Can we just blanket ban all crypto mining?
Back in the 1990’s, hackers fought for—and won—the right to do whatever cryptographic computation they wanted to do on their own computers while the US government was trying to prohibit strong cryptography and require all secured communications to use a secret algorithm designed by the NSA with keys held and managed by the federal government. The failure of the Clipper Chip and the proliferation of cryptography has been a victory for privacy and a thorn in the side of the FBI for decades. And the entire time hackers and privacy activists have been fighting this fight, the feds and their enablers have smeared them with accusations of enabling drug dealers and pedophiles. So unless you can convince people that crypto mining is even worse than child rape, I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere on that front. Besides, all of the cryptographic algorithms are too well known at this point. I don’t think you can stop people from doing math on their own damn computers.
And that leaves peer to peer networking. While cryptography was smeared for enabling pedophilia, peer to peer networking was smeared for something even worse, at least in the hearts of our government and corporate overlords—downloading music! Now that we have the opportunity to pay our corporate overlords for the privilege of “streaming”, they don’t seem to care so much and this fight has also faded into the background. But what’s at stake here was much bigger: whether or not your home internet connection allowed to be anything other than a passive one-way pipe to receive content from our corporate overlords. And in reality, this question also reduces to the other, because if you use cryptography, no one will be the wiser regarding what, exactly, you are doing with your internet connection.
But maybe this was all just a relic of a forgotten time, when hackers were people who scoffed at the idea that the internet should be locked down to stop people from depriving poor Lars Ulrich of album royalties or whatever. Clearly the moral panics of today are much more pressing than those of the 1990’s, and there is simply no need to just allow people to do math on their own computers. Just one of those silly, optimistic ideas we old fools still hold onto, like freedom of speech. Maybe China had the right idea when they built the Great Firewall.
Not sure I agree with the idea to ban this, though. I think it's a huge waste of time, money, and electricity, but people should be able to do that if they want.
But they should have to pay their fair share for it: penalties for these noise complaints should meaningfully cut into their profit to the point that it would be more cost-effective for them to build proper noise isolation. Electricity prices should be set higher for commercial activity of that kind so local communities aren't harmed, and in places where they aren't mining off renewable energy, the carbon impact of the mining should be accounted for somehow. And we should ensure that these companies are paying their fair share of taxes. I expect the low taxes in Texas is a reason why mining companies like it there, though.
And if paying for these externalities makes mining no longer profitable, that's just the system working as it should.
Politicians pass laws and the internet laughs. The law also supposedly made it illegal to share the hexadecimal number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 but everyone did it anyway. I’m not a huge fan of cryptocurrency but I am of the old-fashioned opinion that doing math on your own damn computer is a human right, and that fundamentally unenforceable laws are silly.
That will protect the conscientious consumers of electricity, and punish the profligate wasters (or encourage them to create their own sources of energy, preferably renewable).
What gives someone the right to tell someone else what they must use the electricity they've bought for? The only right I can think of would be an indirect one - i.e. if their use of the electricity directly broke a law (e.g. they electrocuted someone)
Well, at its base, the law and force of government give people that right, just like any law we make gives anyone the right to tell someone else they can or can't do something.
Electricity is a common resource. Spinning up new power plants is not cheap and has environmental impact. Overtaxing a grid not prepared for the added load causes all sorts of problems for residents. We write laws all the time to encourage behavior we want and discourage behavior we don't want. There's not reason why electricity use around Bitcoin mining should be exempt from that.
How about a tax for computer gaming? Explain the difference.
Did you read the article? Harm is definitely being caused.
Wanting to ban it because of an easily resolved incidence of noise disturbance would be even more insane than I usually expect.
There's also the problem that most people (even most people using crypto) want some degree of regulation, so it's likely that regulated crypto will outpace the growth of unregulated crypto at least in the forseeable future.
The government cannot control the bitcoin network. They can either choose to embrace it or not.
I don't think we can support that claim. Growth in demand can mean a lot of things. Since Bitcoin is still largely driven by speculators (not to mention scammers), I don't think we can assume that growth in demand is strictly due to people who want to use it as a store of value, or as a currency.
> The government cannot control the bitcoin network.
True, but they can make it difficult for people to use it, and penalize people who are found to be using it. That doesn't mean no one will use it, or that no one will get value out of it, but it does mean that it would be marginalized and of limited use to most people.
Incorrect. The only way that the _lowest_ value of bitcoin continues to increase significantly each halving epoch is that more and more value is being stored in it long term.
> True, but they can make it difficult for people to use it, and penalize people who are found to be using it. That doesn't mean no one will use it, or that no one will get value out of it, but it does mean that it would be marginalized and of limited use to most people.
They can't penalise people for using it as it would be unlawful/unconstitutional to do so. Sure, they can _slow down_ the adoption in their country through various underhand means like allowing the banking system to prevent people from sending their own money to exchanges, and capital "gains" taxes but they can't control the network itself.
People in other countries without an oppressive regime will be unaffected (and will thrive as a result of having better access to a better store-of-value).
Depending on the activity, their effectiveness at doing so will of course vary. But governments can absolutely ban Bitcoin and (especially) mining, and that will greatly reduce the usefulness of Bitcoin for people, even if they can't fully stamp it out.
If the legislation they create is not lawful then it can't be enforced in the courts as doing so would be inherently unjust.
Hashing data and purchasing electricity obtained from approved sources have never been shown to be (and unlikely ever will be) unlawful activities.
Sure. And building a bomb is just chemistry. And shooting someone is just physics. Reductionist arguments which ignore context never work, because the context always matters. Even anarchists tend to accept that a balance needs to be struck between individual liberties and the needs of society, and the question of regulating or banning Bitcoin mining isn't one of "performing calculations" but the practical environmental and societal consequences of Bitcoin mining at scale. See TFA.
The real issue here is that you think doing the hashing is a waste of energy/money. Well you have no right to tell me how efficiently I should use my own property.
Your property rights aren't absolute. You're using resources provided by society, thus society has a legitimate interest in the cost and benefit of that usage.
Something tells me that even conceding the existence of the aggregate, you would still refuse to acknowledge its relevance, maintaining that the specific instance of your own hashing doesn't cause damage any more than a single snowflake is responsible for an avalanche. But that isn't an argument that Bitcoin mining isn't harmful, it's an argument that you don't care either way.
Perhaps you should consider your own arrogance, that you think you should be able to stop me using electricity for something that doesn't cause any harm, but which you ignorantly believe doesn't provide me enough benefit. It's none of your business.
Show me the evidence of the harm the act of hashing data causes. All you can present is some claim that using electricity causes harm. Well that applies to everything you plug into the wall, including electric vehicles, clothes dryers and Christmas lights.
Again, what right does anyone have to enforce that I should not be supplied electricity because they deem that I use it inefficiently? I pay for the electricity I use, just as everyone else does.
In any case, if my use of electricity is inefficient then whatever I'm using it for will ultimately be succeeded by a more efficient alternative that provides the same benefits (I wouldn't advise holding your breath).
Another poster here (who lives there) says the local government also offered this company a tax break when they moved in. Sounds like the government doesn't actually have the best interests of its citizens in mind.
So, to be clear: I do agree with you that we shouldn't just "ban Bitcoin mining". We should require, however, that miners -- especially large-scale ones like this -- are paying for the externalities of their business. Too much noise? They need to spend a bunch of money on proper noise isolation. They should be paying their fair share of taxes, and not getting tax breaks. They should be paying for the environmental impact of their added electricity usage, if any. If their electricity usage requires building new power plants and/or fortifying existing grid connections or transmission lines, they should bear the cost of that work, alone. Residents should not be seeing higher electricity costs because of companies like this, but the article claims they are.
If paying for these externalities makes mining unprofitable to the point that they shut down, so be it.
> what right does anyone have to enforce that I should not be supplied electricity because they deem that I use it inefficiently?
You keep bringing this up, but seem to have no idea how society works: governments and citizens have that right. That's how laws work. People like something, so they write a law to encourage it. People don't like something, so they write a law to ban it. There's no natural right to use electricity any way you want. (In fact there's no such thing as "natural rights": our rights are defined by humans and enumerated by legal documents, and there are governments that are willing to enforce them.)
Again, I'm not saying we should legally ban Bitcoin mining; I think there are better ways to deal with the problem, as I outlined above. But governments and citizens absolutely have the right to write laws that restrict what people do with electricity. That's just basic civics.
That was likely because they didn't expect it to be noisy. This is something that is relatively easily fixed by adding more sound insulation to the building. If the fine is too low to encourage this, then that is a problem with the law enforcement, not bitcoin mining.
> If their electricity usage requires building new power plants and/or fortifying existing grid connections or transmission lines, they should bear the cost of that work, alone. Residents should not be seeing higher electricity costs because of companies like this, but the article claims they are.
Would you say the same for data centres? Should computer gamers be forced to pay for the power plants that supply the energy that they used? Why are you singling out one particular use of energy? If its using a lot of energy, then it's also paying for a lot of energy, and likely very profitable energy as it's a constant demand rather than volatile which can be very wasteful for production.
> You keep bringing this up, but seem to have no idea how society works: governments and citizens have that right.
I keep bringing it up, because they do not have that right. Governments can try to enforce legislation, but if it's unlawful/unconstitutional then they will fail assuming the judicial system is correctly independent. If I do something with energy that I have fairly obtained and what I do does not harm anyone else (which hashing data does not, just as computer gaming doesn't) then attempts to stop me would be a breach of my peace and I could and would, sue for damages.
That's not because the law specifically says you can't use electricity to do those things (it's about murder and illegal drug production and distribution), but the end result is the same.
Banning Bitcoin or Bitcoin mining need not be a specific energy-use law, even if that might be the purpose behind such a law.