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Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

In these articles I keep on seeing the phrase "illegal mining", and yet I see no reason why legality would effect the environment. Is it somehow better for the environment if the government gets paid for the resource extraction? I don't think so.

I know that illegal miners may violate mining regulations which are intended to protect the environment, but as far as I can tell, legal third world mining is not regulated in any ecological way making that point moot.

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I would think it would be more about "managing" the resource, than income to a government, but I could be wrong.

Here’s something to think about: how much CO2 has been released into the atmosphere just from crypto currency mining alone? One of the main reasons I’ve avoided getting into bitcoin mining is because my town is powered by a coal plant and I simply cannot justify burning coal to acquire make-believe money.

Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful.

Do you consider gold and silver similarly perverse? Literal mining is messy.

How is that not just whataboutism?

It's not as if we are all forced to choose between either bitcoin or gold...

Besides, those metals are real and have industrial uses, whereas cryptos are just a series of bits that the market collectively agrees holds a value.

Most economies use representative currency. In many places, notes and coins are largely worthless.

Cryptocurrencies differ mainly by being virtual. Given that notes are usually used to represent the larger sums of money, the virtual aspect becomes mostly semantic. Given that most people store their money in banks, who don't have all that money on hand at any point in time (hence why they collapse), then the virtual factor begins to matter even less.

I don't use bitcoin (or equivalent) for pragmatic reasons. Your point however seems to be about its collective abstraction. If you were being consistent, you would have to be against most mainstream currencies as well. This is not a pragmatic or scalable method of commerce. It very quickly become tedious to trade with items that are of only concrete, immediate value to both parties. Try to imagine how online purchases, or warehouses, would function. There's a good reason why virtually every civilisation swapped to representative currency after reaching a certain size.

It happens in America. This mine finally closed down this year but the economics only worked because the mining operation were not paying anywhere close to enough to mitigate the effects / cost of the resource to sell a 50 pound back of sand at Lowe's for a couple of bucks.

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/article/NE/20170328/NEWS/17...

Because illegal miners can take sand from public beaches from rivers, from deltas, etc. Doing so destroys beaches and damages ecosystems, and many governments want to maintain these systems because they are a public good used by many.

How can you "tell" that no third-world country regulates sand mining for ecological reasons? How could they begin to do this if miners are already operating outside of government control?

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