Your premise is false. It's not an environmental disaster. If you think it is, point to the harm. Then explain why video games or Netflix or whatever are not bigger "disasters".
People buy electricity and do what they want with it. It's not your business. I don't come into your house and check how much ketchup you're using on your fries. Please sort out your own life before going and being a neo-climate-alarmist-electricity-use-hating Baptist about how other people are living theirs.
I know of not a single person who's bought a small shed and/or building to house all the equipment required to run a video game, then additionally leave the hardware running a full blast 24/7
This feel like false equivalence.
Additionally, it does becomes "our" problem when the load placed on grids starts to impact the average consumer, which it has in various smaller communities where miners of setup shop.
It's none of your business. The electricity is purchased privately. "Load placed on grids starts to impact the average consumer" is like somebody keeps buying all the boxes of the kind of Cheerios you like, i.e., not an infringement of your rights, just market stuff happening. You living in my neighborhood "impacts" me in ways I don't like, but I don't give you a hard time about it because I don't have the mentality of putting my nose into the details of other people's lives. There's an unacknowledged cult rising to prominence, and one of its tenets is that "electricity should only be used in small quantities for approved purposes". Well, I reject that. If your concern is pollution, please speak about that, not electricity use.
Regardless of the motivation, i find the question of how would one stop bitcoin rather interesting.
I have not put a lot of thought into it, but my attack vector would be to force a government crack down.
To achieve this in china, where anecdotally most of the miners are operated, one would essentially have to make bitcoin an effective bypass around the party's censorship. Just posting a few bits of illegal content would of course not be enough, there would have to be an entire ecosystem of apps allowing you to read data of the blockchain and then a concerted effort to continuously upload content, think the nytimes uploading their front page in chinese daily. As you can imagine that would be rather costly.
Another potential attack vector that seems cheaper (but maybe isn't) would be to find/inject software vulnerabilities that would allow the attacker to cause service disruption or data loss in the most popular clients. Remote code execution, allowing one to take control of the nodes would be preferable as any flaw that would just cause a denial of service would be easily rolled back.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] threadPeople buy electricity and do what they want with it. It's not your business. I don't come into your house and check how much ketchup you're using on your fries. Please sort out your own life before going and being a neo-climate-alarmist-electricity-use-hating Baptist about how other people are living theirs.
This feel like false equivalence.
Additionally, it does becomes "our" problem when the load placed on grids starts to impact the average consumer, which it has in various smaller communities where miners of setup shop.
I will fight any efforts spurred by baseless claims about Bitcoin environmental impact.
Were awfully selfish creatures, aren't we?
I have not put a lot of thought into it, but my attack vector would be to force a government crack down.
To achieve this in china, where anecdotally most of the miners are operated, one would essentially have to make bitcoin an effective bypass around the party's censorship. Just posting a few bits of illegal content would of course not be enough, there would have to be an entire ecosystem of apps allowing you to read data of the blockchain and then a concerted effort to continuously upload content, think the nytimes uploading their front page in chinese daily. As you can imagine that would be rather costly.
Another potential attack vector that seems cheaper (but maybe isn't) would be to find/inject software vulnerabilities that would allow the attacker to cause service disruption or data loss in the most popular clients. Remote code execution, allowing one to take control of the nodes would be preferable as any flaw that would just cause a denial of service would be easily rolled back.