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Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway22032

This is disappointing. I'd previously been a big fan of the sourcehut model.

I can understand not wanting to be associated with the billions of tinycoin ICO scams or NFTs that are just URL links or whatever else.

But to reject things like Bitcoin or Ethereum seems to me to be a denial of reality. Just because it's not useful for you, doesn't make it not useful.

For clarity, I will be affected by this change and I don't at all believe my code is socially negative, but I'm not interested in justifying myself. My favourite ice cream flavour is not yours.

In the end, Git is decentralized and running cgit or whatever is pretty simple stuff. I just had high hopes for sourcehut.

On a long enough timescale I suppose anyone lets you down.

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There is nothing wrong with you being disappointed, but it is important to clarify that disappointing you does not mean that the service disappoints others.

After all, there is nothing inherently wrong with people having different ideologies, and that must apply to companies too - either the ideology of the owners/operators, or the jurisdiction they reside in. And considering how the vast majority of cryptocurrencies are indeed just vehicles of scam and speculation, I find it perfectly reasonable to just have to send a short message to give a heads up that you are indeed the 1 in a million case worthy of exclusion. Talking to people is not the end of the world, and I doubt it would take more than a short message.

Bitcoin with proof of waste is not just about flavour.

And yet Drew hasn't made an exemption for Ethereum, which does not do proof of work.

That a project using proof of work is bad does not meant that a project using proof of stake is good. The ban is cryptocurrencies, and that PoW cooks the planet for no benefit is only one of the listed reasons behind it.

Proof of work isn't "cooking the planet". Get a grip. And Bitcoin is a fantastic benefit for humanity resulting from proof of work.

Turning on shuttered gas and coal plants solely to mine cryptocurrencies is about as close as you can get to pointlessly cooking the planet.

The benefits have been relatively modest so far.

Sounds like you have a problem with fossil fuels.

Indeed I do. I have problems with lots of things, as most people do.

What makes securing hundreds of billions of people's money a less valid use of fossil fuels than playing Call of Duty?

For one, quantity: video games don’t use as much electricity, and those that do aren’t incentivizing reactivation of old fossil fuel plants.

For another, necessity: we have a preexisting financial system that secures orders of magnitude more value than cryptocurrencies do, with actual legal guarantees and recourses.

For a final, civic harm: whatever limited negative social ills can be explained by video games are dwarfed by the civic poison of fraud and “easy” money.

Energy isn't fungible.

That financial system uses many more magnitudes of energy.

This is like blaming dollars for the existence of bank robbers.

I don’t understand what energy’s fungibility has to do with anything I’ve said. Most economic uses of energy involve exchanging it for productive capacity or consumer demand. Bitcoin definitely is an economic use of energy, just not a good or desirable one.

I don’t think the directly comparable elements of the financial system (i.e., storage and settlement) use anywhere near as much power as Bitcoin does. Unless you’re doing that thing where you’re comparing the entire traditional economy to Bitcoin, which is silly: the traditional economy has actually valuable outflows, and Bitcoin does not replace factories and their workers.

Not a good or desirable one in your opinion. It is absolutely good and desirable in my opinion to have neutral money that can be used by anybody but controlled by nobody. The US dollar is secured by military force which has a staggering energy footprint. Bitcoin finally settled roughly the same amount as Fedwire last year and uses exactly as much energy as it needs to.

Yes, and thereby those that cause them to keep running (e.g., Bitcoin miners).

If we had abundant clean energy everywhere with no unclean power plants, then knock yourself dead. But right now, any power consumed has an unclean component.

Even if you use power in a country that is 100% renewable, it takes away power from a grid that is then replaced by non-renewable energy. And that these miners buy old crap power plants make it worse - it reverses grid-wide improvements to green energy.

... heck even with fully renewable energy for the entire globe, wastefully burning energy so that more renewable power sources need to be deployed is still bad - no power plant is neutral to manufacture.

And re: comparison to call of duty, if had the same footprint as Bitcoin, then we could start talking. Bitcoin consumes power like a small country, not like someone forgetting to turn off the lights. All for something that can be done without any of this power draw.

Nope. Energy isn't fungible.

Nothing the GP has said requires a stance on the fungible nature of energy. Where are you getting that from?

"it takes away power from a grid that is then replaced by non-renewable energy."

This idea/delusion that energy that is used for mining should and could have been used for something else. It's just not the case.

You shouldn’t refer to other commenters as deluded.

It’s pretty clear the GP means a demand curve: cryptocurrencies induce demand for energy sources that would otherwise be uneconomical to operate. This doesn’t require fungibility.

And that's only a problem if those energy sources are fossil fuels. Demand for renewables is a fantastic thing. Bitcoin is a pioneer species, it will use that energy when there's literally no other economically viable use.

> And that's only a problem if those energy sources are fossil fuels

Okay, but the 'if' there is true. Bitcoin is currently inducing demand for coal and gas plants, which is very bad. It's unclear when it'll stop doing that, if it'll stop, and a hypothetical future in which Bitcoin starts incentivizing the good thing instead of the bad thing doesn't change the truth value of the current bad thing.

(We've also fixated on coal burning, when there are oodles of other great reasons to not like Bitcoin. A small handful of them have been listed elsewhere in this thread.)

Bitcoin isn't going away. More people are putting their trust in it as their monetary standard every day, not less. Bitcoin, the asset and network are neutral. Scams on top of it, shitcoin affinity scams, or whatever "oodles of other great reasons" don't change that. The majority of Bitcoin mining is already renewable, it already incentivises renewables this isn't a hypothetical future.

If somebody proposed a law tomorrow that bans coal plants being reopened to mine Bitcoin I wouldn't be against it, and Bitcoin would carry on happily regardless.

BUt you're then getting into the dangerous territory of telling people what and what isn't an acceptable use of compute power. Bitcoin is a valid and useful consumer of energy.

This is a polemic. I don't have a stated position on whether Bitcoin is or isn't going away, and we've completely drifted away from the factual matter at hand (that Bitcoin does currently incentivize coal burning).

If Bitcoin is neutral as you say, it cannot incentivize renewable production. It can only induce energy demand and, consequently, seek out the cheapest energy on the market. It doesn't get to sit on any laurels for that, any more than car manufacturing or aluminum refinement would. Except, of course, that those actually produce things.

Bitcoin mining secures hundreds of billions of value for hundreds of millions of people going back to the very first transaction. It produces security, a forcefield around a financial system, and the miners get paid to do that.

Fossil fuels are everyone's problem.

It's wasting huge amounts of precious resources, often from buying out old, unclean and otherwise decommissioned powerplants to make it extra bad. All with no immediate benefit. Even if Bitcoin was Proof of Stake, it's still a pretty "eh" technology.

The best thing that happened to Bitcoin was when it got banned in China so that the mining capacity was vastly reduced, taking part of the environmental footprint with it. Can't wait for others to do the same.

Maybe new Blockchain products will pop up that do something interesting without being a significant contributor to global warming and lung cancer by massively increasing unclean power usage - but maybe not.

No it isn't. If that energy is cheap enough to be used for securing Bitcoin then it can't have been used for something "useful" (in your opinion). Energy isn't fungible and transport costs exist. The immediate benefit is securing and making possible an open, permissionless digital financial system anybody can use. That is an absolutely stunning technological innovation. Proof of stake is the perpetual motion machine scam here.

The massive amount of stranded hydro that Bitcoin was soaking up in China, when mining was banned was that energy magically teleported to NYC to power people's TVs and dry their clothes? No, it's now sitting there unused with no buyers of last resort. In fact, that being sitting unused is now subsidising the fossil fuel mining by lowering the relative mining difficulty.

Mining is responsible for a rounding error in emissions, if it disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't even make a detectable dent.

Fossil fuels are bad. Fossil fuels being used for mining is bad. That doesn't make Bitcoin bad.

Sure, when we have a 100% renewable grid where Bitcoin neither takes away renewable quota, add dirty energy, cause grid to have to expand, or causes issues when TWh of heat is vented, and it is then adopted for legitimate reasons and not primarly for speculation and scamming, then Bitcoin goes from extremely harmful to mildly interesting.

Yes there are cases where they buy good power plants, but they also power from grid and buy dirty power plants. Even in case of good power, the investment should instead be made to make this power useful. Heck, folding at home or similar would be a hell of lot better usage.

But that isn't where we are. We're in a huge energy crunch, and having to go back on green policies because of it. During this time, ANY consumption is bad, and no, regardless of opinions on its usefulness, Bitcoin does not yet contribute in a meaningful enough way to sacrifice other utilities.

So yeah - I agree with you that we can waste power when and only when the vast majority of dirty power has been replaced.

"ANY consumption is bad" You really aren't getting this are you. Energy in place A can't be magically transported to place B where it's needed for what you bless as acceptable usage. Bicoin miners aren't using grid energy. They're using energy that CAN'T be connected to a grid. Bitcoin is a fantastic use of energy regardless, just because YOU don't need to use it or think so doesn't make that the case.

Yeah you aren't getting it.

1. People mine Bitcoin on the grid.

2. Some miners - mostly China, which is no longer mining - buy decommissioned power plants and mine "off the grid".

... But, surprise surprise, these decommissioned power plants were previously used. People generally do not invest in building power plants that cannot connect to the grid, as the power plant needs to make money. While it never became a thing in the US, energy trade is a big thing in the rest of the world - see e.g. the European Energy Exchange.

The people that tripped over a hydroplant that was built only to power e.g. a remote factory that has shut down and nothing else, account for a very, very, VERY small amount of miners.

Considering that Bitcoin mining consumes TWh in the scale of a small country, those few fairy tale cases just don't matter. It's a cute way to try to justify the environmental disaster Bitcoin mining is, just too bad it doesn't hold.

This may be an axe you want to grind, but it doesn't seem pertinent to the actual statement from Sourcehut. They don't say they're terminating crypto projects because of the environmental aspect. They're terminating them because they're often fraudulent. According to this statement you could be bad for the environment, but not be a platform for fraud, and appeal to Sourcehut and be reinstated.

I personally am a fan of Drew's work and pretty skeptical of crypto, but this announcement makes me feel that Sourcehut is too small and attached to the preferences of one man for me to host anything significant there.

Nah, Bitcoin was a thing. But it is an intellectually dead. And without the network the asset itself is barely a thing.

The best engineering talent works on Bitcoin. Altcoins were intellectually DOA.

Working on what? Smart-contracts? Privacy? The only thing Bitcoin has going is LN, but even than, it will not succeed - simply because a better alternatives exist.

Bitcoin is money, digital scarcity only needed to be invented once. Shitcoins are scams. LN is growing fast on a solid hard money layer 1 foundation.

You haven't addressed anything I've said. What they are working on? Definitely not privacy nor smart-contracts.

Privacy on the base layer means the supply isn't auditable. Lightning network has sender privacy and improvements are being made to receiver privacy. I did smart contracts stuff on Rootstock yesterday. I don't need my base layer doing that thanks. I just need it to be money.

they've been sea lioning this thread, the goal isn't to convince, but to exhaust

But it is. Your negatively charged comment just proved that.

It says they are willing to make exceptions if you contact them with compelling reason.

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