up, I still see TX fees high as fuck.
I really would like a more clear explanation of what you see as benefits, this whole paragraph reads as pure techno-babble to me.
So like, you want to make a chat room, and someone has a special power to ban people, and the chat room remembers who is banned. If the banning person doesn’t log in for a while, the power moves to someone else randomly. There’s also membership tiers, so people can pay a small fee to have fancier names if they really like the room, and there are little mini games in there with leaderboards. And there’s also no one in charge, it’s just a room with some rules that exists because the people in it sort of like those rules, and anyone in it can spool another one up with different settings if they want.
All of that stuff would take quuuiiite a bit of backend logic to code. But with smart contracts you can take basically all of it for granted, it might be like… a few pages at most of contract code. And then you can focus on writing a really good user interface instead.
Anyone can then just grab that front end code that just runs in a browser, chuck a tiny bit of crypto in to fuel it, and suddenly the backend exists purely on chain. Wherever there’s a group of people, and they have some kind of collaborative set of rules they’d like to agree to, like a marketplace or anything like that, crypto makes it really really easy
The biggest issue is really just the cost. Currently it’s ~$5 to transact which is… too high for any side project or toy. But with L2’s (rolling out now) it should come down to almost nothing, so I reckon we’ll start to see some pretty cool stuff popping up soon
Thats not exactly true. Every 2016 blocks the network compares the actual blocks mined with the target blocks (at 10 mins per block), and adjusts the difficulty accordingly.
If you suddenly had less miners the current difficulty would mean that the time to mine a block would be greater than 10 mins. Depending on where it is in the 2016 block cycle it could also mean an extended period of time before the difficulty is rectified.
If the network suddenly dropped to a VERY low hashrate (like a single PC), it is possible it would take (at current difficulty) tens of millions of years to mine a single block - let alone 2016 of them. Of course, thats probably not going to happen, im just using it as an example to show that its not a fixed period of time per block.
Also, I think it is absolutely BS to claim that allowing bitcoin mining equals not "letting society transition to a more sustainable future".
If electricity production is constrained then this should be addressed generally on both demand and supply sides instead of essentially finding scapegoats.
(I don't like bitcoin, by the way, but it's not a reason to go over the top)
Various other industry already pay that tax, why not mining crypto? Crypto fans make various claims, so lets check that. E.g. Any new etherum block carbon footprint would be verified through oracle and smart contracts. Based on that it will be subject to tax that will go to carbon-capture companies.
With that incentive, crypto could innovate to better methods and be buyer of last resort of clean energy.
Crypto can adapt quickly, climate can’t. We can not afford new carbon intensive industries.
What you are describing penalizes somebody who uses clean energy for mining and ignores somebody who uses coal power for running his bot farm.
E: Can't reply below, but here's a very real argument for you. It's completely absurd to bikeshed about banning an activity that doesn't even exist in Sweden at any meaningful scale. Discussing whether or not Sweden should ban cryptomining is utterly pointless when nobody is (planning to start) mining in Sweden at any significant scale.
It really does matter what government officials spend their time on, this is an utter waste. To suggest that they're doing a good thing here is just incredible.
You don't have a real argument do you if you are are resorting to name calling and ad-hominem attacks?
And this will happen, we will pay carbon tax for meat, electricity and electronics. I would like to get a tax discount for planting trees too, but we know that's now how governments work.
On top of this base model one could then also introduce subsidies for specific energy intensive industries that are deemed essential (probably not bitcoin).
That would handle the distribution of limited* amount of energy we have. CO2 emissions should probably be taxed separately and progressive rates would seem reasonable to me here as well.
* Yes, we can still build more, but at some point the energy usage has to stagnate. Exponential growth in usage would lead the Earth to become very hot in a few hundred years since the only way heat gets released to space is via infrared radiation which is limited by the surface area of the planet [1, Section 1.3].
[1] Murphy, T.: Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (2021), a free textbook at https://doi.org/10.21221/S2978-0-578-86717-5
Video games? Banned. Alcohol? Banned. Driving? Banned. Exercise? Banned - it increases your daily caloric needs. Food? Why would you need food? Eat your government rations.
Why should we prefer some activities over others by government decree? Have we not learned from the past?
Oh, you're growing the wrong kind of plant? To jail! Oh, you're doing the wrong kinds of calculations? To jail!
hypersonic nuclear missiles... nah, it's definitely this open source software for timestamping database changes.
How did you manage to miss the atomic bomb?
I'm quite sure atomic bomb and cryptocurrencies were invented in different centuries (assuming original Satoshi's Bitcoin paper as origin of current crypto)
A major distinction, obviously.
But my point still stands: if you believe crypto and/or PoW is the most evil thing invented in the last <X> years, you need to get more exposure to the real world, whatever X may be.
They lower the stored capacity and pay cheap price for that which results later the general population and other industry having to pay much higher cost of electricity, while they probably stop buying it, thus not taking their fair share of costs.
[0] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/umwelt-wirtschaft/gesel...
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-020-02785-4
Also I don't see why only a small part of society should be paying for that "carbon tax" - all citizens should pay an amount corresponding to their energy spending and then we are back to miners not externalising anything.
Where did I say that only a small part should be paying the real cost? That's a straw man.
And no: miners are externalizing exactly because the lack of a carbon tax. And from my experience they are not very interested in introducing one either.
... and its hydro and nuclear power.
"In Sweden, all nuclear power plants are currently operating in baseload, meaning they are constantly operating at their maximum rated thermal power and maximum rated electrical output." [1]
With hydro serving as a flexible power source to compensate for fluctuations in intermittent sources like wind and solar.
The government making a value judgement about what type of commercial activity is worthwhile is extremely risky. Countries with innovative financial and credit systems have historically steamrolled those that don't have such innovations. We still don't understand the nature of crypto.
Edit: I suppose, if you want to subsidize all uses of electricity except for cryptocurrency (and a few other areas of your choice), you could simplify this process by only applying the externality tax to miners (etc). But this should be limited to the externality, not arbitrarily high.
In other words, decreasing power consumption is as important if not more important than increasing clean energy as a share of production.
It's possible that cryptocurrency will be the future of finance. It's also entirely possible that crypto - which is incredibly expensive energy-wise per transaction - is actually a waste of energy and is a net drain on economies which embrace it. It might be a competitive advantage to ban mining.
I guess Sweden will be a part of that experiment and we will see what happens.
The upshot is lots of the know-how now lives in China, the wealth is being generated in Shenzhen instead of the west. The argument was correct, but in hindsight it does look like the positive externalities were greater than the negative. China's growth has been much more impressive than the EUs.
I agree, but couldn’t this be said for a lot of activities? It might be a competitive advantage to ban the production of reality tv shows or video games or cars or steel. Is it really a good idea (or even morally defensible) for the state to make these kind of macro decisions (based on what might be best for the economy)?
Generally problems are only handled* when they come up. In this case the carbon footprint of crypto is already a problem, so therefore it is now being handled. Getaway car carbon footprint on the other hand is not a problem as of now, so therefore this is not a correct parallel to draw.
* you could argue that we should have foresight, but unfortunately this is very hard to pull of. Most policy making is thus reactive, not proactive.
Those aren't commercial activities. One of the parties doesn't agree to the deal, so they are violations of property rights.
The justification for forbidding them isn't that the government has concerns about the transaction (the robber probably needs the goods more than the person they are robbing, on a needs basis most robberies might be justifiable for all I know). The problem is the involuntary nature of a robbery. That isn't a factor here.
As far as I can tell, bit coins ain't that.
I have yet to meet someone who bought something real with crypto.
I bought a car last year with Bitcoins
Hi, nice to meet you.
And it is not like Sweden doesn't already have entirely reasonable financial, payment and banking sector.
Or is it that people (through government) decide what’s allowed to do in the market, and things with negative externalities are banned or taxed?
I can’t decide to buy an incandescent lightbulb and put my money towards more electricity to drive it.
I also predict that cryptocurrencies as a whole will suffer from that due to the inability of the medias to understand that Bitcoin is not representative of all blockchain technologies.
It’s a shame because today most modern cryptocurrencies are not based on proof of work.
Because economically that’s true. There is no crypto (even ETH) which could stay at its price when BTC goes up and down by a magnitude. Of course they are correlated, like INTC may correlate with APPL when markets go crazy, but this link is too rigid for all crypto under bitcoin even when it’s relatively quiet.
I don’t understand an exact reason behind this, but I believe it’s related to how crypto exchanges work internally.
The biggest (afaik) of these ETH contract-based coins, USDT, is owned by a single company, which is partially backing it by their BTC and it maintains a list of blocked tokens, which is by design. Of course small money is relatively safe, but for large capitals it’s just a joke.
Any smart contract with a centralized oracle entity has all of the downsides of centralized money. These are much more convenient as a medium to crypto, but that’s it.
I actually have to give China credit for making the right moves there, given our climate disaster, crypto is a doomsday cult as long as proof-of-work is a thing.
Now electricity prices are rising a lot, especially on days when there is little wind (which generally is the case on extremely cold winter days), and emergency power plants using fossil fuels are running a lot more than before.
So now they are going to blame something else, just like any other politicians in any other country would.
but somehow they decided to blame crypto-mining instead of excessive house heating and refusal to wear sweaters indoors. funny that.
Singling out one non-essential for its use of energy and banning it, while leaving all others legal, makes no sense. Doing so is a case of scapegoating one small facet of a larger phenomenon, instead of addressing the root problem.
1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e7/El...
With today's more rigorous environmental policies, constructing more hydro power seems infeasible due to the adverse effects on wildlife diversity.
The actual problem is a regional on: the most souther parts of sweden is that they have more connections to the energy market in continental europe than to the big hydro-plants in the north that have plenty of excess capacity. In fact Sweden is a net exporter of electricity even in times where the emergency plants in the extreme south are running.
And water+nuclear has been at around 80% total, not 100.
Nuclear would help with this as there would be certain baseline price and hydro could store more excess capacity for those times renewable production is low.
Only Barsebäck 1 in 1999, Barsebäck 2 in 2005, and that was primarily because of Danish pressure (it's very close to Copenhagen). So that's 15-20 years ago.
The other reactors (Ringhals 1 (2020), Ringhals 2 (2019), Oskarshamn 1 (2017), Oskarshamn 2 (2015)) have been shut down by the private companies operating them because they have either reached their operational lifetime and were deemed (by the private company (Vattenfall, Uniper/Eon)) not economically feasible for modernization, or just plain not profitable to keep running, due to low electricity prices.
What I want to say is that regulating what kind of computations I can run on my machine is pretty bad.
It would make more sense to regulate maximum power consumption of computers like it is done with lightbulbs
It's not, he's making a valid point.
To put it in a maybe a more arguable way:
where do you draw the line at a government deciding what you can and can't run on your computer?
I would argue that this proposal does bring it a step further though. Child porn involves a child being abused before it gets to your machine. To crack a piece of software you need to take software written by someone else and modify it to avoid paying the author. It is based o a legal framework of intellectual property, which I don't agree with, but at least it looks like a valid framework of property rights in general. This proposal also covers software that you write yourself. It is also totally arbitrary, because it doesn't even try to pretend that you are violating someone else's rights.
But still, crypto mining is such a niche use-case, preventing me from running a file sharing server I wrote myself since people use it to distribute IP seems much more intrusive to me.
There is another point about abundant regulations helping Europe capture yet another brilliant opportunity to complain about foreign companies monopolizing everything, but in case of crypto mining we might be in a low risk area
And anyone who's being an activist towards reducing energy consumption is completely deluded: energy consumption is strongly correlated with technical progress and civilization progress. Good luck putting an end to that short of reverting to the stone age.
Energy production is what needs to be fixed, specifically energy production that results in environmental damage, e.g.fossil fuel.
For reference, this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o claims that a million square km of the Sahara desert receives enough energy from the sun to power the entire human civilization needs in 2020. Solve the technical problems associated with solar energy production and you'll solve global warming.
Infinite clean solar energy lets you filter CO2 out of the atmosphere back into carbon using technology, something plants have been doing to aeons.
Good luck winning an election with that program.
Seems logical and enforceable.
Otherwise I don't think I have a very wasteful usage of electricity.
Well, of course you don't think it's wasteful. But that's irrelevant. We're talking about putting the power to decide what's "wasteful" in somebody else's hands, maybe some appointed judges somewhere in the government. It doesn't seem like you want to put that power in my hands, though. Still waiting for that list. I'm ready to dictate which of your activities are worthy of electricity.
The EU has a long history of regulating energy waste, and outlawing crypto is a logical next step.
I think that about 95 % of the activities that humans do professionally are a complete waste of time. Does it follow that I should be for banning these activities?
And then they point at the "evil foreign/investor buyers" when people complain of the exorbitant house prices.
For example, Microsoft, Facebook and Google data centers are deemed appropriate use of renewable energy in Sweden and are thus subsidized.
However, will there be sufficient renewable energy available for Swedish citizens in the long run, with continued data center build outs?
We currently need to send most of traditional energy to our households, cars, manufacturing facilities etc. This cost of transportation to me is the key difference.
PoW doesn'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.
I know this is an utopian future but overall the idea of a people's currency is quite important for society, not just for speculation. Most of us I assume are tech people living privileged lives developing software for super rich companies in places with stable currencies and governments. We should realize this is not the case for many people - especially in societies where people cannot trust their countries' government or currency.
> Our conclusion is that policy measures are required to address the harms caused by the proof of work mining method. It is important that both Sweden and the EU can use our renewable energy where it provides the greatest benefit for society as a whole.
For example, I've seen calls to action from a lot of HNers to ban all cryptocurrencies because they are destroying the environment, missing completely that PoS even exists and has nowhere near the impact on energy usage as PoW.
The provenance (or "color") of energy use, the "social benefit" of it, somehow becomes criteria for discrimination of utilities and human rights.
We don't want you using your energy for unapproved computations!
I hope to see more goverments prevent individuals from performing hash computations on their computers.
The hash function is a climate disaster.
Interesting that they call it crypto-assets and never refer to it as a crypto-currency (not disagreeing; you can't use it to buy very much in Sweden, just thought it was an interesting observation).
It is a fairy tale what it is said is absurd.
I find myself swayed in my convictions by your well constructed argument.
I understand that "Climate crisis" is becoming the new "Children and Terrorists" wrapping for the next decades' wave of state oppression, but overall this ban may not be a bad idea for sweden and most of the developed world. Westerners being monetarily dependent on poor and otherwise forgotten countries will be a breath of fresh air.
Technically, sure. But without sufficient network capacity, there won't be much demand for it.
like, today?