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Comment by DickingAround | Hacker News Reader

If you worry about the power waste, have a CO2 tax. You don't think some people's use of power is right, but perhaps they don't think your use of power is right. Is that really something you don't want to be a fundamental right, this concept of being able to use electricity as you see fit?

The idea of banning something because of a chip shortage is an even more extreme attack on the rights of others. One person makes specialized bitcoin mining chips (they can't be used for anything else), another person buys them. And you want to bring people with guns into it because maybe the person making the chips could be making them for whatever you want? Please, think deeply before asking for force and violence to be involved in a bunch of people peacefully going about their own ways and interests.

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It's not about waste; it's a matter of managing an energy shortage while simultaneously trying to threaten Russia with sanctions and whilst being dependent on Russian gas.

A CO2 tax won't help when the issue is that the grids simply can't keep up with demand.

But it’s all about personal freedoms. It’s not important there’s a planet wide climate emergency, that there’s a massive decline in wildlife population - all these things don’t matter as long as we’re all free to dick around and do what ever we want without the spooky regulators with guns telling us what to do.

Well, to be frank, it's not about the environment, and barely about national security: some places in Europe -- southern Sweden being the most notable example -- has severe energy shortages to such an extent that new businesses have to go elsewhere when they want to expand.

Other parts of Europe has a power surplus, but the grid's capacity simply isn't high enough to transfer all of it to the locations where it's needed.

As it turned out, the environmentalists' push to kill nuclear power wasn't that great since the plants were in the areas where the power was actually consumed.

If they really are low on power, for whatever reason, it's time to raise prices. I know people like fixing the price below what the actual market rate would be but it causes a lot of problems. And Europe in particular isn't doing itself any favors by shutting down clean nuke plants and relying on fossil fuel Russia, of all countries. They need to re-think how they're managing their energy before it's too late. And "we allowed someone to use their computer a lot so let's ban that" is not a root cause here.

No doubt about it; shutting down the nuclear plants ahead of schedule was simply a bad decision, and I don't think anyone is claiming that crypto actually caused the current energy crisis in Europe.

It's a mess caused by a whole lot of varying factors, ranging from public utilities being sold out to international cartels who pocketed the income without investing in grid improvements, to the EV rollouts, to power plants being decomissioned. On top of that, you have Russia flexing their muscles, and if that conflict somehow escalates then Russian gas imports will be weaponized. I suspect the EU would like to be the ones doing the weaponizing and that means reducing the energy usage and fast.

Under those circumstances, proof-of-work crypto is simply low-hanging fruit and banning it will have a relatively large impact with a fairly small number of people being hit. People will prefer that to even higher energy prices, regardless if it's morally right or not.

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