Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Let’s extrapolate. The year is 2035, Bitcoin is $50 Million a coin (but there are less coins), and households are fighting for electricity against bitcoin miners, who are easily winning. Governments trying to ban bitcoin mining meet similar fate to Mexican governments trying to ban the drug cartels’ activity, that is to say their families are threatened and they do not have power anymore to stop it, etc. Their feeble attempts to print money fall short of the ever growing rewards.

Everything in the articles about bitcoin using “only” 6% is misunderstanding the expontnential function. In 2021 those stats are outdated and the Bitcoin network consumes more electricity than half the world’s countries. We are five minutes to midnight. By the time we realize it’s consuming more than half the world combined, it will be too late to stop this activity. It will be “too sweet” and too financial lucrative.

If you think we can stop it as a society, then let’s see how we have done with killing off insects, reducing biodiversity and species, polluting the world with plastic and pumping greenhouse gases into the air. Take that last one for example — have we been able to make a reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions, or merely their rate of growth?

What exactly will change between now and 2035, or 2135 that will make bitcoing mining NOT be more economical valuable than, say, airconditioning homes?

Change my mind. Prove me wrong.

OK, let's imagine a 2030 scenario where environmental and energy use problems ar rampant and Bitcoin is widely agreed to be a big problem. It's super lucrative to mine and unscrupulous miners threaten officials.

But what stops governments or private interests from just identifying large power consumers who are mining and arresting or killing them?

Sure, miners could retaliate but frankly most people who mine bitcoin aren't professional criminals and don't have sufficiently strong social infrastructure to undertake offensive campaigns against their enemies (otherwise every billionaire would be like an emergent nation state). Another problem for them is that there's no relationship between miners and the public at large. Big drug dealers have the (very indirect) support of the many people who enjoy drug consumption. I'm not sure that exists for crypto. You could own a whole cargo container of GPUs that are mining for you 24-7 but I kinda doubt your hardware supplier/network techs are gonna take or dispense a bullet for you.

Okay they also have:

lobbying (as the tech industry does)

paying off government officials to use their island or whatever

mining in secret

mining in such a decentralized way that you can’t detect it, even maybe hijacking normal computing power

But I’m going to go with “it’s so lucrative, that you can't shut it down because they can pay off whatever legal means you dispense at them"

after all if your appeoach worked, why wouldn't the government do the same with all poachers and all plastic manufacturers and all fossil fuel companies?

Well, I'm sure there will be lobbying against it, but you specifically cited the example from Mexico of narcoterrorists threatening public officials so I wanted to explore that extreme scenario.

Some countries are adopting this sort of approach with poachers, although (as with drug dealing) the people doing the actual poaching are generally near the bottom of the food chain and may not even be aware of the larger issues in play. I am fine with bad things happening to upper-tier environmental criminals though.

What about the carbon offsets that would need to be considered if people in aggregate spend less if they all are hoarding bitcoin. Of course the core mining operations must be considered, but if most people are delaying spending because they expect fiat to be replaced by bitcoin, or other cryptos, the quantity demanded of various consumer goods might be lower and this would cause less aggregate power.

I don't buy it, but I mean I heard this on another bitcoin thread and figured I'd bring it up

Electricity is not a finite resource. We have access to functionally unlimited energy from renewable sources which is becoming exponentially cheaper to convert to electricity, but it is a variable resource. What we need is not 100% renewables, but more like 500-600%. We need economic activity to unlock the investment in new infrastructure. Bitcoin is arguably the way forward for cheap clean energy, not the obstacle.

How is energy not finite within our lifetimes? It is not feasible for us to capture the universe’ energy within the next 100 or perhaps 1,000 years (and that universe is expanding faster than light, we become more lonely every second).

Now the power of the sun going into an efficient and massive solar array is absurdly large so yes, we could technically have nearly unlimited power in a few decades.... but sorry my Sci-fi nerd got the best of me and I don’t agree electricity is technically infinite.

There is no shortage of energy in the universe, bitcoin heavily incentivizes utilizing it to secure a global financial network... so we will capture it with increasing efficiency and mankind will get the benefit of all the new tech.

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