Cryptocurrency mining does not cause global warming.
Burning fossil fuel does. Why not ban fossil fuel burning, if the concern is pollution? How are all other industries exempt?
Burning fossil fuel does. Why not ban fossil fuel burning, if the concern is pollution? How are all other industries exempt?
I don’t care about the merits of bitcoin, but these simplistic crude and inaccurate legislation attempts are fundamentally market distorting and inefficient and restrict our rights.
[Spoiler: it's more than 30 years just for onboarding, for those who are curious. For the unaffiliated bystanders, next time you hear "Lightning network solves all issues, layer 2!" chant from the cult, remember that Bitcoin is still a tired old database at the bottom of it that is still looking for a problem to solve.]
Spoiler: eltoo & an upgrade with SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT along with channel factories seems perfectly capable.
But it will NEVER work for everyone.
> you want to discount it cause it can't immediately onboard the entirety of humanity within an arbitrarily short timeframe is
The "arbitrarily short" timeframe is 30 years. That seems kinda long to me. But then again I keep hearing "We're still early!" after 13 years of Bitcoin, so maybe you guys are targeting sometimes next century, in which case, my apologies.
Oh, and also, it's not _just_ to onboard, it's the first transaction. Anytime you want to settle, close a channel, create a new one, it's the same congestion. Unless you propose people initiate a channel for their newborn so the kid can eventually start using lightning when they get their third real job at 30? That _could_ work, hmm.
> there certainly will be a protocol capable of achieving that absurd high bar for a trust-less blockchain
"My project is gonna be working by the time for the final! I swear!" stopped working for me when I graduated high school and entered what some may call the real life. Seems cute that it's still alive and well in the crypto fantasy land to judge things by the publicity pieces instead of what they actually are.
Anyway, I'm not nitpicking. I'm punching holes through your tired arguments about an inefficient database and how it's the savior of humanity (just to pump up your coinz.)
To all knee deep bitcoiner, please understand that your future of finance wet dream doesn't actually ever scale to 1% of what's needed, stop burning fossil fuel, and find a new hobby, ffs.
> future of finance wet dream doesn't actually ever scale to 1% of what's needed, stop burning fossil fuel, and find a new hobby, ffs
This just seems needlessly vitriolic rather than a substantive argument.
I gave you a protocol that doesn't "take 30 years" and you say it's a pipe dream.
That brings quite a value. Without anti-fraud measures, you wouldn't have a monetary system.
"We also are making our operations more sustainable – including achieving carbon neutrality and procuring 100% renewable electricity in 2019, a year ahead of schedule."
Drastically lower than Bitcoin if this is anything to go by. So low you might as well put BofA into a fossil fuel burn limbo contest.
Given that result took less than three seconds of searching, I'm wondering if you have an ulterior motive in targeting BofA specifically.
Who is the government to say otherwise?
Without that you have an anarchic lawless society where individualism can flourish and people can exploit whatever they want without regards for the 2nd, 3rd, n-th order impact that an action might cause unto others, because it's invisible or severely hidden to them. Or that they simply don't care about said impact because their personal reward is worth more to them than the benefit of society as a whole.
Why not a carbon tax scheme for everyone, period? This is what I'm asking.
Why is cryptocurrency mining banned, while other "profiteers" (oil companies, gas-electric companies and so on) would not be penalized equally?
The US has among the highest per-capita carbon emissions.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?most_rec...
Given that the global carbon tax is unlikely to happen, we might has well take action against proof of work now since it would still be a net benefit for mankind.
Because the world is not fair and a general carbon tax will not get passed.
That's discounting a federal carbon tax that would go this deep, because that's certainly not happening.
Not because they are god, because they are how society codifies what it wants and sets policies to achieve it.
Cryptocurrency isn't even banned, only proof of work.
It's a completely valid thing for a government to set a policy about.
Especially now that the experiment has been allowed to run without meddling for many years, and the results are well and truly in.
There might be an argument about invalid interference on day one, but not now.
Banning proof of work is tantamount to banning computation, it's silly and infeasible unless you want to start monitoring what people calculate.
Which for anyone remotely sane is laughable on its face.
The purpose of a state-level policy (state as in government not state as in NY) is to have a state-level agregate effect, not to actually care about each microscopic individual instance.
If you make a policy that in effect Bitcoin is illegal, that will have a population-scale effect.
The fact that you can make an argument that 'it's just computation no different from any other computation' is ignorant of the point and kind of jeuvenile. You didn't say anything they didn't know perfectly well.
Why call me juvenile? That's not necessary to make your argument. It's rude too and against the rules.
> Enforcement practicality is a separate issue.
No it's not, enforcement practicality is the only important issue regarding a law. An unenforceable law is useless.
The question of if a thing is harmful or should be controlled or declared illegal, and the question of how the implimentation mechanics of controlling a thing might be done, are two completely different questions. If you had no way to physically prevent murders, that does not then follow that therefor murder shouldn't be illegal. Failing to realize that is yet another example of jeuvenile.
Practically every law, policy, regulation, code, etc has some element of arbitrariness, interpretation, and discretion or selective enforcement. This one is no different.
Who is the government to say otherwise?
Oh yeah, that's right, the government SHOULD actually make policies to cut down on negative affects of things that some people want to do. You know, because that's the whole point of government.
It's the will of the people and it overrules the will of some cryptobros.
The goverenment, in liberal democracies, are the people elected representatives.
It's massively simplified our processes, and improved UX. Our customer base is already crypto-native, which is what makes this possible.
Users pay us simply by sending funds to our wallet. Our entire payment processing engine is under 300 lines, including USD-denominated fees in crypto. Payments arrive instantly, with almost zero fees, from any country.
We have no chargebacks or (traditional) payment fraud.
Our remote staff are paid in crypto, arriving instantly with no cross-border issues.
One might argue that crypto makes customers unable to demand a refund, or that it is impossible to send a refund to a customer who is so anonymous that the merchant cannot even communicate with them, but these are less obviously a "no-no" for a business.
This argument was (and still is) valid for PoW algorithms, but energy consumption is now barely a factor for Ethereum, which is the main network we take payments on [1].
Ethereum is currently doing 30 TPS [0], and Paypal ~200 [1]. Assuming that energy usage scales linearly (a naive assumption, but for arguments sake), it could deliver similar value with 10x lower energy consumption, I don't find arguing against the adoption of PoS crypto solely based on sustainability very credible either.
[1] https://www.ing.uc.cl/en/boletines/engineering-student-scale....
Not even a bit. The tide has changed after endless failures on the side of cryptocurrencies.
You've said it yourself. If the only way to accept crypto payments is to have a "crypto-native" userbase, what does this say about its utility for society? If the entire crypto industry is self referential, then once you peel back the layers there's not much left but a big system that moves money around in a circle.
Aren't you describing all fiat currencies? How is the US dollar any different?
Lithium-ion is a great comparison to because we should, even though there has been adoption of Li batteries, still be willing to say that massive scale lithium strip mining might be worse than having electric cars and it might be worth regulating away. Even if crypto was highly used, doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate it, particularly if it's externalities are worse than the alternatives (and they are).
Even if crypto did reach 50% of transactions or any of your other examples, and it can't, trustless environments demand waste so that kind of scale isn't possible without earth shattering waste, but for the sake of argument let's say it did, I'd still argue for it's abolishment at a societal level because it does transactions WORSE than everything else. Higher risk, fewer safeguards (oops wrong address, now my money is gone forever vs oops, I'll just call my bank), more emissions, more dark money, more money laundering, more room for scams... I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point.
A global currency has now been established successfully (done organically too with no authority behind it), but 15 years is entirely too short of a time frame to guarantee adoption. The primary growth issue has been secure on and off ramps for local users, but that's a short term problem. Amazingly, we already see adoption in some of the poorest corners of the world before the richest. But you already know why that is: first world countries are fine paying a higher premium on every transaction because we can be more wasteful. It does offer some additional services like chargebacks, short-term debt financing, etc. Others aren't as fortunate due to local currency values, local infrastructure, etc. Also worth mentioning, sending any kind of remittance across the globe has a punishing level of fees attached as well. I don't think you are justified to say what we have right now is good enough, because across multiple dimensions it isn't for millions of people. The adoption curves for other countries demonstrates this: there is a need for something new.
Visa claims their network can handle 24k transactions a second. There are multiple crypto that can approach that throughput without much increase in waste. Lightning network's energy use doesn't scale with the volume of transactions. The security of the network and transaction volume are different dimensions on energy usage, so I think you are off on that point.
Energy waste is definitely a concern, but IMO should not be the concern for a much needed global financial network. Energy waste must come from global emission agreements and local regulation. High non-renewable energy users should be taxed more. High individual users can also be taxed more. The good thing about crypto is the tradeoff of value add vs energy used is extremely clear to everyone involved. If it doesn't make money people stop doing it, or commit a crime that can be pursued (whether or not it will be is another issue). The economics are transparent, which is extremely important.
The externalities are not worse than the alternatives, and it's fairly obvious. The alternative is no global finance network. The alternative is an unstable money supply. The alternative is continued manipulation of powerful countries to perpetuate financial repression. The continued funding of middle-men. The slow erosion of financial privacy (TBF, only 1 crypto actually improves this).
We'll find the energy savings somewhere else, such as the overwhelming wasteful industrial and transportation sectors. Crypto will continue do what makes sense economically. It will continue funding renewable energy and lift up areas with low industry potential but high renewable energy potential.
The current system loses hundreds of billions of dollars in credit card scams. But CC companies are still profitable. Wire fraud scams are up to $3.5 billion per year. Crypto has a better chance of fixing these through new security processes (there's room for custodial wallets) than the current system. The bank is already going to tell you to take a hike if you were scammed. If you can prove it's identity theft then you will typically be made whole, but even then it's not guaranteed without additional insurance.
Cheers
Ideally we want to use/focus our resources to create things which then create net value.
More mining does not provide more coins, only increased fuel burnt per coin.
So in total for society, we are burning fuel for nothing in return in aggregate. And let’s be honest - a majority of these coins aren’t going to “citizen crypto miners”, they are typically going to huge scale crypto farms so it’s hardly spreading the wealth.
But apparently people agree with the >$600k/hour costs [1] it takes to process Bitcoin transactions.
This cost is taken from the Bitcoin price (via miners selling) and from transaction fees.
Therefore, they must think they are getting at least that much value out of the system.
If people are willing to trade this, it must be valuable and also thus must be worth more than the environmental damage being caused.
But it should be fair across all industries.
My hypothesis is: special laws betray special interest - here, Big Oil still wants most of the world to pollute, but Big Banks want Bitcoin out of the picture.
I think this is at the heart of the difference in opinion - if the free market efficiently determines the best use of resources.
My personal view is that it often doesn’t, and that where it doesn’t that the government should sometimes intervene.
The specificity of this law exposes the corrupt interests that have captured the politicians (i.e. Big Oil).
No, it says "that are operated through electric generating facilities that use a carbon-based fuel".
How is using the grid not banned? Does grid energy not use carbon-based fuel?
>Section 2 places a moratorium on air permit issuance and renewal for an electric generating facility that utilizes a carbon-based fuel and that provides, in whole or in part, behind-the-meter electric energy consumed or utilized by cryptocurrency mining operations that use proof-of-work authentication methods to validate blockchain transactions.
Also, as the price of oil goes down because Dilbert (et al.) refuse to buy it, the marginal oil producer (probably US tight oil, ironically, since about 2006) gets priced out of the market, resulting in a decrease of production.
If you have a disfavored sector of the economy that isn't allowed to use electricity from fossil fuels, and a favored sector that is, the effect on how much electricity your economy consumes from what sources will be zero until the amount of electricity needed by the disfavored sector exceeds total non-fossil-fuel-based production.
But it's a variant of Parkinson's Law in action; new energy production is gobbled up by whatever industry. We're building huge offshore windmill farms, but their capacity is bought up by datacenters.
We don't need more green energy per sé; we need to reduce consumption wholesale.
It's not the first time new currencies were made illegal, actually it is expected.
I'm offended by people saying that I use it for illegal things, just how I don't suppose a person is a drug dealer just because there's trace cocaine on the money he or she uses.
Also I use Binance debit card for payments, they autoconvert to the currency that the country needs.
Of course I use fiat currency accounts as well, I didn't say that, what I wrote is by Bitcoin payments are not illegal.
Right now I'm on a smaller budget than before, it's no problem for me.
More generally it is troubling that the ban implicitly is an attack against general purpose computing. There is a policy that only certain programs get to use energy sources. Even those who want to kill crypto currencies should think about the downstream consequences of this policy, and what else it could be applied to next.
ASICs that mine Bitcoin are _anything but_ a general purpose computer. It's like saying "banning coal rollers is an affornt against general transportation". I personally would be pretty okay if the ban was against Bitcoin mining ASICs instead, knowing that it does nothing to restrict any other computing freedom.
But I believe people should be free to waste/risk their money in general.
Similarly: nothing about forbidding the use of fossil fuels challenges the fundamentals of the Bitcoin protocol. It’s merely been promoted to the same regulatory status as “burning tires in your backyard for heat.”
All it serves to do is create more techno-babble that confuses 99% of the population which has no ability to actually understand what the technology actually is and does. So scams fill the void
A blanket ban is much easier to enforce, even if "easy" in this context is basically impossible.