Senate Bill S6486D Establishes a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining

Yes, some of the details are wrong but it’s irrelevant to the point of the bill. The point is mining with carbon based power is something they want to stop.

Unless the thing you bought is a fossil fuel based electricity generation facility I don't think this affects you.

> I don't appreciate the government letting me buy things and then informing me I'm using them wrong. If they feel there is some negative externality associated with the good I'm buying then they should mitigate it there,

Government does that all the time. You pay for water from the water utility, but they also have restrictions on lawn watering during droughts. You can buy a car, but there are restrictions on who can drive it and under what circumstances. You can buy alcohol, but there are restrictions on when you can drink (drinking and driving, open container laws).

> Regulation of resources is based on scarcity. When water supplies dwindle, you will prioritize drinking over industrial use and farming.

Is this really true in practice? I don’t live in the US, but there were some threads about quite the opposite happening in California: government regulating availability of water in households while raising prices, and at the same time making water cheaply available and wasting for almond production in a desert.

If there's one thing that most economists generally agree on (a rare occurence), it is that resources are better allocated through a market economy than through central planning. It is my understanding that they do that with water, your example, because it is free public utility which is not subject to market forces. Government is generally not involved in the allocation of resources.

When the published summary of the bill isn’t an accurate summary, I think it’s fair to be outraged at several aspects of the overall political process.

Could you please elaborate the advantages of pow crypto mining that outweigh the environmental concerns associated with it?

Please cite specific, real-world examples if possible, not vague ideas and promises that haven't come to fruition yet.

Yet clothes can't be washed by using proof of stake methods

But they provide value, in a way mining does not

Do you have a source for this?

Maybe today. PoW is akin to a paper clip maximizer. The more value the network holds the more energy it needs to use. The cheaper the energy gets the more of it needs to use. So why not jut nip it in the bud?

Washing machines wash clothes, they provide value to the world. And they are subject to plenty of government regulation.

100% this. I wonder if people consider the carbon footprint of maintaining petrodollar hegemony.

But they will lose that hegemony. It happened to the denarii, it will happen to the dollar. The question is - what would be best suited to replace it? Our contenders are the Euro, the Yuen or Bitcoin.

Seems an obvious choice.

Did you read the article I linked to? It’s literally a rounding error because we can’t accurately measure global energy usage down to the 0.1% level.

Significantly (incomparably) less factoring all the elements in traditional finance and the military industrial complex used to secure it.

PoW mining energy consumption is massively exaggerated. Christmas lights alone use more energy than the entire Bitcoin network.

Don't forget to count in the carbon footprint of the physical printing presses all over the world, the cost of disposing the old bills, the fuel needed to transport all those bills every single day, and all the resources associated with building and maintaining that giant infrastructure we take for granted nowadays. I'd also add the cost of waging wars that are made possible by the inflationary policies of the central banks.

Bitcoin is not a payment system. It’s a store of value (like gold) useable to underpin payment systems such as Lightning (like fed wire underpins bank to bank transactions today but more like the gold standard of the past). If Bitcoin were wildly successful and using 1% of energy usage it would probably be displacing enough of the existing financial system to be coming in net ahead as an environmental benefit. In it’s current state it doesn’t justify its environmental footprint largely because as a store of value it fluctuates too much, but it will be interesting to see Lightning and other new tech play out.

Technicalities of the language matter with respect to laws.

To the second point, that sounds like a failure of the government to provide clean energy. In Los Angeles, we get 16% of our energy from coal and 28% from natural gas. I do not blame Bitcoin miners for this. It is a failure of the government to meet the energy needs of its people with clean sources.

Write legislation that mandates building new nuclear power plants or wind farms off the coast.

Hey don, long time!

So the thing with crypto: yeah sure there's bad crap on the margins, but the core of crypto is a completely new, faster and more flexible way to handle money, value, ownership and control. I liken it to "programmable money" but even that's too simplistic. With programmable real estate, the line between rental and ownership can blur, softening the risk and lability for owners, and creating more responsibility and upside for renters. A Bored Ape is a club membership and flexible ownership in a rapidly expanding brand that earns licensing fees: the folks at Disney are paying close attention. A $1+mm apartment is worth $1mm because people say it is and because zoning limits supply, not because the sum of the wood and metal adds up to $1mm.

Today, we spend enormous time/energy/etc on nonsense that should be one line of code, from incorporating companies to paying taxes. As crypto continues to mature and weave itself into business systems, these processes become lines of code that execute while we conduct business. You spin up a company with complex ownership, conduct the transaction, send money to and from the parties (incl government) and year it all down - in seconds. Today, you need weeks and lawyers, accountants, notaries, etc. It's insane.

As for the environment, we can't save our way to success: the solution is either geoengineering or murdering billions (plural) of people and slowing the rest from breeding. I'm hopeful for geoengineering.

Anyway, we can raise our fists to the sky, but the next generation is going to demand 24x7x365 business and banking, have taxes woven into transactions, sophisticated fractional ownership, etc.

,,The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work.'' (From the Bitcoin whitepaper)

I would prefer to quote Satoshi Nakamoto or Dr Adam Back on the subject.

Brian Armstrong is in the business of selling altcoins, he can sell Bitcoin only once, but new altcoins can be created every day.