You're totally missing the point and pointlessly nit picking at irrelevant technicalities in the language, according to your own biased interpretation.
People burning massive amounts coal and gas for fraudulent get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, rug pulls, pump-and-dump schemes, money laundering, fraud, ransomeware, ugly ape jpegs, insider trading, getting around international sanctions in response to unprovoked military attacks and war crimes against humanity, and other criminal enterprises clearly don't understand (or care about) the problem space of climate change, and what lowering carbon emission and regulating crime and fraud solve.
Technicalities of the language matter with respect to laws.
To the second point, that sounds like a failure of the government to provide clean energy. In Los Angeles, we get 16% of our energy from coal and 28% from natural gas. I do not blame Bitcoin miners for this. It is a failure of the government to meet the energy needs of its people with clean sources.
Write legislation that mandates building new nuclear power plants or wind farms off the coast.
Not the subjective definitions and technicalities he's nit-picking about. Words have many different meanings in different contexts, and he's cherry picking one particular interpretation that's completely irrelevant and out of context.
And governments can do multiple things at once to solve problems. The fact that they could build more nuclear power plants and wind farms doesn't mean they shouldn't also regulate burning coal to defraud people, commit crimes, and get around banking regulation and international sanctions.
Government cannot create a bottomless supply of renewable energy by pen stroke. Proof of work mining is taking exponentially more resources out of the universe that anything facilitated by it is giving back to the economy or anything. It's terrible trade-off for humanity. This is precisely what mandates are for to stop harmful action not to wish into existence some magical thinking solution so that people can do bad things with negative consequences forever
That’s crazy. Why should a government spend taxpayer money to build energy supplies to support the “energy needs” of crypto scams? Its a terrible idea, if for no other reason than that a vanishingly small percentage of the population would benefit.
This is also one of the ways a government attempts to promote clean energy: by banning, in part or in whole, a source of dirty energy, people can either do without... or switch to a clean-energy source.
Instead of electric vehicle tax credits, which cost the government in question an increasing amount of money as more people use them, you could apply a similar force with an ICE tax on purchasing new ICE vehicles, which raises a decreasing amount of revenue as people stop buying ICEs in response.
While there is a failure to provide clean energy, increasing demand makes it harder to supply energy to everyone. If the rich keep on pushing demand by using energy on speculative financial products, we can’t make up the supply in time to prevent the worst of climate change. Bitcoin is basically class warfare, except because of climate and air pollution in general, it’s lethal class warfare.
I’m not saying to stop all innovation, but crypto is 5+ orders of magnitude more energy inefficient, and it’s killer apps so far have been asset speculation, untaxed remittances, and cyber crime. Governments have no interest in those innovations at all.
So the thing with crypto: yeah sure there's bad crap on the margins, but the core of crypto is a completely new, faster and more flexible way to handle money, value, ownership and control. I liken it to "programmable money" but even that's too simplistic. With programmable real estate, the line between rental and ownership can blur, softening the risk and lability for owners, and creating more responsibility and upside for renters. A Bored Ape is a club membership and flexible ownership in a rapidly expanding brand that earns licensing fees: the folks at Disney are paying close attention. A $1+mm apartment is worth $1mm because people say it is and because zoning limits supply, not because the sum of the wood and metal adds up to $1mm.
Today, we spend enormous time/energy/etc on nonsense that should be one line of code, from incorporating companies to paying taxes. As crypto continues to mature and weave itself into business systems, these processes become lines of code that execute while we conduct business. You spin up a company with complex ownership, conduct the transaction, send money to and from the parties (incl government) and year it all down - in seconds. Today, you need weeks and lawyers, accountants, notaries, etc. It's insane.
As for the environment, we can't save our way to success: the solution is either geoengineering or murdering billions (plural) of people and slowing the rest from breeding. I'm hopeful for geoengineering.
Anyway, we can raise our fists to the sky, but the next generation is going to demand 24x7x365 business and banking, have taxes woven into transactions, sophisticated fractional ownership, etc.
Ad hominem attacks are not welcome on HN, and if lookup my HN profile, I'm about the last person anyone would ascribe as being a cultist.
I've seen a lot of unusual tech and trends win when they "shouldn't." I've seen "first they ignore you, then they fight you, then you win" over and over and over.
I don't personally care if crypto wins or loses or if today's crypto goes to infinity or zero, and I especially don't care if greedy speculators lose their life savings after everybody told them so.
What's interesting to me are novel ways for people to communicate, transact, store and share things.
Oh there are other much more probably reasons to murder billions of people than saving the environment.
I'd like it if the people who voluntarily wanted to slow down their own breeding were able to do that freely and easily, without it being expensive or scorned, and without being thrown into jail along with anyone who helped them, like their Uber driver.
“Proof of work” and “proof of stake” are the two major consensus mechanisms cryptocurrencies use to verify new transactions, add them to the blockchain, and create new tokens.
,,The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work.'' (From the Bitcoin whitepaper)
I would prefer to quote Satoshi Nakamoto or Dr Adam Back on the subject.
Brian Armstrong is in the business of selling altcoins, he can sell Bitcoin only once, but new altcoins can be created every day.
You can read it on the page using the "view more".
Seem to be about asking if it's really ok to waste non renewable energy on this versus facilities that use "cleaner" approach. It also imply crypto mining create value which got me a good laugh.
Excellent news! The energy consumption required by proof-of-work blockchains is simply unacceptible, and it’s perfectly appropriate to adress it using new laws. Hopefully other states and countries will follow suit.
Petty - I don't think so. They're based on legitimate health and well being concerns. You're free to destroy your health/future, but not mine. Whether they're right or not (and I think they are) is irrelevant. They're not petty.
Uncalled for - the context here (the bill) is about banning certain things related to mining on PoW blockchains for environmental reasons. Comments to ban PoW blockchains entirely for the same reasons is called for. Again, this is irrespective of the commenter's correctness.
> I openly dismiss your petty and uncalled for attacks on me and the PoW blockchains entirely
I was involved with this bill. It’s being replicated in a few other state houses.
I was on the fence, initially. (I am by default sceptical of regulation.) But the mean argument against was more or less the above. Dismissal without evidence or even attempt at argument.
Hence the 2-year term. If nobody can make an actual argument in that time, the moratorium should expand to all power generation (you can do whatever you want after the meter, this targets behind-the-meter deals) indefinitely.
You should probably specifically mention PoW and not crypto mining in general. There are crypto mining mechanisms like PoS which use a negligible amount of energy.
There really aren't any environmental concerns with crypto. Crypto (PoW), like any other industry, invests in energy infrastructure. The concern right now is that its sometimes cheaper to pollute than to use green energy. All our politicians have had plenty time to ensure this is not the case; We should be more than angry that they have failed.
If we establish, through regulations, subsidies and taxes, a situation where it is always cheaper to use green energy; Crypto would bring nothing but massive investment in green energy development.
If we accept that energy is a limited resource, we have to think about how we allocate it. PoW Crypto takes up a lot - what does it give us to justify that expense?
Even if we get to a point where we can power crypto purely with green energy - that might still mean that not enough green energy is available to power other, potentially more important use cases.
I don't accept that energy is a limited resource, like all other resources it requires investment. Reduce investment and you get less of that resource. Increase investment and you get more of that resource at a cheaper rate (as mass production kicks in at different levels). Crypto, and any other popular industry; Invest in the cheapest energy available, growing that market while profiting from it. Its OUR job (democratically) to ensure that green energy is the cheapest energy available...
There's a limited amount of fossil fuels available.
There's limited amount of space for solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric power plants.
Even if we were to achieve fusion, we'd be limited by e = mc^2, where m is limited within a radius that is reachable without losing energy on transport.
You can't fix a physics problem with market ideology.
If the limit is unreachable except in our imagination, we can think of it as unlimited. At least for the purposes of policy right now.
And i think you are being unfair conflating the current energy shortage with a hard limit that the human race may never reach. The current energy shortage might have been averted if the investment from industries like crypto, was invested in renewables..
Energy is not a pie. Producers overproduce energy in order to meet peak demand. Most grid mining uses off peak energy, since the utility would rather sell it cheaper than not have anyone buy it at all.
Off grid mining finds stranded energy which stops methane being flared directly into the atmosphere and converts most of it to CO2, which is factually better than any amount of CH4 being released.
By making stranded energy viable PoW actually allows green energy production to be built where existing demand cannot make it economically viable.
I deem the fiat standard responsible for countless wars and atrocities that have occurred in the past 100 years. The environmental issues that come from mining seem so minor and insignificant in the long run that all the aggression that is justified by them prevents me from taking such attacks seriously. Every year humanity develops better solar panels, leverages geothermal energy more efficiently, improves the fission NPPs and comes closer to designing fusion reactors. It's only a matter of time before we enter the age of cheap, green and almost limitless energy.
I think it's a question of mentality. Some people bet on human ingenuity, and some are willing to halt the progress completely because it hurts "mother earth" in their imagination.
So basically it's a purely ideological pitch? I'm sorry, but I'd rather spend our limited resources on practical progress that benefits people.
If we do end up in the "age of cheap, green and almost limitless energy", we can use some for crypto, why not. But we're not there yet and I'd rather not put the cart before the horse, given how important an issue energy and climate are.
Your way of accusing sceptics of being in the way of "progress" recalls the promises of soviet planners or various cults. Beware of vague salvation promises in the future - utopian fantasies usually have dystopian outcomes.
You haven't offered any objective evidence that your viewpoint is correct, which ipso facto implies it's a purely ideologically based statement. To paraphrase an old expression, "you can 'deem' in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first."
Your tone is also similar to that of the stereotypical 14-year old "libertarian/ancap" living in their parents' basement, and your only other comment on this site outside this thread is one from over 6 years ago accusing the Washington Post of publishing fake news. This doesn't affect the truth or validity of what you say, but it doesn't help, either.
Yes, I was getting a distinct "parents' basement" libertarian larva vibe from his tone and lack of evidence too. I wonder if he knows the price of a bar of soap, or cares about externalities or anyone but himself.
It also doesn't help his case that the Levenshtein Distance from "troorl" to "troll" is only 2.
The environmental impact of Bitcoin is not any less real than the power consumption & CO2 emissions of an entire country.[1] Since limitless energy is obviously not yet here (and is very unlikely to become a reality in the short term), it is irresponsible to dismiss these concerns.
After fourteen years of running this experiment, Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) have not yet delivered a single real world application that would be beneficial to the society at large - as far as I know.
I can't help wondering if some of the advocates, who continue to defend these technologies, own themselves cryptocurrencies and have a personal profit motive in glorifying/hyping the technology - for example by hinting that cryptocurrencies would have solved "countless wars and atrocities of the past 100 years".
>It's only a matter of time before we enter the age of cheap, green and almost limitless energy.
If it's coming so soon, then how about you immediately stop burning coal and shilling ugly ape jpegs for a while, until all your utopian libertarian promises are finally fulfilled and free of unintended consequences.
But until such a time, just put a lid on it, m'kay?
They can be washed by hands, like billions of people still do in the 3rd world. But that's a sacrifice most western environmentally-conscious folks aren't willing to make.
Hand washing clothes is a regression, specially considering industrial applications, whereas proof of stake is in many ways a progress in the way consensus is reached for blockchains.
Being environmentally-conscious is about reducing carbon footprint with smarter processes, not reverting to older ways for the sake of cutting electricity consumption. That was an unfortunate fallacy.
That is entirely your subjective opinion. I think the exact opposite – that Bitcoin is one of the most positive for humanity, world changing inventions ever created.
Maybe today. PoW is akin to a paper clip maximizer. The more value the network holds the more energy it needs to use. The cheaper the energy gets the more of it needs to use. So why not jut nip it in the bud?
The ongoing fiat dollar experiment, initially to finance the Vietnam war is unacceptable to me. The resulting impending unraveling of USD as the world reserve currency might be unacceptable to you.
Money and government should be separated, otherwise it provides the government with wrong incentives.
100% this. I wonder if people consider the carbon footprint of maintaining petrodollar hegemony.
But they will lose that hegemony. It happened to the denarii, it will happen to the dollar. The question is - what would be best suited to replace it? Our contenders are the Euro, the Yuen or Bitcoin.
This is about government deciding how electricity should or should not be used and seems like an extremely bad idea. Cryptocurrency mining doesn't pollute in itself. If the idea is that electricity consumption in general is polluting, the law should penalize/regulate electricity consumption in general.
Thank you. A lot of folks in the comments currently seem to focus on whether or not they feel cryptocurrencies are legitimate at all, but this is the real crux of the matter.
I don't appreciate the government letting me buy things and then informing me I'm using them wrong. If they feel there is some negative externality associated with the good I'm buying then they should mitigate it there, not based on some holier-than-thou judgement about whether not not I'm applying it right.
This reminds me strongly of a house I once rented that had in the rental contract that the rental agency was allowed to "monitor my electricity use" so they could "give me advice on better spending" if I fell out of some undefined norm. Simply uncalled for.
> I don't appreciate the government letting me buy things and then informing me I'm using them wrong. If they feel there is some negative externality associated with the good I'm buying then they should mitigate it there,
Government does that all the time. You pay for water from the water utility, but they also have restrictions on lawn watering during droughts. You can buy a car, but there are restrictions on who can drive it and under what circumstances. You can buy alcohol, but there are restrictions on when you can drink (drinking and driving, open container laws).
It's nice that they do it anyway, but I still don't appreciate it and I don't like it when they do it to more things. I'm not sure why "but they already do it!" should be an argument for liking it (or even tolerating it in novel circumstances). To me that sounds like stockholm syndrome.
> Regulation of resources is based on scarcity. When water supplies dwindle, you will prioritize drinking over industrial use and farming.
Is this really true in practice? I don’t live in the US, but there were some threads about quite the opposite happening in California: government regulating availability of water in households while raising prices, and at the same time making water cheaply available and wasting for almond production in a desert.
Well the concrete tradeoffs differ from case to case of course. But grandparent's suggestion that resources should be distributed irrespective of their usage is nevertheless wrong.
In the end, you can look at the tradeoffs to try and infer regulatory agencies' priorities. As far as I read, the californian approach does indeed favor agricultural use. At the same time, it is obviously a good idea to limit unnecessary consumer use (lawns, albeit a small share of overall water consumption).
That said, imagine there was a drinking water shortage in LA. I guess the policy would change rapidly. So it's a question of the associated costs, and the costs of civil unrest are high.
Of course, the US is such a political disaster right now that a lot of really fundamental and trivial societal issues are negotiated through high-stakes (and sometimes violent) confrontations rather than through civilized political means. Woe to thee o land whose electorate is so spiteful.
The point I'm trying to make is that if there would be drinking water shortage in LA and the government wouldn't subsidize agriculture, almond production in California would probably get bankrupt, the farmers would move to another state that is more suitable for water intensitive farming, and the market would just solve the issue. Regulations can be beneficial, but harmful as well.
In the current case gas prices are high anyways, and Bitcoin miners are dynamic resources in containers that can move easily, so I guess they will just create another wave of demand for solar panel + battery pack installations (just like Blockstream did with Tesla solar+batteries, and what's going on in Texas in the last few years with solar overprovisioning). I'm in favor of this law, just not the title.
I have absolutely no objection, all correct points.
One additional factor to consider is the time frame of regulation / market reactions: In some cases catastrophic short-term events may harm people. Even though market reactions would offer medium-term solutions, that may still be a case in favor of regulation.
But we're approaching a textbook-length argument here and I'm not really an expert on infrastructure regulation, so I'll leave it at this :)
More probably, they would change which crops they grow. Is there any evidence that farmers enjoy the ability to pick up and move to other land? I seem to recall these land plots staying in the family for hundreds of years.
If there's one thing that most economists generally agree on (a rare occurence), it is that resources are better allocated through a market economy than through central planning. It is my understanding that they do that with water, your example, because it is free public utility which is not subject to market forces. Government is generally not involved in the allocation of resources.
I'm with you there, but some resources are limited in the sense that externalities are growing. So my argument is that more regulation will be needed as that happens.
Land, for example, has always been a limited resource and has always(*) been subject to heavy regulation.
> about government deciding how electricity should or should not be used and seems like an extremely bad idea
Why?
We regulate luxuries differently from productive activities. It makes sense to do similarly for crypto. Energy generation is massively publicly supported.
Crypto can be produced abroad and traded here; burning our backyards to produce literally nothing is madness.
> 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.
Governments decide incandescent bulbs aren’t an ok way to use electricity. Governments will soon decide combustion engine cars aren’t an allowed use of gasoline.
We can’t ban gasoline and electricity or tax it to oblivion because that’s a better way of reducing waste of electricity in incandescent bulbs.
Electricity is a public utility. Government has been deciding how it should be used for decades and decades now. If you don’t want interference or want freedom from legislation you can trivially roll your own local power.
Note - This is about permits for mining operations that run their own fossil fuel based electricity generation, not what random people at home can do (edit, as best as I can tell, I'm not used to reading these bills)
> We must determine whether the growth of Proof-of-Work authentication
cryptocurrency mining companies that operate their own electric generat-
ing facilities and produce energy by burning fossil fuels is incompat-
ible with our greenhouse gas emission targets established in law.
When the published summary of the bill isn’t an accurate summary, I think it’s fair to be outraged at several aspects of the overall political process.
Americans should first look at the other energy wastage they do - oversized automobiles, excessive consumption and wastage of food, factory farming, military.
This "cryptocurrency causes global warming" is a nice story for the gullible.
I mean it literally does and the climate does not care about the order heating factors are removed. It only cares about the integral. Downsizing cars is a way harder problem politically.
Yes, when war starts, like now in Ukraine, nobody is worried about environmental issues. Like war planes flying on alcohol. We are separating garbage for years now, but our effort is wiped out with such 'approved' behaviour like wars.
Similar with Right to repair. Big tech just acts in making more waste by opposing to RTR.
> 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.
Even as a PoW author, I support this bill. Note that PoW is a consensus method, not an authentication method. It's also separate from transaction validation.
Yes, some of the details are wrong but it’s irrelevant to the point of the bill. The point is mining with carbon based power is something they want to stop.
Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%) and if wildly successful would still be < 1% of energy usage.
https://www.lynalden.com/bitcoin-energy/
However, when miners concentrate in one place the energy usage is certainly noticeable. This bill is for the New York senate. Banning mining from using more than 1% of the grid energy in their location would make sense. Better might be to require mining to shutdown during peak energy usage. At peak energy becomes the scarcest and fixed rate users may be subsidized. It is also usually the dirtiest at peak due to peaker plants coming online.
Edit: others are saying this bill ends miners from operating non renewable power plants- that also makes sense.
> Current Bitcoin usage is literally a rounding error of global energy usage (0.1%)
A tenth of a percent is definitely not a rounding error of global energy usage. It's equivalent to the consumption of 8 million people. Would you call New York City a rounding error?
Don't forget to count in the carbon footprint of the physical printing presses all over the world, the cost of disposing the old bills, the fuel needed to transport all those bills every single day, and all the resources associated with building and maintaining that giant infrastructure we take for granted nowadays. I'd also add the cost of waging wars that are made possible by the inflationary policies of the central banks.
Bitcoin is not a payment system. It’s a store of value (like gold) useable to underpin payment systems such as Lightning (like fed wire underpins bank to bank transactions today but more like the gold standard of the past). If Bitcoin were wildly successful and using 1% of energy usage it would probably be displacing enough of the existing financial system to be coming in net ahead as an environmental benefit. In it’s current state it doesn’t justify its environmental footprint largely because as a store of value it fluctuates too much, but it will be interesting to see Lightning and other new tech play out.
> If Bitcoin were wildly successful and using 1% of energy usage it would probably be displacing enough of the existing financial system to be coming in net ahead as an environmental benefit.
I find it highly unlikely. I mean, if you exclude all other energy that is used for all the other things built on top of it, then maybe. And I'm unsure of even that.
Fair comparison, judging by your post, seems to be to compare bitcoin to fed wire energy consumption which I would think is using less energy than bitcoin today.
Bitcoin uptime is incredible (whereas fedwire just recently had downtime). Fees for Lightning are close to zero whereas traditional international payment fees for example are much greater. New systems will get to leave behind legacy baggage which allows them to build more robust and efficient systems- this could translate to reduced environmental impact. There is no requirement that the endgame for Bitcoin is increased energy consumption or net environmental damage. Regulations like this bill that would stop miners from operating coal plants can help shape a better environmental future for Bitcoin.
what if they decided to replace "cryptocurrency mining operations that use proof-of-work" with "pornography on the internet" ? or with "non-useful streamers and their platforms" ? What's a good use of energy and what's not ?
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadProof of work is not used for validation of transactions at all. It is used for ordering transactions / solving the double spending problem.
The people creating this law clearly don’t understand the problem space and what the algorithm solves.
People burning massive amounts coal and gas for fraudulent get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, rug pulls, pump-and-dump schemes, money laundering, fraud, ransomeware, ugly ape jpegs, insider trading, getting around international sanctions in response to unprovoked military attacks and war crimes against humanity, and other criminal enterprises clearly don't understand (or care about) the problem space of climate change, and what lowering carbon emission and regulating crime and fraud solve.
To the second point, that sounds like a failure of the government to provide clean energy. In Los Angeles, we get 16% of our energy from coal and 28% from natural gas. I do not blame Bitcoin miners for this. It is a failure of the government to meet the energy needs of its people with clean sources.
Write legislation that mandates building new nuclear power plants or wind farms off the coast.
And governments can do multiple things at once to solve problems. The fact that they could build more nuclear power plants and wind farms doesn't mean they shouldn't also regulate burning coal to defraud people, commit crimes, and get around banking regulation and international sanctions.
Instead of electric vehicle tax credits, which cost the government in question an increasing amount of money as more people use them, you could apply a similar force with an ICE tax on purchasing new ICE vehicles, which raises a decreasing amount of revenue as people stop buying ICEs in response.
I’m not saying to stop all innovation, but crypto is 5+ orders of magnitude more energy inefficient, and it’s killer apps so far have been asset speculation, untaxed remittances, and cyber crime. Governments have no interest in those innovations at all.
So the thing with crypto: yeah sure there's bad crap on the margins, but the core of crypto is a completely new, faster and more flexible way to handle money, value, ownership and control. I liken it to "programmable money" but even that's too simplistic. With programmable real estate, the line between rental and ownership can blur, softening the risk and lability for owners, and creating more responsibility and upside for renters. A Bored Ape is a club membership and flexible ownership in a rapidly expanding brand that earns licensing fees: the folks at Disney are paying close attention. A $1+mm apartment is worth $1mm because people say it is and because zoning limits supply, not because the sum of the wood and metal adds up to $1mm.
Today, we spend enormous time/energy/etc on nonsense that should be one line of code, from incorporating companies to paying taxes. As crypto continues to mature and weave itself into business systems, these processes become lines of code that execute while we conduct business. You spin up a company with complex ownership, conduct the transaction, send money to and from the parties (incl government) and year it all down - in seconds. Today, you need weeks and lawyers, accountants, notaries, etc. It's insane.
As for the environment, we can't save our way to success: the solution is either geoengineering or murdering billions (plural) of people and slowing the rest from breeding. I'm hopeful for geoengineering.
Anyway, we can raise our fists to the sky, but the next generation is going to demand 24x7x365 business and banking, have taxes woven into transactions, sophisticated fractional ownership, etc.
I've seen a lot of unusual tech and trends win when they "shouldn't." I've seen "first they ignore you, then they fight you, then you win" over and over and over.
I don't personally care if crypto wins or loses or if today's crypto goes to infinity or zero, and I especially don't care if greedy speculators lose their life savings after everybody told them so.
What's interesting to me are novel ways for people to communicate, transact, store and share things.
I'd like it if the people who voluntarily wanted to slow down their own breeding were able to do that freely and easily, without it being expensive or scorned, and without being thrown into jail along with anyone who helped them, like their Uber driver.
https://www.newsweek.com/texas-uber-drivers-could-sued-10000...
“Proof of work” and “proof of stake” are the two major consensus mechanisms cryptocurrencies use to verify new transactions, add them to the blockchain, and create new tokens.
https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-basics/what-is-proof-o...
I would prefer to quote Satoshi Nakamoto or Dr Adam Back on the subject.
Brian Armstrong is in the business of selling altcoins, he can sell Bitcoin only once, but new altcoins can be created every day.
He might even be able to sell the same sats multiple times too, without having those sats for settlement.
Get your coin off the exchange!
Seem to be about asking if it's really ok to waste non renewable energy on this versus facilities that use "cleaner" approach. It also imply crypto mining create value which got me a good laugh.
Uncalled for - the context here (the bill) is about banning certain things related to mining on PoW blockchains for environmental reasons. Comments to ban PoW blockchains entirely for the same reasons is called for. Again, this is irrespective of the commenter's correctness.
I was involved with this bill. It’s being replicated in a few other state houses.
I was on the fence, initially. (I am by default sceptical of regulation.) But the mean argument against was more or less the above. Dismissal without evidence or even attempt at argument.
Hence the 2-year term. If nobody can make an actual argument in that time, the moratorium should expand to all power generation (you can do whatever you want after the meter, this targets behind-the-meter deals) indefinitely.
Please cite specific, real-world examples if possible, not vague ideas and promises that haven't come to fruition yet.
If we establish, through regulations, subsidies and taxes, a situation where it is always cheaper to use green energy; Crypto would bring nothing but massive investment in green energy development.
Even if we get to a point where we can power crypto purely with green energy - that might still mean that not enough green energy is available to power other, potentially more important use cases.
There is really no other way to fix this.
There's limited amount of space for solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric power plants.
Even if we were to achieve fusion, we'd be limited by e = mc^2, where m is limited within a radius that is reachable without losing energy on transport.
You can't fix a physics problem with market ideology.
And i think you are being unfair conflating the current energy shortage with a hard limit that the human race may never reach. The current energy shortage might have been averted if the investment from industries like crypto, was invested in renewables..
Off grid mining finds stranded energy which stops methane being flared directly into the atmosphere and converts most of it to CO2, which is factually better than any amount of CH4 being released.
By making stranded energy viable PoW actually allows green energy production to be built where existing demand cannot make it economically viable.
I think it's a question of mentality. Some people bet on human ingenuity, and some are willing to halt the progress completely because it hurts "mother earth" in their imagination.
If we do end up in the "age of cheap, green and almost limitless energy", we can use some for crypto, why not. But we're not there yet and I'd rather not put the cart before the horse, given how important an issue energy and climate are.
Your way of accusing sceptics of being in the way of "progress" recalls the promises of soviet planners or various cults. Beware of vague salvation promises in the future - utopian fantasies usually have dystopian outcomes.
Your tone is also similar to that of the stereotypical 14-year old "libertarian/ancap" living in their parents' basement, and your only other comment on this site outside this thread is one from over 6 years ago accusing the Washington Post of publishing fake news. This doesn't affect the truth or validity of what you say, but it doesn't help, either.
It also doesn't help his case that the Levenshtein Distance from "troorl" to "troll" is only 2.
https://planetcalc.com/1721/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31401754
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv_-KOdM6Wk
After fourteen years of running this experiment, Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) have not yet delivered a single real world application that would be beneficial to the society at large - as far as I know.
I can't help wondering if some of the advocates, who continue to defend these technologies, own themselves cryptocurrencies and have a personal profit motive in glorifying/hyping the technology - for example by hinting that cryptocurrencies would have solved "countless wars and atrocities of the past 100 years".
[1]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
If it's coming so soon, then how about you immediately stop burning coal and shilling ugly ape jpegs for a while, until all your utopian libertarian promises are finally fulfilled and free of unintended consequences.
But until such a time, just put a lid on it, m'kay?
Being environmentally-conscious is about reducing carbon footprint with smarter processes, not reverting to older ways for the sake of cutting electricity consumption. That was an unfortunate fallacy.
Money and government should be separated, otherwise it provides the government with wrong incentives.
But they will lose that hegemony. It happened to the denarii, it will happen to the dollar. The question is - what would be best suited to replace it? Our contenders are the Euro, the Yuen or Bitcoin.
Seems an obvious choice.
I don't appreciate the government letting me buy things and then informing me I'm using them wrong. If they feel there is some negative externality associated with the good I'm buying then they should mitigate it there, not based on some holier-than-thou judgement about whether not not I'm applying it right.
This reminds me strongly of a house I once rented that had in the rental contract that the rental agency was allowed to "monitor my electricity use" so they could "give me advice on better spending" if I fell out of some undefined norm. Simply uncalled for.
Government does that all the time. You pay for water from the water utility, but they also have restrictions on lawn watering during droughts. You can buy a car, but there are restrictions on who can drive it and under what circumstances. You can buy alcohol, but there are restrictions on when you can drink (drinking and driving, open container laws).
So when the externalities of energy increase, prioritizing (or penalizing) specific uses is (a) straight-forward and (b) not a novel phenomenon.
Is this really true in practice? I don’t live in the US, but there were some threads about quite the opposite happening in California: government regulating availability of water in households while raising prices, and at the same time making water cheaply available and wasting for almond production in a desert.
In the end, you can look at the tradeoffs to try and infer regulatory agencies' priorities. As far as I read, the californian approach does indeed favor agricultural use. At the same time, it is obviously a good idea to limit unnecessary consumer use (lawns, albeit a small share of overall water consumption).
That said, imagine there was a drinking water shortage in LA. I guess the policy would change rapidly. So it's a question of the associated costs, and the costs of civil unrest are high.
Of course, the US is such a political disaster right now that a lot of really fundamental and trivial societal issues are negotiated through high-stakes (and sometimes violent) confrontations rather than through civilized political means. Woe to thee o land whose electorate is so spiteful.
In the current case gas prices are high anyways, and Bitcoin miners are dynamic resources in containers that can move easily, so I guess they will just create another wave of demand for solar panel + battery pack installations (just like Blockstream did with Tesla solar+batteries, and what's going on in Texas in the last few years with solar overprovisioning). I'm in favor of this law, just not the title.
One additional factor to consider is the time frame of regulation / market reactions: In some cases catastrophic short-term events may harm people. Even though market reactions would offer medium-term solutions, that may still be a case in favor of regulation.
But we're approaching a textbook-length argument here and I'm not really an expert on infrastructure regulation, so I'll leave it at this :)
Land, for example, has always been a limited resource and has always(*) been subject to heavy regulation.
Why?
We regulate luxuries differently from productive activities. It makes sense to do similarly for crypto. Energy generation is massively publicly supported.
Crypto can be produced abroad and traded here; burning our backyards to produce literally nothing is madness.
> 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.
We can’t ban gasoline and electricity or tax it to oblivion because that’s a better way of reducing waste of electricity in incandescent bulbs.
> We must determine whether the growth of Proof-of-Work authentication cryptocurrency mining companies that operate their own electric generat- ing facilities and produce energy by burning fossil fuels is incompat- ible with our greenhouse gas emission targets established in law.
This "cryptocurrency causes global warming" is a nice story for the gullible.
> 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.
However, when miners concentrate in one place the energy usage is certainly noticeable. This bill is for the New York senate. Banning mining from using more than 1% of the grid energy in their location would make sense. Better might be to require mining to shutdown during peak energy usage. At peak energy becomes the scarcest and fixed rate users may be subsidized. It is also usually the dirtiest at peak due to peaker plants coming online.
Edit: others are saying this bill ends miners from operating non renewable power plants- that also makes sense.
A tenth of a percent is definitely not a rounding error of global energy usage. It's equivalent to the consumption of 8 million people. Would you call New York City a rounding error?
That's not very useful comparison. How does it stack up against payment systems' energy consumption?
PoW mining energy consumption is massively exaggerated. Christmas lights alone use more energy than the entire Bitcoin network.
This argument significantly detracts from your credibility. Were there no wars during the millennia we were on commodity money?
I find it highly unlikely. I mean, if you exclude all other energy that is used for all the other things built on top of it, then maybe. And I'm unsure of even that.
Fair comparison, judging by your post, seems to be to compare bitcoin to fed wire energy consumption which I would think is using less energy than bitcoin today.
Schrödinger's Panacea: measure a problem with sufficient inaccuracy and any arbitrary contribution can be disregarded.
The local community feels that it adds no jobs and produces a lot of pollution, and the Senate Bill is trying to stop this.