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Comment by Tenoke | Hacker News Reader

Imposing global technological bans so willy-nilly seems like a nice idea only on the surface. Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US (uncommon in Europe so seems frivolous) uses as much if not more energy. Others might consider gaming or self-hosted servers or who knows what else equally inefficient. Do you really want to put things so easily on the potential chopping block even if this one thing you hear a lot about might be a waste?

Now if PoW was using 10% of the world power maybe it'd worth it but I just don't see how you can justify such a ban but only apply it to this one thing.

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A single miner uses 1,300W (Antminer S9) and runs 24/7. That is 218,400Wh for a week.

A gaming computer at ~400W, left on 24/7, is 67,200Wh. That assumes you are playing 24/7 - your idle wattage in sleep is < 100W.

If you run your dryer every night of the week for an hour, you are using about 38,400Wh.

You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient single miner node. About 50% less!

Bitcoin is a huge waste of electricity, and it is WAY worse than anything else you listed.

It doesn't make sense to compare 1 person gaming or clothes drying to a specific mining machine. The consideration was about global bans and total outputs from those activities.

Bitcoin mining uses more power than the country of Sweden.

[1] - https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...

I have no love for bitcoin, but I always hate this comparison. It’s useless. Sweden uses much more energy than it uses power (as pretty much every country) and it also exports power usage by buying finished products. Why is the power usage not compared to something useful? The power or rather energy usage of the global banking network for example?

When people compare energy usage like that, they are making an implicit argument that the energy usage of bitcoin is a "waste".

This is what i dislike about the argument that PoW should be banned - that it wastes energy that could otherwise have been used for something else. I argue that it is not a waste, because the person who is paying for the energy does not consider it a waste. No one else can make this judgement.

The only weakness of this argument is that some energy sources have externalized the cost of emissions. I would very much like to see an emissions tax to account for it (which makes sense to do, regardless of one's position on PoW).

Agreed with the "waste" argument. I won't defend the huge power consumption but the energy spent is strictly useful in a utilitarian sense - every joule spent makes it that much harder to perform a 51% attack. Ideally, the energy used to secure the network is widely/evenly distributed among nodes for maximum security benefit (though not usually how it plays out).

However, to say it's all a waste is just an emotional argument because you don't like it. That's fine but it's opinion, not objective fact.

> When you put it all together, that’s a projection of 135.12 TWh in the year, or about as much power as is used annually by the country of Sweden

I don't doubt that bitcoin miners use a lot of energy, but I hesitate to trust a source that doesn't know the difference between power and energy. Also, they're lying about the energy consumption of Sweden, which actually uses 645.7 TW/yr as of 2012 [0]. They number they quote is actually the electricity consumption of Sweden [1], which is like 5x lower.

[0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=energy+consumption+of+...

[1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=energy+consumption+of+...

Yes, but the real question always is:

Who will make a decision as to what is considered frivolous.

Not to search very far, I consider trucks in US for non-contractor use to be frivolous, but I don't go around telling people those need to be banned.

Trucks move people and items. Bitcoin allows us to buy porn, pot and run scams on a mostly centralized network.

Can you explain how it is centralized? Because… it isn’t.

Lets say Coinbase and Paypal (both BTC processors) stop supporting your website. Do you think that you'll get as many BTC transactions if this happens?

I don’t think you understand how cryptocurrencies work. There ain’t much Coinbase and PayPal can do to stop someone sending coins to my address. I don’t have a website, nor do I care what Coinbase or PayPal do or say.

I don't think you understand the practical business realities of the internet.

No typical business is going to work with BTC addresses on the raw. They're going to (and currently) using simple APIs like Coinbase API (https://developers.coinbase.com/) to "implement BTC receipts".

As far as US business is concerned, the typical payment processor for bitcoin is Coinbase. They handle the bitcoint transfer, transaction history, and conversion into USD all at the same time.

There are many business that run their own payment infrastructure, BTCPay is the most popular. It is better for the network if people DONT use centralized providers. We all have the power to use decentralized infrastructure.

Bitcoin works the way it is intended, that is peer to peer payments. Everything else is just ecosystem, which can be replaced. Coinbase is important as an on-ramp for users for now, yes, but their importance to the network is peripheral.

And the Exim email-server and "bind" DNS server is "decentralized", except everybody uses gmail.com, or even centralized upon AWS.

There's your theory, and there's the practice of the internet and business. In theory, they should be the same. In practice, they're different.

Bitcoin doesn’t care about businesses. It doesn’t care about peoples wishes. It doesn’t care that everyone else is using Gmail. It provides a peer to peer, censorship resistant append only ledger for transactions secured by cryptographic signatures and proof of work. That is all. And that is plenty.

I agree. I think you two are talking past each other to a degree - Bitcoin the protocol is decentralized, Bitcoin the ecosystem in 2022 is moderately centralized in various ways.

Without an on-ramp and off-ramp for converting into dollars/euros, Bitcoin is entirely useless, even for the hardcore idealists like yourself. And those can quite easily be made illegal.

You can't even access your wallet without an API provider. This includes MetaMask.

Maybe in eth land, if you don’t run a fullnode. And that speaks to moxies recent post about centralization.

I’m talking about Bitcoin, and you better believe I run a fullnode. No provider required. I recommend you run a Bitcoin full Node too, and transact without any 3rd parties!

there's only one blockchain

Only one Bitcoin blockchain, correct. There are affinity scams like bcash and bsv that try to steal the name.

The users/miners decided, in decentralized fashion by contributing resources. Decentralized!

Depends on if you count hard forks as new chains. Successful hard forks require decentralized consensus to follow the new chain.

I think the issue is your concern does not really answer the question I posed. We can follow the use 'use' argument as soon as we deal with the 'who has the authority to tell people what to do with energy/money/equipment'. Is it me? Is it you? Is it society? Is it government? As soon as we get through that conundrum, we can discuss how crypto is basically evil and used for nefarious purposes only and cars are more like knives ( I disagree, but we can get to it once we know who can actually make the call on the behalf of humanity as a whole that a given technology is banned ).

I don't understand why anyone thinks this argument is some kind of checkmate. This is the equivalent of screaming you're a sovereign citizen when the police ask for your name.

Governments have this general monopoly on the use of force, which is why they tell you you can't do things like sell heroin. If you disobey them, they will send men with firearms and make you stop.

Governments can obtain their consent in a bunch of different models and lots of people argue about which ones are better.

A "world wide ban on crypto" probably is not going to happen but more and more countries are banning it. I suspect many more will continue.

You still did not give me an answer by the way and I have to question as to whether you are arguing in good faith.

Still, I will address your comment in good faith.

It is not a checkmate. I am simply just trying to see what world model you have in your head. We clearly disagree, but it does not mean we can't openly discuss those disagreements. It is mostly the beauty of HN. If you present a logical argument, I might simply say, it makes sense. Right now I am confused.

Are you officially arguing government is the one to say as to whether technology is banned? If so, which government speaks for humanity as a whole?

<<This is the equivalent of screaming you're a sovereign citizen when the police ask for your name.

Is it? Can you elaborate a little bit? The analogy seems a little off.

<<Governments have this general monopoly on the use of force, which is why they tell you you can't do things like sell heroin.

Yes. Government monopoly on power has been a well established theory. We are not breaking new ground here. Is crypto heroin in this scenario?

<<If you disobey them, they will send men with firearms and make you stop.

Yes. See above. How does that help your argument?

<<Governments can obtain their consent in a bunch of different models and lots of people argue about which ones are better.

Yes. See above. How does that help your argument?

<<A "world wide ban on crypto" probably is not going to happen but more and more countries are banning it. I suspect many more will continue.

Maybe yes. Maybe not. It is not, however, an argument for or against crypto banning, whether it should be banned or not. It is not an argument at all. At best, it is just a speculation.

I'm going to interpret your current question as "Who has the authority to ban crypto?"

The answer is the government.

Governments are restricted to their borders but they do like to cooperate, and so EU may pass a general crypto ban and the EU may even ask the nations it trades with or that want to join to do similar.

But there is no real question that a government may ban something in it's borders.

"Ah, but I can get away with crime sometimes! Thus the government ban doesn't matter!" is the usual response. And sure, some small crime goes unpunished, but in general people don't want to overtly engage in criminal behavior. No business would touch crypto, which harms it's value and use.

Should we ban crypto?

Well, we can explore why countries have. The answer is a mixture of "it makes tax evasion stupidly easy" and "it uses too much power". With parts of the world paying INSANE prices for fuel right now, a lot more governments will latch onto that second line of reasoning. In general, governments detest tax evasion and things which aide it.

We do in fact generally like tax revenue. We like roads and schools and such, and most people are opposed to tax cheats. Nobody particularly cares for high electricity prices or polluters either.

"Well, what about those crypto operations which pay their taxes and are funded by renewables?" Sure, perhaps those are allowed to exist, but that comes with two problems. 1. It dramatically shrinks the mining pool, making sybil attacks easier. 2. It reduces processors which means less businesses will accept crypto.

Crypto already has a strong association with open air drug markets, and for good reason. As legitimate usage declines, the desire to ban a tool used primarily for crime will increase as it should.

Crypto is already being banned and it probably should be banned. If not banned then regulated, but regulation would harm it significantly.

<< Well, we can explore why countries have. The answer is a mixture of "it makes tax evasion stupidly easy" and "it uses too much power". With parts of the world paying INSANE prices for fuel right now, a lot more governments will latch onto that second line of reasoning. In general, governments detest tax evasion and things which aide it.

I take issue with the statement "it makes tax evasion stupidly easy". The moment you touch any US-based exchange, your information is up for grabs by a variety of agencies from IRS to various LEOs. It may make doing the deed easy, but it does not really change much. It has been years now since blockchain made it into mainstream. There are companies specializing in selling blockchain insights. Unless we are not talking US. But US has an entire cottage industry devoted to making sure that the wealthy pay as little as possible. I am not sure banning crypto would help here. Killing lawyers and accountants could ( I jest.. it is just a reference to Henry VI ), but that is about it.

<<"it uses too much power"

I find this argument amusing. I am paying for it. If you don't like my use, either raise the price or, well, leave me alone. But therein lies a problem, energy prices are not an equilibrium point and people do not want to give up THEIR toys, but an appropriate scapegoat will let them keep their toys and feel righteous indignation. It is a win/win.

<<The answer is the government.

And this is where it gets fun as correctly noticed. Even without considering the distributed nature of the technology itself ( because there are way to circumvent that as internet splintering has shown ), government these days may, if not will, disagree for a variety of reasons including but not limited to "they are for A, therefore I am for not A", making it a protracted game of whack-a-mole ala piracy, war on drugs and multiple other endeavours governments proved to be so good at. To sum up, you may reasonably argue they have the authority, but do you reasonably think, they will actually pull it off?

> I am paying for it. If you don't like my use, either raise the price or, well, leave me alone.

Residential miners are using subsidized electricity. We do that so Grandma can afford to be warm and run her dryer.

If we forced miners to use commercial electricity plans then they would in fact pay a whole mess more.

I find this argument odd. Is the electricity used by the business somehow different than the one used by grandma? Are these currents used by the business somehow more special? No. If anything, based on my dad's experience as a shop owner, businesses pay much higher rates than individuals. They are not subsidizing grandma. They are subsidizing bureaucrat lives. That is all the there is to it.

Still, let us say that I accept your argument, some miners actually bought various electricity producing entities. Now what? Are you going to argue they can't use the electricity they generate or are you going to argue that we can then force them out of business some other way. Either undermines some tenets of US society, but I am curious now.

It may make doing the deed easy, but it does not really change much I'd argue the opposite, bitcoin is terrible for tax evasion and only fools think they're getting away with it. Besides every legit exchange doing KYC, law enforcement buys off the shelf chain analysis software to track people on their radar.

> "Who has the authority to ban crypto?" > The answer is the government.

The gov't is supposed to represent the people's will. So are you saying that it is the will of the people to ban crypto? Aka, is crypto something that is causing harm to society, like heroin addiction etc?

Let's go back to the prohibition era - why did the gov't decide to ban alcohol? And why did they re-instate it back afterwards?

I argue that gov't is not an "authority" - they merely execute the ban. The authority lies with the average views of society. Bans on slavery, for example, is only possible because most people slowly came around to disliking it (mostly people who don't benefit from it - while those who do vehemently fought against the banning).

Was it the "will of the people" to ban all drugs? Because that's not how I remember it. Specifically one good example is how MDMA got banned, tons of psychiatrists and psychologists went to court to speak out against the ban and the judge agreed with them. Did the DEA give a shit? Absolutely not. Banned.

Not to mention, the US forced the anti drug ideology on the rest of the planet through economic coercion

I'd say public opinion is absolutely swaying in the direction of a ban, especially as the facts become clearer.

who is the authority? We, at least in democratic countries if enough people decide we should ban crypto we just draft the laws and end it, easy. We did this with many other things, don't know why this would be different

It is not a bad argument, but 'we' seem to be disagreeing a lot lately. I am not assuming you are from US, but I am going to use US as an example. The polarization is at a point where just about every major issues is split 50/50. And this does not even begin to touch as to whether US political class actually represents the needs/demands/whatever you want to call it of its electorate.

So yeah, you are not wrong about the general framework, but do you think drafting such a law right now would be..hmm.. palatable to the general populace. After all, consent of the governed is a thing.

And as for crypto specifically.. well.. the time to squash it has long passed. There is people with real money in it now. The best you can hope for is regulation.

> I consider trucks in US for non-contractor use to be frivolous, but I don't go around telling people those need to be banned.

What does you not liking trucks have to do with the issue of putting limitations on mining crypto?

Just because you don't care about this random issue doesn't invalidate serious concerns other people have.

Also, this is a pretty bad faith argument to say 'who can make these decisions'. We make rules in society all the time. If enough people can be convinced for a particular regulation and the laws of the society allow it, then it'll be implemented.

I do not believe it is a bad faith argument.

At the end of the day, trucks are there to illustrate a point that people may not agree what is considered 'good','efficient' or whatever qualifier you want to add. Trucks - those humongous behemoths intended for largely for contractors, but bought people with more money than sense for reasons that are not 'good','efficient' or whatever other qualifier you would want to add to crypto - are largely inefficient for a family unit. Some could easily argue that those should be banned for personal use as their gas-guzzling abilities are a MUCH greater threat to climate change than the entirety of crypto mining operation.

But do I suggest people are mandated to only get one Prius every 5 years? No. Do you know why, because the concerns of the people may be real, but we have not, as a society, yet decided that it is ok for those concerns to override individual choices.

You are right about society. You are wrong about the argument.

1000W+ power supplies are pretty common on the high end of gaming PC's, I've got a 1200W psu in my machine, as my old 750W PSU was shutting off when I upgraded my GPU. I don't know how many watts it's drawing during a resource intensive game, but it's gotta be a lot more than 400. I think I'll look into getting a wall plug power meter.

RTX 3060 + 5950x CPU under load is like 400 to 450 watts, based on my power meter. That includes power to monitor and other peripherals as well.

I agree with OP though, we're within an order of magnitude of other legit uses, so let people be free. Increase electricity costs or taxes if you want.

> You can game 24/7 and dry your clothes every night of the week and STILL use less power than a modern, efficient single miner node. About 50% less!

I think OP point still stands. This is comparable in term of "waste".

A modern dryer uses less than 2 kWh for an 8kg run [0]. That means for those 38 kWh you need to run it daily for almost 3 weeks. Normal usage (let's say twice per week) would lead to ~3 kWh energy consumption.

[0] Siemens WT47R400: 176 kWh / year for 160 cycles by energy label, 1.4 kWh for a full run.

Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the need of power is steadily bigger each year. Where would be the limit of that? When that requires the energy of a big country? (We are quite away from that as far as I know [1] ) A heavily industrialized continent? More than the whole world?

It's absolutely crazy. I know that there's a big lobby behind mining, I absolutely respect what they have being doing protecting Bitcoin i.e. and making the project survive... even if it somehow completely lost it's original purpose. But FFS guys what's the purpose of having cryptocurrencies if the cost of that is aiming to destroy the world, or much more probably, to win a last minute complete cryptocurrency ban from all governments with the handy climate change as an excuse?

[1] https://www.thebalance.com/how-much-power-does-the-bitcoin-n...

>Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the need of power is steadily bigger each year.

They don't really require more power, they are just getting more valuable so it's been profitable for more people to increase their mining investments. The limit is that they are not infinitely valuable, and if anything mining rewards are decreasing.

>Biggest problem about PoW coins, and that's something that everybody working on it knows, or should know, is that the need of power is steadily bigger each year

PoW is wasteful by design. The more hash power you throw at the network, the more difficult the PoW becomes. Any efficiency gains necessarily have to go towards more hashing, instead of maintaining the same level of work at a lower power draw.

I sometimes wonder if we'll discover a Kardashev Type II civilization, harnessing the power of their sun via a Dyson sphere. And then, upon first-contact, realize they are using all that power to mine Bitcoin.

Indeed. What then, do we get them to move to SHA256 (or whatever hash Bitcoin uses for its PoW in 100 years time), or do we adopt the alien hashing algos?

If PoW and the endless thirst for energy would spur the development of Dyson spheres, then it would've be a good outcome.

The typical drying machine pulls about 2-6 KW while running. A cryptomining rig pulls about ~1.2 KW while mining. A drying machine runs for an hour a week. Let's say 2 hours a week. That's 12kWh per week at the high end for drying. A cryptomining rig running 24/7 ends up using 201 KWh for the same time period. That's 16x more taking the most pessimistic clothes drying usage, so I'm not sure how you're concluding "uses as much if not more energy".

Most people living in the suburbs in the US have a drying machine while not everyone has a cryptomining rig running 24/7, so we could _easily_ be in a situation where drying machines in a region use more power than cryptomining rigs. And a lot of things are like that: Netflix, furnaces, AC, freezers.

You forgot to account for the cost of the damage a dryer does to clothing. And how much conditioned air it pumps outside that needs to get sucked back in through my home’s cracks and re-conditioned.

And the fires!

OP is probably talking cumulative energy. The vast majority of households probably have dryers in the US. The vast majority of households also DO NOT have crypto mining rigs.

It's currently close. Bitcoin alone uses 91 TWh globally [1]. US dryers consume ~60 TWh [2]. However, one of those is seeing exponential energy usage while the others is very mature and stable.

I'm also shocked that people do laundry so often. Not sure why people are doing more than one or two loads per week and that's a problem the government could look at tackling (not so much with PoW coins).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco...

[2] https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/ene_14060901a.pdf

Honestly surprised it's that close.

A household dryer is very unlikely to get anywhere near 6 kW even at peak. In Europe it's common to have 16 A at 220-240 V which gives you a maximum of roughly 3.5 kW.

A US dryer is 240V at 30A (actual usage is 24A - 80% of rating), which is 5.7kW.

I just looked up how much energy my last dryer load used. It came in just shy of 6kWh. The unit is a standard electric dryer, around 10yr old. Just wanted to provide some additional data.

We do about 4 loads per week here. I hope that the newer heat pump based dryers are reliable!

Would you support Visa and Amex if their next generation networks required you to burn x minutes of natural gas or x pounds of coal to complete a transaction? Why is this an acceptable architecture for Blockchain? It is a race to the bottom.

That’s absurd comparison. No energy user (be it miners or the visa network) requires unclean power. Electricity is fungible.

We all want power to be cleanly generated. This demand side bullying needs to stop. Give us clean energy!

There is no such thing as clean energy.

You severely underestimate the power use of proof-of-work blockchains. It's on the scale of nations.

But the main difference is that whatever you compare with those blockchains, it will never have the critical flaw: the automatically increasing difficulty. Your dryer doesn't periodically flood the drum to make it harder because more people are interested in tumble drying.

Difficulty isn't necessarely increasing. It could also decrease if less people are interested in mining (e.g. when energy prices go up).

That is true.

However, market forces guarantee that the difficulty will go up to the point where it's infeasible to add more hashrate, e.g. because it becomes uneconomical or there's simply no more hardware available. PoW workchains must work at maximum inefficiency. (This bears out in the data, too, I think. BTC had its highest hashrate at the beginning of this month, when energy price were at an all-time high and BTC was at the lowest over 12 months)

This comes up every single time banning cryptocurrency for wasting electricity comes up. Using a clothes drying machine and just about anything else that you can think of that uses electricity is fundamentally different than PoW cryptocurrency.

If I want to use a machine to dry my clothes, I pay for that electricity. This puts a limit on the amount of electricity I can consume to do it.

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.

> The more electricity you burn, the more money you make.

there will be a new equilibrium - the more electricity you use, the less of it is available, and thus the price would rise to match the demand. This means there's a limit to how much you can earn (unfortunately you wont know this limit until you reach it, because the full demand for crypto is unknown atm).

But high prices of electricity would spur developments in energy production.

In any case, energy use is energy use, regardless of the purpose. As long as the person using it is paying for it, then it is a valid use.

Governments could apply a carbon and electronic waste offset tax to declared cryptocurrency income. The people making money from cryptocurrencies should pay enough to fund projects that will fully offset their environmental costs.

Of course, those taxes will probably just disappear into general tax revenues and wind up paying for other things, but it would encourage crypto miners to pursue green energy sources and, perhaps, find better uses for obsolete graphics cards.

> The people making money from cryptocurrencies should pay enough to fund projects that will fully offset their environmental costs.

why should crypto be specifically targeted for an energy use tax (ala, a carbon tax but with extra steps), instead of a general tax on energy use (aka, just implement the aforementioned carbon tax)?

There is literal legislation about energy efficiency of consumer goods (such as dryers), our houses have to be built to be environmentally friendly with good insulation to stop wasted energy, governments are banning plastic packaging. But crypto should be except? No, crypto should be legislated so that it’s energy usage is limited. To think otherwise is an enormous step backwards.

I cannot understand how this is not a bigger issue being talked about in the media. Right now in the UK we are going through an energy crisis where people can’t afford to heat their own homes (I’m not blaming crypto for this). It’s absolutely maddening that in a world where climate change and energy scarcity is such an issue this would be a controversial topic.

Those are very different things.

My dishwasher is rated based on specific cycles, but I'm legally allowed to use it as frivolously as I want. I can run an A+++ rated dryer with a single sock in and send the photo to the police.

We don't limit energy use but inefficiencies. The equivalent in crypto would be to rate hardware by hashes per joule.

Crypto things are different because the incentives are different. I'm incentivised to use my appliances efficiently as the energy cost is just a cost.

On the other hand with PoW, I'm incentivised to mine efficiently but as much as possible because I can buy a thing that turns electricity into cash.

We are looking down the barrel of a gun. The gun is cryptomining's thirst for electricity destroying all our gains to diminish climate change. Your arguments may be right, but you are on the wrong side of our survival as a civilization.

The point here is that existing legislation does not cover this and trying to apply it would fail, you would need something new if you want it to work.

> Things like machine drying your clothes at home in the US

Fine, yes. Ban both.

You can wash your clothes in a bucket if you want to save even more energy. But I like the convenience of washers and dryers.

Machine drying clothes unnecessarily is right up there in the wastefulness stakes.

Machine washing too.

Ha ha. But clothes dry themselves. Clothes do not wash themselves.

You would be amazed what can be accomplished when you roll up your sleeves.

Maybe they meant people wash their clothes too often?

https://www.prima.co.uk/fashion-and-beauty/fashion-tips/a269...

Machine washing is a significant labor and time saver.

People are usually opposed to line drying clothes because of aesthetics and feeling like it makes their neighborhood look “poor”. Luckily quite a few states have passed laws making it illegal for landlords or HOAs to ban putting up clotheslines.

Significant? Who doesn't have 20 minutes to soak and wash their clothes in a bucket? If the goal is to reduce energy usage one should start at the top with large appliances.

There are plenty of other wasteful activities that should be limited as well.

Classic whataboutism. First of all your entire comparison makes no sense, you have to compare alternatives for use. What's the alternative to a dryer. Using a line and hanging your clothes. Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York? A ventless dryer? Doesn't use substantially less energy. And so forth.

For every conceivable use case there exists alternatives that use orders of magnitude less energy. NFTs, sending money, federated computing, you name it, something already exists.

The only reason blockchain is a thing is because cryptocurrencies are booming in terms of how much they're sold for. The end.

> Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York?

I dry my clothes on a line in the winter in New York. It's below zero outside, but like 80 degrees and 0% humidity inside my apartment. Clothes dry fast. (And the space was already being heated, because I live in it, and it's against the law for the landlord to allow the temperature to go below 55 degrees, and they are paranoid, so it's more like 80-90 all winter.)

Its 80 in your place? Holy shit, I would just be sweating all the time. And finding a new place to live

Sometimes I feel like I have a fever and am getting sick, then I realize it's probably just in the 90s and I should open a window. Not great. This is with all my radiators turned off!

The heat is on a timer so it's not like this all the time, but I have to wonder what a world where thermostats have been invented would be like.

>Fair enough, what about in the winter in New York?

Large swathes of Europe have winters as bad or even worse than New York's. I've grown up in one of those countries and had never seen a home clothes dryer before visiting the US. I've also almost never seen them in London or Berlin where I lived after that and those have at most marginally warmer winters than New York.

I live in west germany and they are very comon here….

Then you can use a drying rack indoors, as Europeans do... They look like this: https://alittlelifeineurope.com/2017/09/10/in-praise-of-the-...

Electrical resistive heating clothes dryers are an enormous energy hog.

I'm familiar - however it's slow. What do you do if you need your clean clothes to be dried quickly?

Buy merino wool clothing, it dries very quickly :-)

It's time to heat pump

Yeah, though the heat pump dryers I've seen don't sound like they perform very well for some reason. I need to look into it more.

Heat pump water heaters, though, are supposedly much better than resistive.

Not all Europeans use a drying rack indoors. In the Netherlands only the poor do this. It takes a long time and doesn't even save any energy as the water from your clothes makes your entire house humid and feel cold in the winter.

Shrug we've been mostly using them, they seem to work well enough.

Spot the cryptoshill.

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