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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

I am not in favor of crypto. I don't think it is a better alternative than our "centralized" economy. I don't own any crypto, I don't encourage it to flourish, I don't encourage people to buy it.

>Crypto is so inherently wasteful it's completely unethical.

skateboarding is inherently wasteful, should we ban that too?

if people choose to do something voluntarily, and devote resources to it, I don't see a basis for you declaring it unethical. If climate change is your fear and we all decide to save ourselves by living in caves, some cavemen might still choose to engage in the cave-crypto-currency equivalent (carving big giant rolling stone coins?): it's not unethical, it's just not what you would choose.

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Without delving too much into the utility of the practice, skateboarding as a past time is a rather commonly banned activity in common spaces.

The issue here is not that someone is doing something voluntarily and devoting resources to it, but rather that someone is taking an action that involves the consumption of a rivalrous good. The court's ruling notes this explicitly (from the article) "the very real prospect that devoting such a large proportion of the available electrical power supply to one industry would leave less energy for other uses which might result in increased costs to all other residential and industry customers in B.C.”

> skateboarding is inherently wasteful, should we ban that too?

* Skateboarding does not waste nearly as much energy

* Each joule expended Skateboarding is spent increasing fun, on crypto spent on greed

* More skate borders makes more fun, more miners is less fun

Not just energy, crypto is also using far more rare earth minerals and metals in their excessive utilization of CPUs and GPUs. Batteries to keep things running when power goes out. It's wasting so very many of our resources. There is no defense.

skateboarding doesn't scale to take up all available resources. I could be 10x the skater as Tony Hawk and I'd still only use one skateboard at a time. Doesn't matter if it's a $1,000,000 skateboard, I'm still only using one at a time. Meanwhile, $1,000,000 of cryptomining by one person is going to use so many more joules, and for what?

Is the commercial exploitation of several finite resources —skyrocketing their market prices— to generate nothing of actual value really just like skateboarding?

That's a bad analogy. The wastefulness of crypto affects us all.

If skateboarding consumed 2% of our total power consumption then yes, it would be unethical and probably subject to stringent regulations.

Skateboarding isn't using millions of dollars of energy, that outside of this instance is frequently carbon producing.

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