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Comment by iskander | Hacker News Reader

This is a mix of climate denialism and Bitcoin religion.

1) A system that turns energy usage into $ will always gravitate towards the cheapest energy source (fossil fuels). Maybe we'll eventually figure out cold fusion, but for the next few decades it's pretty important to promote carbon neutral energy production even if it's more expensive while simultaneously cutting out gratuitous industrial scale waste like PoW mining.

2) "makes the protocol incorruptible and eternally open and permissionless for anyone to join as first class citizens, even late adopters". Ah yes, let me just fire up my warehouse full of ASICs connected to a dedicated power plant. Any old Joe could do it.

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> cheapest energy source (fossil fuels).

Renewables are often cheaper - it depends.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new...

No, you just misunderstood him. He's saying that energy generation and use should be carbon taxed. If you internalize the carbon externality, fossil fuels will not be cheap.

There are arguments against these, but yours is a poor one.

Thank you. Everyone replying to this comment seems to be intentionally ignoring my point.

Since one of the inherent properties of PoW cryptocurrencies is it doesn't matter where the mining takes place, mining will always take place in whichever country doesn't impose a carbon tax. Ironically they're much more "censorship resistant" to carbon taxes than actual attempts by major economies to ban their use (which would only need to be partially effective to squash the price bubble and by extension reduce incentive to spend on mining)

That's already a problem. Developing nations are consuming an ever expanding amount of fossil fuels. And they're sure as hell not going to stop, because the advantage to their citizens of developing their infrastructure towards Western standards of living far outweighs projected threats of climate change.

Developed countries are already making okish strides on decarbonizing, but how can we in the first world effectively decree that the developing world must halt or slow progress towards the lifestyles that we enjoy. That reeks of a new kind of colonialism, and simply won't go over well without the threat of global violence.

The only way we'll actually make strides on decarbonization is with some kind of global carbon tax. I'm not going to pretend I know how we accomplish that, but if we can't, we're not going to mitigate climate change in any reasonable way.

Geopolitical energy cost arbitrage is a major climate change issue, but I feel like it's disingenuous to focus on crypto as the main problem.

The majority of these harms are in heavy industry, manufacturing, logistics, etc. I'd estimate only 1% of this problem can be attributed to cryptocurrency.

If crypto was somehow globally banned, the problem would not be significantly diminished. If bitcoin eventually becomes responsible for 10%+ of dirty energy, only then would this argument be compelling to me.

This is a mix of Bitcoin denialism and climate religion.

1) Bitcoin mining is increasingly migrating to hydro and geothermal, because fossil fuels are too expensive in comparison. Presumably, nuclear will come eventually.

2) See what I did there in my first sentence? We should have an intellectually hygenic discussion; there is no valid place for the kind of rhetoric you're employing.

Well, I thought it was clever

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