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"If we were to allow extensive mining of crypto-assets in Sweden, there is a risk that the renewable energy available to us will be insufficient to cover the required climate transition that we need to make. This energy is urgently required for the development of fossil-free steel, large-scale battery manufacturing and the electrification of our transport sector. Based on estimates from Cambridge University, it is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single bitcoin. This is the equivalent of forty-four laps around the globe. 900 bitcoins are mined every day. This is not a reasonable use of our renewable energy."

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.

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Honestly do we really need cryptocurrency? I don’t want my transactions public. I like exchanging cash for weed (legal in California) and nobody needs to know regardless. I also don’t understand what’s wrong with USD. I grew up in a third world country so maybe it could help people there but in USA? I’m happy with the dollar fluctuations vs four digit fluctuations daily.

Can someone give me a good explain?

The explanation is simply that there are people that have bought in that want others to buy in also so they can liquidate for a profit. Meanwhile, others are susceptible to what amounts to FOMO-driven investment. The same sentiment that drove the beanie-baby craze, the dot-com boom, the subprime mortgage crisis, the current metaverse craze, and so on. Nothing new under the sun.

>there are people that have bought in that want others to buy in also so they can liquidate for a profit.

Is that any different than a ponzi/pyramid scheme?

Consider this.

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?

Actually it can create fiat currency... in a roundabout way...

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.

>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.

>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.

USDC only has half the market cap of Tether. In fact, Tether has a higher market cap than all the other stable coins combined! So everything I've said is still true even if some operators are not as shady as the market leader.

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.

https://paxos.com/attestations

That means the ones at the bottom, whenever that bottom is gonna be reached, will be left holding the bags for those who got in and got out early.

This exact reasoning can be applied to the buying and selling of gold, can it not? I’m not saying that therefore it’s moot, but is there a difference? Would you call gold a ponzu scheme as well or do you see a difference between the two? It can also be applied to, for example, the buying and selling of old watches or art.

The key difference between just pure bubble assets (where extrinsic demand outstrips intrinsic demand) and Ponzi schemes are the representation of the real thing being bought underneath.

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.

Most ponzi/pyramid schemes don't burn as much coal and cause as much cancer and lung disease.

You don't need to invest if you just want to use it.

But you still need to burn coal and cause cancer and lung disease to use it.

The utility of crypto comes from two factors: its decentralization, and its pseudonymity.

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.

> Honestly do we really need cryptocurrency?

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.

We also ban quite a few things like CFC’s. Cryptocurrency might not be inherently significantly harmful to the environment but proof of work coins are, so it just comes down to a question of benefit vs harm.

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.

But we do have good reasons to ban it. It does cause measurable harm.

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.

Who's "we"? Maybe you don't need it. Personally, I don't need golf courses, professional football or a new phone every year.

Those do have negative externalities too. They are extremely regulated in how those externalities are handled though (how many golf courses are built, where, what their environmental impact is and so on).

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.

Sure, all businesses are regulated within the jurisdictions in which they operate. But if I want to set up a mining machine in my house, I don't see how a government can say that running my heater is fine but running the miner is not.. are they monitoring my electricity usage down to the device level? How?

Can you grow a ficus but not cannabis? Are they monitoring your gardening to the plant level?

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.

Well if it only applies practically to industrial level mining, I guess that's a good thing. Since it would decentralise mining and makes it more profitable for individuals who can freely ignore the law à la file sharing, cannabis, etc. Hopefully it will make the network more robust.

> I don’t want my transactions public.

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.

Complete transaction anonymity is not a feature. There are no protections against wash trading, and you have no way to gauge true market demand or pricing from transaction volume data alone.

> they all implement untraceable transactions

As a non-criminal, what use would I have for untraceable transactions?

Imagine if you have a business and someone uses their tainted coins (from a hack or extortion or whatever) and buys something from you. You then deposit this on an exchange... And get your account locked.

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.

> 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?

Not all crypto is money. ETH for example (which will soon be proof of stake... and more energy efficient) could be considered more accurately as a really large (but relatively slow) computer that never turns off. This plus infrastructure like ipfs enables a brand new internet. Completely decentralized and free of the strangle hold of large tech companies.

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)

Don't you realize that HBO made a whole TV show series that made fun of people who say stuff like that?

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.

> ETH for example (which will soon be proof of stake... and more energy efficient) could be considered more accurately as a really large (but relatively slow) computer that never turns off.

Run by babies who will manually change the output of the computer when it calculates something they don’t like.

Not possible unless majority of the nodes accepts the change.

It's funny and sad that when people talk about their "freedom" in 2021, it's almost always some sort of madness: freedom not to get vaccinated; freedom not to wear a mask; freedom to use cryptocurrencies.

Isn't freedom always a freedom to do something the majority won't like and/or find absurd. Most of it is really absurd, but some things pave way for the future, and it justifies tolerating the rest of it.

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 :)

I'm vaccinated, I wear an N95 mask when I go out. I try to be reasonable. But this comment is exactly why I think crypto is important. There are too many people now questioning the basic tenets of our liberal democracy. When I watched the president of the United States get thrown out of of the most popular forums to discuss politics at the same time, and then destroy the only place people with a different opinion could go to talk, it became clear to me that these companies have too much power.

In addition to what was mentioned, the hope is that once cryptocurrencies stabilize (especially the bigger ones like bitcoin, eth), they will be a hedge against government induced inflation.

Using cash is fine, but what if you need to use digital payments? Then you need to rely on third parties (VISA, PayPal, Stripe etc) who will of course charge fees from your business, or completely block you.

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.

When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.

I'm not fond of cryptocurrency, but there are both traceable and untraceable ones. You could buy weed with untraceable crypto.

you don't use crypto do you? playing with money is honestly just a fun thing to do, putting it into coins you think will do well or staking it to earn more or lending it via defi, or putting it into a yearn vault etc

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.

But the problem isn't that it can use renewable, but rather "steels" renewable that could be used for other purposes

> there's also nothing suggesting proof of work can't run on renewable energy

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.

Crypto doesn't try to replace cash. It tries to replace digital payments (i.e. bank transfer, paypal, credit card etc) and I'm totally fine with that. Some people like paypal, visa and mastercard, some people don't.

Do digital payments need replacing?

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.

This is because you don't live in a sanctioned country and you have a good social credit score.

This is like saying "why do I need encryption, I don't have anything to hide".

Many people do not have this privilege.

Sorry, i thought the fact we were discussing a move by Sweden, in English on a website dominated by Americans kind of gave the game away.

We should reopen the thread with a different premise.

"Crypto currencies have no place or value in the western world"

> "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.

It hat the same place as encryption for the same reason. And it is being fought like encryption was, for the same reasons.

Wrong.

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.

Correct, they picked other excuses.

You're picking other excuses for shilling cryptocurrency to detract from the hard cold sociopathic fact that you don't give a flying fuck about the environment or public health.

First, physical cash is still the norm in most of the world.

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.

> 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!

This is incorrect. The transaction costs are very low and you are free to choose whatever wallet you want.

> The transaction costs are very low

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.

why should I defend an autocrat?

Better question: Why should you shill a get-rich-quick pyramid scheme that destroys the environment, causes climate change, wastes energy, burns coal, and causes cancer and lung disease?

... and despite all its rhetoric about freedom, seems to be associated primarily with oligarchs, autocrats, and the biggest winners of traditional capitalism.

No, it isn't a payment system.

Check out GNU Taler (and alternatives), which really are payment systems instead of currency alternatives

It's more of a haven asset. It doesn't make sense as a payment system, and it hasn't in a decade really succeded in that role. It has accumulated a lot of capital, however, that might otherwise have gone into other haven assets.

It's great for doing cross-border transfers without restrictions as an example. For privacy there are Monero and mixers. The solution for volatility is stablecoins. DeFi can be useful for traders, you can trade without trusting any platform to hold your assets. The most important thing: it's an open source alternative to the traditional financial system, anyone can use it for anything without asking anyone else, and it evolves very fast because there is a lot of competition and no restrictions.

Meanwhile the bitcoin marketing mega machine is going into over drive. Full/Front page ads in newspapers, targeted campaigns on the most misguided, propping up talking heads and influencers, 24*7 sms bombardment in countries all over the world offering free coins, games and wallets to rope in more and more people who have clue about anything. Show growth. Get funds to buy more marketing, target the most ignorant, produce more growth, rinse and repeat. The whole process is like a death sprial that gets more effecient every year.

The marketing industry has turned into such a global exploitative scam with the tools that have today.

Everything is a scam nowadays, from tap water to US presidency. It’s almost if the rich people stopped caring about morals and just started setting up traps to entertain themselves with the suffering of others.

>It’s almost if the rich people stopped caring about morals and just started setting up traps to entertain themselves with the suffering of others.

There is even a successful Korean TV show depicting this current situation.

The thing is it doesn't matter whether there are a few miners or a lot. Bitcoin will continue to mine a block every 10 minutes. It's like an energy sink, you can drip in tiny amounts and get the same, or you can pour in all future fusion power plants, you get the same.

So actually it won't affect bitcoin, but it will release the energy to other uses.

> whether there are a few miners or a lot. Bitcoin will continue to mine a block every 10 minutes

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.

It's every 10 minutes on average.

IF the global hashrate stays the same as it did for the 2016 blocks prior to the last difficulty change - this thread is about if the hash rate was suddenly changed by miners going offline.

This is just wrong. The hashrate is proportional to the network security, eg 51% attack.

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!

The very first time I saw email, I immediately knew I wanted to have it. Ditto with the web. Ditto with video conferencing.

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.

>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.

Your examples are all commercial trucks, not personal cars.

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.

> 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

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.

It's a distributed finite state machine, that anyone can engage with on equal footing. The biggest issue right now is just that the fees are still so crazy.

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

I don't think I grasped any of the concepts you tried to expose as benefits of crypto.

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.

Oh ok!

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

I'm also not a fan of cryptocurrency but you seem to be living a privileged life in a country with a stable currency. Crypto is godsend for people where their countries cannot be trusted.

This merely pushes Bitcoin mining to countries that do not have this kind of regulation (and probably have less renewable energy).

Then let’s ban this waste of electricity everywhere. I’m all for the idea of crypto currency, but I’m not in support or baking the planet just so a few people can get some virtual goods.

Isn't it interesting that it is never a "waste" if it is the Pentagon that is polluting and poisoning the world.

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.

Compare and contrast this with military spending. Arguably, all of it is pure waste since you wouldn't need it in the first place if people weren't using violence as a means to resolve conflict. And yet here we are, so states have to allocate certain spending to maintain healthy military balance and support the walls of peace, so to speak. Even if the military is never going to be used offensively, to seize profit for the state, nations still have to waste resources on its maintenance as a deterrent of foreign aggression. (Oh, and occasionally some military-related or military-funded research results in something with non-military applications.)

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.

The military industrial complex has destroyed millions of lives and poisoned counties for decades to come. The abolition of the system that is perpetrating these crimes should be the top priority for any environmentalist and humanitarian.

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.

The first point is classic whataboutism. Would you defend a murder court case by claiming people don't care when the police kill people? It's the same thing, but people being replaced by the planet.

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.

Bitcoin is targeted because it is a threat to power, not because of any environmental concerns.

The people who use it do not have to justify it for you or anyone else. That's what makes it successful.

Sweden wouldn't be the first western country to ban crypto mining if it was just about power. Sweden has a lot of environmentalists in its government though, so it makes sense that Sweden is the first western country to ban it for environmental reasons.

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.

Do you really have to just make stuff up like that?

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.

How is BitCoin a threat to power? It’s no more a threat to power than 1990s Beanie Babies on EBay.

How you define waste of electricity? You writing that comment might as well be declared a waste and prohibited.

This shitty comment uses a kilojoule max. A single BTC transaction uses 1880 kWh.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

A Bitcoin transaction doesn't consume much energy, only the block generation does. An empty Bitcoin block still consumes the same amount of energy. Which in the end makes it even worse.

this calculation ignores layer-2 transactions which are just a few TCP packets

People decide that democratically. This is just like how California bans all showerheads that gives you more than a trickle of water, since they see good showers as a waste of water (All of USA has a similar ban but less restrictive). Just that in Sweden they ban wasteful businesses rather than "wasteful" quality of life improvements.

And like many other "democratic" decisions, it's just a feel-good measure. Watering your lawn is apparently a worthwhile use of resources, according to the Demos.

California bans the sale, not the use. Discrimination of how we use power is like discrimination of how we use internet service.

What happened to power network neutrality?

Well every time I visit California the showers are horrible in the hotels, so I bet hotels has to have those shitty showerheads. It would work the same here, you ban crypto mining for businesses but people will still mine privately since you can't really ban that.

Like any other waste, when it does more bad than good.

we should ban videogames, they use more energy than ethereum network (u.s. video game industry uses more energy than small countries!!) and the virtual goods are locked inside one game and cant even be exchanged or resold after use.

not a fan of using energy for some peoples private flights of fancy. we should prioritise actual infrastructure with social value.

Yet more whataboutism. People need entertainment, but an investment medium that is designed to use as much power as possible is not remotely comparable to the basic needs of humans.

It would still raise the cost of mining. And those countries that do not ban mining will face increasing pressure to do so, due to miners pushing energy prices up.

But yes, an international treaty banning PoW crypto mining would be more effective. Then confiscate the equipment and use it to attack the networks.

How about an international treaty instituting a carbon tax, if C02 is what you actually want to minimize. Sounds like that's not the goal based on your comment though.

High mining cost is what provides network security.

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"

It would actually make the network more secure, since mining would shift from big industry players to local private users who mine from home electricity. You can't hide a power dependent business and poor countries lack the power production for significant mining operations.

Security is the argument of last-resort for so many bad technologies.

like Governments

"Governments" is a bit broad but some policies almost certainly.

Unless they buy their own coal plant?

Yes and the same argument is used for all green laws which makes things like manufacturing more expensive. When becoming greener, we have to start some where

Sure, let them go ahead. Then see what happens when they start having blackouts (or other problems).

Then those countries can solve the problem in their local environment.

It is a very slippery slope, though, when a small group of people starts deciding what use of electricity is allowed.

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)

Seu, you are absolutely right. "The required climate transition" is 100% on the button. We cannot allow the moneyed class to close the future for humanity IMNSHO. Thanks for such clarity.

Option c: price energy usage accordingly and profit off cryptominers. You'll have the funds to expand energy production capacity to both solve today problem and future proof infrastructure

Or maybe just invest in atomic energy that is capable of producing enough power for current and future needs?

Nuclear is clean and sustainable and can allow people to mine bitcoin and even heat their homes, which seems to be a problem currently in some regions of Europe.

Nuclear energy may not release CO2 into the atmosphere, but that doesn't make it clean and sustainable:

- 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.

That all might be true, but there are ways to improve on those points. For instance thorium reactors are much more efficient in terms of waste, and they are much safer.

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.

Thorium reactors are a castle in the air

Everything is until it isn't right? Do you think there's a fundamental problem there, or is it just taking too long?

taking too long is a fundamental problem here

Some problems are complex. If you asked me in 2012 if fuel cell cars would ever exist I would have called it a pipe-dream, but now you can buy one and use it as a real vehicle in California.

and when did we think we would have got fusion? We can't rely on pipe dreams when solving the climate crisis

I'm not saying thorium is a solution to the climate crisis. But I think the balance is a bit far in the other direction: people rule out Nuclear unnecessarily as a part of a larger clean energy strategy because of bad associations with mushroom clouds and Chernobyl/Three Mile Island.

and waste

Readily fissile materials aren't just found lying around next to the reactor though. There is a non-negligible amount of CO2 emitted to get fuel, even for nuclear power.

Nuclear waste is much safer than all other waste from energy production:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/06/19...

I’m fine with nuclear, but producing excess nuclear waste simply to produce random bits to do absolutely nothing isn’t something I’d support.

I agree with you, but how exactly do you check for that? Put a telescreen in every home?

Treat crypto no different from stocks.

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.

As someone living near one of europes largest uranium deposits, i can tell you that nuclear itself might be clean, but getting the fuel is anything but. Uranium dont come in nice nuggets like gold, its mixed up with other things so that its only fractions of grams per ton of rock you have to mine. When this rock is processed we are left with big holes in the ground that shifts the level of the waterbed, and big piles of toxic rock dust that leaks all kinds of nasty shit into said ground water.

Same for the minerals needed for batteries or most other things.

This is mining.

Nuclear doesn’t produce any greenhouse gasses, but with the radioactive waste it generates it of course isn’t really clean. It’s also expensive and takes decades to build.

That waste is much easier to dispose that the waste created by "renewables" like solar panels, especially with newer generation plants that burn old nuclear waste.

I am not sure how much you have looked at these newer plants? While must can use since amount of nuclear waste (which is great), their biproducts are only somewhat less toxic than the original. These are nowhere as clean as people seem to imagine.

This is a feature not a bug. What I'm hearing is, it takes the energy necessary to drive 1.8m kilometres to forge one bitcoin. Perfect.

And humanity is not on the verge of climate extinction, although it is the dogma of our times.

I feel like you guys are completely inside the matrix here so allow me to explain...

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.

How about the people win against the evil banks and governments ... and then proceeds to drown in the rising oceans, burn in increased wildfires, freeze in extremely cold weather (including all the gas and coal power plants used to mine BTC, see recent Texas events).

We could ban bitcoin and still drown in rising oceans. 100 companies contribute to 70% of Earth’s pollution. Why aren’t we banning them?

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

Classic whataboutism. Don't.

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.

> Bitcoin is being fought by banks and governments because it threatens the dollar and the banking system.

What's wrong with the dollar? Just because something is centralized doesn't mean it's bad.

The government can print money at will. Just look at what's happening recently with inflation. The government does not have the right to devalue people's hard work at a whim.

> What's wrong with the dollar?

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.

>Bitcoin is being fought

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

Then, how is it? Mining bitcoins does not use a lot of electricity.

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