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Comment by savant_penguin | Hacker News Reader

They should also audit every datacenter to make sure that only pre approved loads are being run.

The only allowed programming languages should be the energy efficient ones

A government official shall follow you to the shower to make sure your hot bath is not consuming too much energy for too long

Only serious applications are permitted. Websites that mostly involve jokes are a waste of energy. Google searches that are not strictly necessary should be dropped (those Google datacenters consume to much!). Every ounce of energy should be saved

I think this is the endgame for the government having the power to decide what should and should not spend energy. (With some stretches for comedic effect)

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…or we could simply stop burning coal to generate electricity. We are using record amounts globally.

Almost 40 years ago Carl Sagan warned us about increasing coal usage by other countries

https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI

He starts discussing other countries around 14:30 and mentions China using increasing amounts of coal around 15m

Getting rid of coal is a really important goal and would be much easier to achieve if "we" reduce our energy consumption. One way to achieve that is stop wasting energy with resistive heating

It has been almost 4 decades.

China now emits almost twice as much greenhouse gas as the United States.

What Sagan predicted 40 years ago came true. “Even if the United States and Russia…”

We’ve essentially squandered half a century.

… and did so because a few large companies recognized how much money they could save by trumping up a controversy around a scientific consensus which was largely settled by the Reagan administration. It’s really aggravating now to hear people complain that it’d cost too much to do anything, knowing not just that this is untrue but also that it would have been much cheaper if we’d made minor changes back then.

> China now emits almost twice as much greenhouse gas as the United States.

China has over four times the population of the US.

edit: i.e. comparing China to the US is like comparing the US to Germany or France. We're polluting twice as much, and a good amount of the pollution in China is for exporting to us.

In the 1980’s I imagine the United States was emitting 10 times as much as China on an absolute basis.

However, as Carl Sagan warned, China had huge coal reserves and they put them to use.

Other countries are doing the same , of course.

Hence global coal usage for power generation is at records.

From global point of view if there is demand for energy they will burn the coal. New sources of energy are not replacing the old ones, just covering new demand. You can point to any country while missing where the demand is coming from.

https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years

Resistive heaters are actually more efficient than heat exchangers at lower temperatures.

Cryptocurrency mining uses orders of magnitude more energy than the business logic behind website and apps. Even transcoding (ie. YouTube, Netflix) does not meaningfully compare to cryptocurrency energy usage.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str...

And the outcome is completely useless.

Isn't it in the governments interest to have stable and affordable electricity for the population? Comparing crypto mining to useless websites is dishonest at best, it seems intentionally misleading

Everything else you listed is taken care of by the market.

Want to consume resources with a website that tells knock-knock jokes? Have a great time! Just make sure to pay your hosting bill. Want to host it on 10,000 servers? Again, have a great time. Just know that you'll be paying a ton of money for that website with no hope of an ROI.

Cryptocurrency is different. The more electricity you burn, the more money you make. I know this first hand - the computer I'm typing this on is running gminer to mine ETH on flexpool.io with my RTX 3070 card. I've mined $2,800 of ETH in the past 10 months.

Something that most people don't understand is that there is a finite amount of ETH that can be mined per day. Hashrate determines the size of the slice of that pie you get. Therefore the incentive is to consume infinite electricity! Of course miners can't do that because mining gear (i.e. GPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, whatever) is hard to purchase and electricity isn't infinite.

But that doesn't stop miners from trying. I know people that do anything they can to acquire GPUs - they have bots combing the Internet, they buy whole systems that have GPUs, rip out the GPU and sell the system, they've signed up for every GPU manufacturer's wait list, they stalk Microcenter, whatever they can do. They seek out areas with cheap or even subsidized electricity and latch onto it like a parasite. It is nothing like anything else you spoke of.

And I just want to get my hands on a new graphics card so I can, you know, play video games.

All we'd have to do is stop innovating.

People are only aware cryptocurrencies exist because a handful of people were wily enough to come up with new ways of burning fuel to make money. Once the idea of crypto is encoded into a whitepaper, it's impossible to completely prevent people from reimplementing it themselves. You can make the technology itself illegal but save for completely draconian measures it's impossible to enforce such a thing.

Maybe our standard for what constitutes a good quality of life should have been frozen in time 7 years ago and we all should have just remained oblivious about how to improve that standard at the cost of the environment and our attention span. Along with crypto, we'd also be running a version of YouTube and other services with 7 years worth of research and whitepapers produced by clever people to increase engagement wiped away.

It would also future-proof us against intelligent, visionary actors that see us allocating larger and larger portions of our attention span to their neat little pet project-turned-hulking abomination that average people will never be able to forget the existence of or escape from. I do not believe that there is an upper bound to how much of some org's KPIs that humble people can be driven into contributing to - except the number of hours we can stay awake per day.

If we continue to innovate at this pace, making our products better and more attractive to where they become irresistible, when will the time come when our allocation of free hours or energy usage becomes completely saturated by unnecessarily things that we can no longer detach our attention from?

Well said.

One could also argue for the banning of video games using the same logic. A relaxing drive to the beach, your wasting energy!

A better solution would be to tax Crypto earnings at a higher rate, and use the tax revenue to build some green energy. I'd imagine Kosovo could become a low cost tech hub , but if you freak out techy expats with strange laws...

> The only allowed programming languages should be the energy efficient ones

I think I'm having trouble reading sarcasm today.

How do you implement that without absolutely draconian measures?

A dmv like government official gets to your home for your scheduled computer search.

> Is this the python binary? You better be ready for a hefty fine.

>> I'm sorry sir! I promise I was only playing around with pytorch and tensorflow! Did you know that they get compiled to much more efficient languages? I'm sure their c++ backends are pre approved!

> Playing? What do you mean by playing? Do you have an energy license for this? Anyways, python is not allowed and this is going to cost you.

>> Most of what I do is c++, don't I get some credits for it?

>Let's see..Is this an old clang compiler? They are 10% less energy efficient but I'm letting you walk with a warning if you update it right now.

>Wait a minute is this an octave binary I see!?! You sir are going to jail

This is actually a theatrical representation of code running in the background of your computer

> How do you implement that without absolutely draconian measures?

You don't, which is why I was thinking it had to be sarcasm. That said, it sounds just idealistic enough that someone would blurt it out without thinking.

The other part that is confusing is what's an efficient programming language? The answer is none. It's all about how programmers write their code. Sometimes you're optimizing for performance, but other times you're solving a niche problem.

Ironically if you let the market do it's thing, this is basically the end result too, but it's not some central authority telling you what to do, but you can decide what you want to waste your money on. A hot bath tonight or running that C compiler for an hour?

Governments have the right to, and do, regulate the power used by industrial facilities.

A hot bath, hosting a joke website, and hosting a search engine all consume magnitude less energy than a crypto farm.

This comment is very out of touch. Energy supplies are limited, even more so in developing countries. Governments everywhere have the responsibility to protect the well being of their people. Even most dictatorships at least try to do that. If crypto farms are hogging so much energy to the point of causing localized blackouts for other people, then most governments will want to put a stop to it. Governments failing to address the basic needs of their population is how you get strongmen in power who will use ruthless means to act on their agenda.

It is not a stretch to imagine that in the not too distant future, somewhere in the world, a cryptominer will be publicly executed in front of a cheering crowd. It's not what I want, but crypto bros have got to stop being so arrogant and self righteous.

> It is not a stretch to imagine that in the not too distant future, somewhere in the world, a cryptominer will be publicly executed in front of a cheering crowd. It's not what I want, but crypto bros have got to stop being so arrogant and self righteous.

I think a lot of people here will be cheering along with you. But alas, we can dream...

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