Proof of work is temporarily illegal in New York
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The issue here is that at the very bottom you end up with really nasty vicious poverty circles... and now that I think of it, we don't know in advance what kind of combination of minimum low power and low time fraction of guaranteed supply is the best, and how you combine market discovery for that with regulation...
Of course, I know that many of you... as lomg as it is not your own business everything is ok.
It would [let us assume for the sake of argument] be better for society if proof of work systems did not exist. But if we ban it it will just happen anyway.
It would be better for society if murder did not exist but even though we banned it, murder just happens anyway.
Banning this type of activity has historically proven difficult, it's basically the lesson we keep re-learning with the prohibition, the war on drugs and so forth.
Why?
Debt is also something foreign intelligence looks for when attempting to recruit spies.
Crypto speculation. Like all speculation is ultimately gambling, which people can get addicted to.
Your terms are acceptable.
But miners just pay their energy bills like any other citizen. Who are you to tell them what activity should they perform with the energy they purchase?
With the current technology it is just impossible.
Sounds like this is a good reason for them to pay lower rates per kwh.
That's a sacrifice for the whole world and not only for the people it benefits though.
And I wish nobody made that sacrifice. I don't quite care about the blockchain being strongly immutable. However, I strongly care about global warming.
> It is not a waste
Well, it is a waste for anybody who does not need this blockchain. And I'm not sure it's that useful even for its current users.
"Don't feed the blockchain!"
However, I indeed don't want Christmas light on my home for somewhat related reasons.gratuitously
But I suspect Christmas lights are not even close to reaching the levels of energy consumed by blockchain mining worldwide. Even Christmas lights are more useful than PoW blockchains.
As human beings we are going to consume energy and produce CO2 for pleasure (we are not talking about strict necessity here). Because in the end, I believe enjoying life is almost an (the?) end-goal of life, if any. But we don't need to burn some so gratuitously neither.
For the record though, bitcoin mining uses more than Christmas lights, but far less than clothes dryers, and far less than gold mining (and gold mining is pretty horrible for human rights and land destruction as well).
Completely agree.
> far less than clothes dryers, and far less than gold mining (and gold mining is pretty horrible for human rights and land destruction as well).
Agree too.
> I would rather just tax the externalities and let people decide how to spend inside of that.
Mhm, I don't believe in the effectiveness of this and I think we need something stronger than this, but that's a belief. One problem with taxing externalities is that richer people get to waste more with fewer consequences than poorer people a.k.a they have a right to pollute more / more power to pollute and I don't think we should be able to buy "pollution power". Currently, the amount of money one have is actually already roughly equivalent to one's power to pollute. Limiting the amount of CO2 each people can spend (without the ability to transfer, because that's equivalent to being able to buy pollution power", equally, might be fairer, and that would probably eliminate PoW mining because people will probably want to "spend" their limited amount of pollution in other ways.
Of course, I'd even prefer that people reach the conclusion that PoW mining is heresy and decide by themselves not to do that. That's an opinion, of course.
But...
> Your argument seems to be that energy use that doesn't benefit you is wrong
Not at all. It's not about me. It's about everybody on Earth. A few people are being, in my view, harmful to everybody, including themselves, for no clear benefits to themselves, and for no gain for society.
While, like (increasingly) many people, I'm trying hard to not heat my home too much in winter, avoiding planes, avoiding producing waste too much, some people gratuitously burn energy because why not.
Don't make me look like I'm self-centered or something.
This is where your argument keeps falling down for me. This may be your view, but I and many others find great benefit in Bitcoin. I dry my clothes on a clothesline, but don't feel that electric clothes dryers should be made illegal (not sure if you are arguing for this as OP does).
If you are interested in reading about the ways in which Bitcoin benefits different people around the world I recommend the writing of Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation.
Bitcoin is not one of them.
Proof of work is only a way to randomly and incontestably select a participant when participation is open and no one is trustable, i.e., a consensus mechanism (which, once augmented with other conventions (I'm thinking of choosing the longest chain), will also prevent double spending).
But what makes the blockchain immutable is the Merkle tree structure (each block containing the hash of its parent) and the distribution of the data (which is what guarantees that participants have a comparison point to detect modification). It would work the same without proof of work. A Git repository has the same exact property.
If anything, proof of work makes mutability easier since it is only required to compute partial collisions to have blocks considered valid.
Merkle tree makes verifying the blockchain datastructure easier, and enables older blocks to be further secured by newer blocks.
Proof for work however makes producing an entirely alternive blockchain expensive. When looking at the bitcoin blockchain, you can prove exactly how much energy was used to make it, and know that energy was not used for making any other variant. This means you can be confident the blockchain is not a altered forgery meant to defraud you, as this attack would require spending all of that energy again.
So yes, PoW can give you confidence, but it is unnecessary in practice. Well, let's say it's an additional security measure where something else more trivial is already enough.
When you get a copy of the blockchain, verifying if all the Merkle tree structure (without even checking for the PoW) and comparing the last hash (or the few last hashes) with what you see on the network from other sources is enough to be sure that your copy is valid. Because providing you with a fake chain which still has the same last hash would require to have at some point (for the block the attacker –i.e., the source of your copy of the blockchain– wants to modify) found a full collision, which is much more difficult than computing alternative valid PoW.
So yeah, here PoW can give you confidence in the copy of the blockchain you get without having to even minimally interact (just looking at a blockchain explorer not controlled by your source for example) with others. But the whole point of the tech is to interact otherwise you don't need to bootstrap a client. So this refinement makes little to no sense.
You keep referring to other consensus mechanisms that are not really trustable without the PoW foundation (looking at other copies on the network, blockchain explorer). The beauty of PoW is that it speaks for itself-- you could download the data over an untrusted network with just one peer, and still be confident you got the real thing, because you can prove energy was sacrificed for its construction.
PoW has other benefits beyond this quite silly scenario, I am just explaining it again as you don't seem to get it.
I'm not talking about other consensus mechanisms. We were first discussing what makes a blockchains immutable, I already explained why PoW is not necessary for that. Then you reframed the discussion to how can you trust that a copy of the blockchain you were just given by someone you don't trust is valid, and you are right that PoW is a solution to this specific problem. My point, again, is that it is an unnecessarily costly solution for this specific problem, because the properties that makes a blockchain immutable (Merkle structure + distribution) are already enough to ensure that in practice, because a fake blockchain copy, even without PoW, will have a different last hash from the real one, and it will be easy to see that by simply comparing it with others sources (if you trust no one, which is one of the requirements for blockchains to be useful, you just need to do that with multiple sources to gain enough confidence, typically ones that are very public and would be easily denounced if they lied). And anyway by participating in the blockchain protocol it will be obvious very soon that your copy doesn't match with everyone else's.
The only way this strategy won't work is if the last hash of the Merkle structure is valid while the blockchain copy is not, and the only way for this to happen is if a full collision has been found on the modified block. Which is way more costly than building a PoW valid hash.
Let me take an example with another technology that has the same immutability properties as blockchains do but don't use PoW: Git.
If you want to get a copy of the git repository of a project and you clone it from my version of the repository, either it is the real repository and everything is fine, or it is not —for example I could have introduced a backdoor somewhere in my version of the project— and then there is two possibilities:
1- Using the copy you downloaded from me you won't be able to participate (push or pull) in the project with anyone else than me because the commit log of the copy you got is incompatible with everyone else's version of the repository. You'll quickly understand that something's wrong with mine, and it will even be easy to see at which point the commit history diverges from the other copies of the repository that you attempt to collaborate with.
2- I've added my backdoor in a past existing commit, and found a collision in its hash to make it have the exact same hash as the original version of the commit (the one without my backdoor), and I have rebuild the exact same commit history from there. But here it requires me to have computed a full collision, which is actually impossible (at least much more so than computing a valid PoW hashes for a few commits after adding my backdoor), as long as there is no vulnerabilities discovered in the hashing algorithm.
Now, if you never interact with anyone else than me, I don't have to find a collision because my commits hashes won't be compared to any others, and then you are right to say that you won't be able to know about the backdoor and that using PoW would make this scenario less plausible (not impossible, but way less plausible) in terms of cost for me. But, even more in the case of bootstrapping a blockchain client, it is the very idea of only interacting with the person you got a copy of the blockchain from that makes no sense.
Your analysis of git makes complete sense to me. I understand how git uses hashes and merkle trees to prevent tampering of data. It is also a good analogy in that bitcoin uses similar properties. I am furthermore perfectly happy to trust a single authoritative source (or trusted peer) when initializing a git repo, it works better that way. But git is not solving the same problem as bitcoin.
You concede that PoW is a solution to this problem, but that it is "unnecessarily costly". But you haven't given a solution to the problem that costs less, only argued that in practice the problem has assumptions that are in practice not necessary. You seem to believe that bitcoin without PoW could still in practice arrive at a consensus through either being able to check that a last block hash is the same as the "real hash", or that you would be able to compare your value to multiple sources. These ideas both rely on another consensus system outside of what is promised by bitcoin itself-- either a trusted third party to enshrine what hash is "real", or being able to rely on a consensus merely based on some number of network peers. Number of peers will not work by itself, because there is almost no cost for an attacker to create many dishonest peers. Note that the purpose of an attack of this kind is not merely to defraud users of bitcoin, but could also be a denial of service attack. Seeing peers with different blockchain history would make the network unusable.
I also don't understand the hangup over PoW and immutability. Immutability is the concept of data that is not changed. If you have a more precise definition, please give it. This could be split into the idea of a design principle, versus the idea of enforcement of immutability. E.g. using an immutable data structure in a trusted programming environment does not need enforcement. We are only talking about the enforcement aspect. A hash digest is a really strong, almost perfect enforcement-- finding a collision is in practice impossible. A digest hash only guarantees that "if trust the hash, I should trust data that matches the hash also". On the otherhand, PoW does act as a soft form of immutability, using economic barriers rather than cryptographic guarantees. PoW guarantees that "this data could not have been produced, and could not be further changed without expending some amount of physical power, and therefore there are unlikely to be variations of this". This effect is orthogonal to the internal immutability provided by hash digest / merkle trees.
Aiming for solutions to problems that do not exist is a thing among blockchain aficionados, but I'm not one. Yet, remark that I also addressed the concern that if you do not interact with anyone else than the source of your blockchain copy, PoW makes it largely unlikely, but not impossible, that they would have tempered with the copy they provided you. So even in this scenario you partly rely on broader interactions.
> I also don't understand the hangup over PoW and immutability.
This whole discussion was started by my answer to your claim that “It [PoW] is not a waste, but a sacrifice made to make the blockchain strongly immutable.”.
I don't think it is worth discussing this further.
For example, if we used a public-writable git repo to track our cryptocurrency transactions, it would have the Merkle structure required for append-only/immutable-history. However, we could get lots of diverging branches; e.g.
+--- Commit sending all my money to Alice
|
Parent commit --+
|
+--- Commit sending all my money to Bob
Proof-of-work makes this spamming much harder. All miners will be trying to add blocks to the longest branch they're aware of (picking arbitrarily, in case there are multiple), since it's unlikely any shorter chain will be able to overtake it (this is a largely self-fulfilling prediction!).
Preventing double spending is a feature of the consensus mechanism indeed, if it is augmented with other rules (longest chain wins), but immutability does not rely on it, as I said in the comment you are replying to.
EDIT: I've updated my previous comment to make it clearer that what I'm saying is "PoW is not an immutability mechanism" (to which answering "you are wrong, PoW prevents double spending" makes little sense).
There's more to mining than hashing [1]. My Cuckoo Cycle Proof-of-Work scheme for example searches random graphs for fixed length cycles.
It would be more correct to say all the Hashcash Proof-of-Work does is calculating hashes.
[1] https://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-min...
However useful uses (typically finding new primes and similar mathematical searches) seem to be fundamentally incompatible with using a blockchain as a distributed ledger in a zero trust environment, because that usefulness automatically weakens the cryptographic safety ?
also works if your browser is picky about expired certs.
(Or, in other words: It's my lighter, and I'm paying for the gasoline, so why is it any business of yours what I'm setting on fire with it?)
What should be addressed though is the problem of negative externalities not being priced in. This is not specific to energy usage of PoW or any other use of energy. Those producing emissions should categorically be required to foot the bill for repairing any damage done and those taxes should be put to use to that end. Once priced in, many things that otherwise commonize costs but privatize profits may prove to be not worth pursuing.
If the societal good done by certain things is worth the negative externalities, those can be explicitly and transparently funded through subsidies which offset some portion of the costs.
1) reducing the ability to profit off of actions that cause environmental damage thereby aligning the market interest to reduce such actions
2) funding the investment in reversing the damage
whereas your suggestion above is doing literally nothing to help…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...
I really think that the possibility of obtaining the wrong conclusions are much higher than getting it right, yet the consequences of putting a ton of restrictions is really harmful for many people, especially in developing countries.
What it predicts for developing countries is disaster, which we already see. More droughts in the summer combined with floods in spring/autumn.
This leads to food insecurity and ecosystem disruption, which will be more harmful than not doing anything.
Weather is hard to predict short-term, but the long-term trends (i.e. climate) are visible.
But the dice experiment is: one leaves variables out of the model bc of its overwhelming complexity for what we know so far.
No, I do not buy this, vote me negative but I do not. If it was true, the weather forecast should be guessable.
Maybe you could compare it to dice. It's very hard to predict on what number a dice is going to land. But if you throw it a lot of times, you'll eventually start to see the distribution converge somewhere. And when you then take a drill and make a hole in the side of the dice, or glue something to its side or whatever, and then throw it a lot of times again, you'll see that the distribution changes. Also, you can make reasonable statements about those developments. "If I make it heavier on the side opposite six, I think I'll start seeing more sixes, because the side opposite is pulled down more by gravity". You don't need to be able to predict the short-term outputs of a system to see changes in its long-term trends, and you can absolutely reason about and possibly predict those long-term changes.
I think it is a really difficult thing to guess. And anyways, even if it is not, how can you stop it if China, India and US say no to it bc there is no current technology to replace?
We could be in the situation where a lot of restrictions are set and later the guess is wrong. More expensive energy means putting a ton of people back into poverty, literally.
Given the depth and breath of the costs, banning the use of fossil fuels in PoW schemes doesn’t seem particularly unreasonable. Especially given the broader social goal of reducing fossil fuel use wherever possible.
There are plenty of things I think people over-value. I may think that buying cars or living in places where you would need them is overvalued, but I won’t argue for banning those. People can form their own opinions on how much they value different things. They shouldn’t however profit from not cleaning up their own messes and having others foot the bill.
So there are certainly uses for PoW, but I agree they are few and far between.
The market still considers a bitcoin to be worth 10x more than ethereum.
No, forbidden forbiding, please, for things like these.
[0] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Miles_per_gallon_gas....
[1] https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-electricity-consumpti...
Anyways, I think the real fear here is from govts. and their loss of control through fiat currency and transaction systems, honestly.
But that is an entirely different topic...
Also, I don't really see how this is really relevant, it really sounds like a "But Sometimes" issue, where some edge case of something sucks, but that doesn't say much about if that something in total is bad or not.
In a lottery the ticket fees go to the organizer, who wastes a little in administrative fees, takes a percentage for themselves, and returns the rest as prizes. Bad for income distribution, but not especially wasteful.
In a PoW blockchain the "ticket fee" — the electricity and depreciating hardware — is completely used up. The reward doesn't come from the other miners, but from transaction fees and new coins (diluting the value).
It's like a lottery that uses all the income from tickets to pay for marketing, and the actual prizes are paid by government subsidy.
It's a probabilistic distributed rate limiter to speed up information convergence in a gossip system. I agree it's a wasteful way of deciding what your VCS' HEAD is.
> Nope, we don’t have enough transmission capacity to the NYC area — proposals to build transmission capability have been blocked by the Sierra Club. NYC is almost exclusively powered by natural gas after the closure of our sole nuclear plant.
That NYC doesn't have a great amount of national grid connectivity seems surprising.
I agree that the lack of connectivity is surprising, though. My understanding was that the city was actually pretty interconnected with both the state and surrounding states, but it’s possible that some of those connections were reduced after the 2005 blackout. That’s speculation in my part, though.
[1]: https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/About/Publications/Energy-Analysi...
Burning fossil fuel does. Why not ban fossil fuel burning, if the concern is pollution? How are all other industries exempt?
Ideally we want to use/focus our resources to create things which then create net value.
More mining does not provide more coins, only increased fuel burnt per coin.
So in total for society, we are burning fuel for nothing in return in aggregate. And let’s be honest - a majority of these coins aren’t going to “citizen crypto miners”, they are typically going to huge scale crypto farms so it’s hardly spreading the wealth.
But apparently people agree with the >$600k/hour costs [1] it takes to process Bitcoin transactions.
This cost is taken from the Bitcoin price (via miners selling) and from transaction fees.
Therefore, they must think they are getting at least that much value out of the system.
If people are willing to trade this, it must be valuable and also thus must be worth more than the environmental damage being caused.
But it should be fair across all industries.
My hypothesis is: special laws betray special interest - here, Big Oil still wants most of the world to pollute, but Big Banks want Bitcoin out of the picture.
I think this is at the heart of the difference in opinion - if the free market efficiently determines the best use of resources.
My personal view is that it often doesn’t, and that where it doesn’t that the government should sometimes intervene.
The specificity of this law exposes the corrupt interests that have captured the politicians (i.e. Big Oil).
But I believe people should be free to waste/risk their money in general.
Similarly: nothing about forbidding the use of fossil fuels challenges the fundamentals of the Bitcoin protocol. It’s merely been promoted to the same regulatory status as “burning tires in your backyard for heat.”
All it serves to do is create more techno-babble that confuses 99% of the population which has no ability to actually understand what the technology actually is and does. So scams fill the void
I don’t care about the merits of bitcoin, but these simplistic crude and inaccurate legislation attempts are fundamentally market distorting and inefficient and restrict our rights.
[Spoiler: it's more than 30 years just for onboarding, for those who are curious. For the unaffiliated bystanders, next time you hear "Lightning network solves all issues, layer 2!" chant from the cult, remember that Bitcoin is still a tired old database at the bottom of it that is still looking for a problem to solve.]
Spoiler: eltoo & an upgrade with SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT along with channel factories seems perfectly capable.
But it will NEVER work for everyone.
> you want to discount it cause it can't immediately onboard the entirety of humanity within an arbitrarily short timeframe is
The "arbitrarily short" timeframe is 30 years. That seems kinda long to me. But then again I keep hearing "We're still early!" after 13 years of Bitcoin, so maybe you guys are targeting sometimes next century, in which case, my apologies.
Oh, and also, it's not _just_ to onboard, it's the first transaction. Anytime you want to settle, close a channel, create a new one, it's the same congestion. Unless you propose people initiate a channel for their newborn so the kid can eventually start using lightning when they get their third real job at 30? That _could_ work, hmm.
> there certainly will be a protocol capable of achieving that absurd high bar for a trust-less blockchain
"My project is gonna be working by the time for the final! I swear!" stopped working for me when I graduated high school and entered what some may call the real life. Seems cute that it's still alive and well in the crypto fantasy land to judge things by the publicity pieces instead of what they actually are.
Anyway, I'm not nitpicking. I'm punching holes through your tired arguments about an inefficient database and how it's the savior of humanity (just to pump up your coinz.)
To all knee deep bitcoiner, please understand that your future of finance wet dream doesn't actually ever scale to 1% of what's needed, stop burning fossil fuel, and find a new hobby, ffs.
> future of finance wet dream doesn't actually ever scale to 1% of what's needed, stop burning fossil fuel, and find a new hobby, ffs
This just seems needlessly vitriolic rather than a substantive argument.
I gave you a protocol that doesn't "take 30 years" and you say it's a pipe dream.
That brings quite a value. Without anti-fraud measures, you wouldn't have a monetary system.
"We also are making our operations more sustainable – including achieving carbon neutrality and procuring 100% renewable electricity in 2019, a year ahead of schedule."
Drastically lower than Bitcoin if this is anything to go by. So low you might as well put BofA into a fossil fuel burn limbo contest.
Given that result took less than three seconds of searching, I'm wondering if you have an ulterior motive in targeting BofA specifically.
Who is the government to say otherwise?
Without that you have an anarchic lawless society where individualism can flourish and people can exploit whatever they want without regards for the 2nd, 3rd, n-th order impact that an action might cause unto others, because it's invisible or severely hidden to them. Or that they simply don't care about said impact because their personal reward is worth more to them than the benefit of society as a whole.
Why not a carbon tax scheme for everyone, period? This is what I'm asking.
Why is cryptocurrency mining banned, while other "profiteers" (oil companies, gas-electric companies and so on) would not be penalized equally?
The US has among the highest per-capita carbon emissions.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?most_rec...
Given that the global carbon tax is unlikely to happen, we might has well take action against proof of work now since it would still be a net benefit for mankind.
Because the world is not fair and a general carbon tax will not get passed.
That's discounting a federal carbon tax that would go this deep, because that's certainly not happening.
Not because they are god, because they are how society codifies what it wants and sets policies to achieve it.
Cryptocurrency isn't even banned, only proof of work.
It's a completely valid thing for a government to set a policy about.
Especially now that the experiment has been allowed to run without meddling for many years, and the results are well and truly in.
There might be an argument about invalid interference on day one, but not now.
Banning proof of work is tantamount to banning computation, it's silly and infeasible unless you want to start monitoring what people calculate.
Which for anyone remotely sane is laughable on its face.
The purpose of a state-level policy (state as in government not state as in NY) is to have a state-level agregate effect, not to actually care about each microscopic individual instance.
If you make a policy that in effect Bitcoin is illegal, that will have a population-scale effect.
The fact that you can make an argument that 'it's just computation no different from any other computation' is ignorant of the point and kind of jeuvenile. You didn't say anything they didn't know perfectly well.
Why call me juvenile? That's not necessary to make your argument. It's rude too and against the rules.
> Enforcement practicality is a separate issue.
No it's not, enforcement practicality is the only important issue regarding a law. An unenforceable law is useless.
The question of if a thing is harmful or should be controlled or declared illegal, and the question of how the implimentation mechanics of controlling a thing might be done, are two completely different questions. If you had no way to physically prevent murders, that does not then follow that therefor murder shouldn't be illegal. Failing to realize that is yet another example of jeuvenile.
Practically every law, policy, regulation, code, etc has some element of arbitrariness, interpretation, and discretion or selective enforcement. This one is no different.
Who is the government to say otherwise?
Oh yeah, that's right, the government SHOULD actually make policies to cut down on negative affects of things that some people want to do. You know, because that's the whole point of government.
It's the will of the people and it overrules the will of some cryptobros.
The goverenment, in liberal democracies, are the people elected representatives.
It's massively simplified our processes, and improved UX. Our customer base is already crypto-native, which is what makes this possible.
Users pay us simply by sending funds to our wallet. Our entire payment processing engine is under 300 lines, including USD-denominated fees in crypto. Payments arrive instantly, with almost zero fees, from any country.
We have no chargebacks or (traditional) payment fraud.
Our remote staff are paid in crypto, arriving instantly with no cross-border issues.
One might argue that crypto makes customers unable to demand a refund, or that it is impossible to send a refund to a customer who is so anonymous that the merchant cannot even communicate with them, but these are less obviously a "no-no" for a business.
This argument was (and still is) valid for PoW algorithms, but energy consumption is now barely a factor for Ethereum, which is the main network we take payments on [1].
Ethereum is currently doing 30 TPS [0], and Paypal ~200 [1]. Assuming that energy usage scales linearly (a naive assumption, but for arguments sake), it could deliver similar value with 10x lower energy consumption, I don't find arguing against the adoption of PoS crypto solely based on sustainability very credible either.
[1] https://www.ing.uc.cl/en/boletines/engineering-student-scale....
Not even a bit. The tide has changed after endless failures on the side of cryptocurrencies.
You've said it yourself. If the only way to accept crypto payments is to have a "crypto-native" userbase, what does this say about its utility for society? If the entire crypto industry is self referential, then once you peel back the layers there's not much left but a big system that moves money around in a circle.
Aren't you describing all fiat currencies? How is the US dollar any different?
Lithium-ion is a great comparison to because we should, even though there has been adoption of Li batteries, still be willing to say that massive scale lithium strip mining might be worse than having electric cars and it might be worth regulating away. Even if crypto was highly used, doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate it, particularly if it's externalities are worse than the alternatives (and they are).
Even if crypto did reach 50% of transactions or any of your other examples, and it can't, trustless environments demand waste so that kind of scale isn't possible without earth shattering waste, but for the sake of argument let's say it did, I'd still argue for it's abolishment at a societal level because it does transactions WORSE than everything else. Higher risk, fewer safeguards (oops wrong address, now my money is gone forever vs oops, I'll just call my bank), more emissions, more dark money, more money laundering, more room for scams... I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point.
A global currency has now been established successfully (done organically too with no authority behind it), but 15 years is entirely too short of a time frame to guarantee adoption. The primary growth issue has been secure on and off ramps for local users, but that's a short term problem. Amazingly, we already see adoption in some of the poorest corners of the world before the richest. But you already know why that is: first world countries are fine paying a higher premium on every transaction because we can be more wasteful. It does offer some additional services like chargebacks, short-term debt financing, etc. Others aren't as fortunate due to local currency values, local infrastructure, etc. Also worth mentioning, sending any kind of remittance across the globe has a punishing level of fees attached as well. I don't think you are justified to say what we have right now is good enough, because across multiple dimensions it isn't for millions of people. The adoption curves for other countries demonstrates this: there is a need for something new.
Visa claims their network can handle 24k transactions a second. There are multiple crypto that can approach that throughput without much increase in waste. Lightning network's energy use doesn't scale with the volume of transactions. The security of the network and transaction volume are different dimensions on energy usage, so I think you are off on that point.
Energy waste is definitely a concern, but IMO should not be the concern for a much needed global financial network. Energy waste must come from global emission agreements and local regulation. High non-renewable energy users should be taxed more. High individual users can also be taxed more. The good thing about crypto is the tradeoff of value add vs energy used is extremely clear to everyone involved. If it doesn't make money people stop doing it, or commit a crime that can be pursued (whether or not it will be is another issue). The economics are transparent, which is extremely important.
The externalities are not worse than the alternatives, and it's fairly obvious. The alternative is no global finance network. The alternative is an unstable money supply. The alternative is continued manipulation of powerful countries to perpetuate financial repression. The continued funding of middle-men. The slow erosion of financial privacy (TBF, only 1 crypto actually improves this).
We'll find the energy savings somewhere else, such as the overwhelming wasteful industrial and transportation sectors. Crypto will continue do what makes sense economically. It will continue funding renewable energy and lift up areas with low industry potential but high renewable energy potential.
The current system loses hundreds of billions of dollars in credit card scams. But CC companies are still profitable. Wire fraud scams are up to $3.5 billion per year. Crypto has a better chance of fixing these through new security processes (there's room for custodial wallets) than the current system. The bank is already going to tell you to take a hike if you were scammed. If you can prove it's identity theft then you will typically be made whole, but even then it's not guaranteed without additional insurance.
Cheers
It's not the first time new currencies were made illegal, actually it is expected.
I'm offended by people saying that I use it for illegal things, just how I don't suppose a person is a drug dealer just because there's trace cocaine on the money he or she uses.
Also I use Binance debit card for payments, they autoconvert to the currency that the country needs.
Of course I use fiat currency accounts as well, I didn't say that, what I wrote is by Bitcoin payments are not illegal.
Right now I'm on a smaller budget than before, it's no problem for me.
A blanket ban is much easier to enforce, even if "easy" in this context is basically impossible.
No, it says "that are operated through electric generating facilities that use a carbon-based fuel".
How is using the grid not banned? Does grid energy not use carbon-based fuel?
>Section 2 places a moratorium on air permit issuance and renewal for an electric generating facility that utilizes a carbon-based fuel and that provides, in whole or in part, behind-the-meter electric energy consumed or utilized by cryptocurrency mining operations that use proof-of-work authentication methods to validate blockchain transactions.
Also, as the price of oil goes down because Dilbert (et al.) refuse to buy it, the marginal oil producer (probably US tight oil, ironically, since about 2006) gets priced out of the market, resulting in a decrease of production.
If you have a disfavored sector of the economy that isn't allowed to use electricity from fossil fuels, and a favored sector that is, the effect on how much electricity your economy consumes from what sources will be zero until the amount of electricity needed by the disfavored sector exceeds total non-fossil-fuel-based production.
More generally it is troubling that the ban implicitly is an attack against general purpose computing. There is a policy that only certain programs get to use energy sources. Even those who want to kill crypto currencies should think about the downstream consequences of this policy, and what else it could be applied to next.
ASICs that mine Bitcoin are _anything but_ a general purpose computer. It's like saying "banning coal rollers is an affornt against general transportation". I personally would be pretty okay if the ban was against Bitcoin mining ASICs instead, knowing that it does nothing to restrict any other computing freedom.
But it's a variant of Parkinson's Law in action; new energy production is gobbled up by whatever industry. We're building huge offshore windmill farms, but their capacity is bought up by datacenters.
We don't need more green energy per sé; we need to reduce consumption wholesale.
Install a heat pump instead, you will save both power and money on heating.
I don't have enough money for a down payment on a new heat pump system... but I might over time if I could offset heating bill with a BTC miner. It's definitely not a waste if my family is warm and my wallet isn't hurting.
Greenidge mining is apparently mining using a NY based coal plant. They're going to have some... issues.
Energy is (by definition) always conserved.
What happens in a computer is that in order to do computation (in almost all of the computers we use today) you have to move around electric charges. This requires energy and converts ALL¤ of this energy to heat.
¤ Or almost : a tiny fraction probably ends in physical and chemical changes that slowly accumulate and degrade the computer.
It's because a computer is NOT a heat engine : it (typically) runs on electricity and not heat, and it's not the (quantum)"mechanical" work it needs to do in order to do computation that we care about. (Heat engine's mechanical work also often ends up (almost) all dissipated as heat by friction : consider a car moving on a level road.)
Also, by the fundamental principle of energo-informatics, it has to transform some of that electric energy into a form of energy that the observer knows less about (like random movements of particles we call "heat"), in order for the observer to carry computation, which involves at some point losing information about the system (you pretty much have to erase bits at some point). (Our computers are still waaay above the limit this creates - but we might hit it this century !)
https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/A7389
The subjects of this policy are not miners, but "electric generating facilities":
> FOR THE PERIOD COMMENCING ON THE EFFECTIVE DATE OF THIS SECTION AND ENDING TWO YEARS AFTER SUCH DATE, THE DEPARTMENT, AFTER CONSULTATION WITH THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE, SHALL NOT APPROVE A NEW APPLICA- TION FOR OR ISSUE A NEW PERMIT PURSUANT TO THIS ARTICLE, OR ARTICLE SEVENTY OF THIS CHAPTER, FOR AN ELECTRIC GENERATING FACILITY THAT UTILIZES A CARBON-BASED FUEL AND THAT PROVIDES, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, BEHIND-THE-METER ELECTRIC ENERGY CONSUMED OR UTILIZED BY CRYPTOCURRENCY MINING OPERATIONS THAT USE PROOF-OF-WORK AUTHENTICATION METHODS TO VALI- DATE BLOCKCHAIN TRANSACTIONS
"Let crypto burn" as they say, both figuratively and in the practical sense, let them burn resources but only it they can pay for them by creating value outside their own bubble, services for which people are willing to pay. Currently the massive impetus of the resource burn is crypto speculation, the hope that a substantial part of the traditional financial system will move to crypto systems and take advantage of the low regulations. That's the major promise of crypto that's driving adoption in the traditional space, regulatory arbitrage.
The [New York State] City That Banned Bitcoin Mining (2018) :
https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xk4e4/bitcoin-ban-plattsbur...
This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town (2018) :
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m...
When I first read the title, I thought the article was about a work permissions in US and not about the blockchain consensus mechanism. And I have a company in the c̶r̶y̶p̶t̶o̶ Web3 sector.
Like ghastly pictures of people dying on cigarette packages, I'll take informed consent anyday.
The GDPR does not require these.
There are website operators who want to use your personal data without consent to benefit themselves and erroneously believe sticking such a banner on a webpage allows them to.
That's entirely on those website operators who make up their own rules.
Not really clear at what point your mining approaches an "operation" which requires a permit, but perhaps that's spelled out in some other law somewhere.
I love the two year time limit. I'd love for it to be constitutionally mandated that all laws have to have a time limit of no more than five years or so. If the time passes and the law isn't renewed, into the incinerator that law goes.
It's literally in the text that you quoted. If they need a permit to operate a fossil fuel powerplant for mining, the answer is now no for 2 years.
https://earthjustice.org/blog/2022-october/cleaning-up-crypt...
>That can't be it.
Why not?
Reducing regulatory complexity is a worthwhile goal, but that's a bad way of going about it.
Everyone else just likes stability, knowing that the law tomorrow will mostly be the same as the law today.
* Selling weed out of an unlicensed storefront
* Punching strangers in the face for no reason
* Jaywalking