So burning electricity on running a cryptocurrency is not right, but burning electricity on running servers for Facebook or user tracking is all right? If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case?
If that's not the case, how do you propose to enforce that all use cases use less electricity, and how do you punish those who use too much?
Why do HN comment threads always end up as Pedantry Pageants where all ye who dare comment must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child comment about failing to do so. It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring. It always follows the same pattern too. "Where do you draw the line?" "Who decides what's the truth?" Always the same fucking slippery slope fallacy. Every fucking time "Regulations" of any kind come up. I think the HN audience wears Being Anal as a kind of badge of honour.
To paraphrase Alan Watts slightly, do you know of a law that set everything to right? Let's just all sit around twiddling our thumbs eh? Since you obviously didn't really offer a counter solution.
Perhaps it's not idle pedantry to observe that many of those who are angry about crypto energy usage couldn't care less about the energy wasted and pollution generated by other endeavors.
It's like an uncle of mine who is outraged that mosques get tax exemptions, but he doesn't care that churches get tax exemptions.
Clearly tax policy isn't a genuine concern for him. He's angry about something else that he won't say out loud.
I wish there was a better name for an "order of magnitude fallacy" (but given Roman numerals I can understand why they probably didn't have a fun Latin name for an order of magnitude problem), because we seem to be seeing them all the time right now.
Industrial production of greenhouse gases is nearly an order of magnitude larger than consumer production, but often inordinately the "guilt" burden is pushed to the consumers: Do you have an EV? Have you changed all your light bulbs to more efficient LEDs? Are you Vegan enough?
Here too: Bitcoin alone has risen to an order (or three) of magnitude more energy consumption than Facebook could ever use/do ever use to track people. (Cumulative, the rest of cryptocurrencies only further dwarf Facebook's comparative energy costs.) We can be angry about two things, we can be angry at both, but why can't we discuss the bigger problem first without getting into the weeds of all the smaller problems?
(And of course, the two order of magnitude problems above are inextricably linked: Bitcoin is on track to make many industrial users of electricity look like chumps and dwarf them by an order of magnitude. Nearly all of the consumer-side gains from veganism, LED lightbulbs, EVs has been offset again, if not entirely dwarfed, by cryptocurrency mining.)
People are bad at reasoning things at large enough scales, have a hard time gut understanding order of magnitude problems, so the fallacies keep creeping up, and keep getting weaponized by bad agents (the consumer "green guilt", the consumer "recycling guilt", so many other "demand-side fallacies" that if consumers just bought "smarter", problems would just go away, when really it's the suppliers that are in control).
How is comparing Bitcoin's energy usage with other endeavors an "order of magnitude fallacy"?
Gold mining uses something like 140 terawatt-hours of energy annually, and produces enormous pollution and environmental destruction in addition to that.
That's greater than Bitcoin's energy usage.
Since gold mining is so much more harmful to the environment, maybe we should outlaw that first before we work on smaller problems.
> How is comparing Bitcoin's energy usage with other endeavors an "order of magnitude fallacy"?
The "other endeavors" category above was "digital endeavours" and specifically "Bitcoin versus Facebook", which is an order of magnitude difference.
You've introduced an entirely different category from the above discussion. It's maybe an interesting category [1] to discuss elsewhere, but is off topic from the fallacy we were discussing. Thanks for the non-sequitur, though.
[1] Personally, I'm not so sure it's a useful counter-comparison to Bitcoin: Gold is used in electronics and other industrial needs, beyond its service as a value store/commodity of interest to collectors. Gold is also increasingly rarely the "primary" focus of mines. Most of our Gold today comes from Copper mines and very few would argue we are mining Copper as a value store/solely for greed.
Gold mining isn't even an edge case in that specific example when the class of problem is explicitly defined as "What digital services use too much energy?" as it had been in the above conversation. Is Gold a digital service? No. Is Gold Mining wasteful? Perhaps. (Though again, as an aside, the better question with specific respect to Gold is: Is Copper Mining wasteful? Most gold is mined as a by product of copper mining.)
It's not an edge case of the "electric waste of Digital Services", because it is an entirely different problem. So not only do we have "pedantry pageants" of edge cases, but we get to address the "pedantry pageants" of all the unrelated but seemingly related problems too?
> Gold mining uses something like 140 terawatt-hours of energy annually, and produces enormous pollution and environmental destruction in addition to that.
The most apropos commentary in this entire thread yet.
> why can't we discuss the bigger problem first without getting into the weeds of all the smaller problems?
People seem to be intentionally conflating some things. A carbon tax is nice precisely because it avoids getting into weeds and is a general approach that applies equally to everything. Some people are proposing this and others are saying "don't get caught up in the weeds." What? Makes no sense. It just reinforces the poster's point: that some people's real motivation doesn't seem to be environmental, there's a strange focus on crypto specifically that makes it seem like they want it to be reigned in for other reasons.
General solutions are great, but when there's a noticeable log_10 distinction between two examples given, why can't we start at dealing with specific solutions to the biggest problem first and worry about the general approach later? It's a 99%/1% problem: we'd potentially get a huge savings if we dealt with the 99% of cases first and worried about the 1% later.
The raw statistics already tell a story that the difference between "BTC" and "Facebook" is greatly exponential. Wanting to focus first on the (much) bigger exponent isn't necessarily a sign that people's real motivation is "conspiratorial" against crypto.
Because an outright ban is misguided anyway. PoW systems incentivize renewable R&D and investment. If you just straight-up make it illegal, you kill a major driving force of change for the better. If you restrict carbon output instead, you just further challenge the industry to find a way to work inside those bounds, allowing creativity and positive externalities to continue to develop.
There was an article just the other day of a coal plant that was entirely restarted for PoW coin mining. PoW systems are not proven to incentivize renewable energy R&D and investment. There's no proven link there. There's no proof that a PoW coin ban would "kill a major driving force of change for the better". Sure, a restriction on carbon output would be such a driving force, but there is no such restriction today and it is wishful thinking to believe that PoW miners are following anything like one in a market where such externalities continue to be unregulated.
It is orthogonal to the issue at hand that PoW is using far too much energy per transaction/per capita/per GDP/per most metrics you want to point to. Not using the energy in the first place is always going to be greener, no matter how much PoW systems invest in renewables and their R&D! I can't see that as "misguided". An outright ban would get immediate results versus a carbon output tax would incentivize eventual results, maybe. That's not misguided, that's just a different perspective, and a different preference on an ideal time window to address the situation versus wishful thinking and "golly gee, sure hope the market eventually figures it out someday".
I'm not setting any line here. I'm saying that we could worry about the big problem first without immediately deciding where any "line" needs to be drawn. I'm saying it doesn't matter which side of the "line" Facebook falls on because we could start with the biggest problems first, then circle back to Facebook when it's top of the list (not a whopping log_10 of at least 2 (!) difference from the current worst offenders, such as BTC).
I don't get why anglophones are so obsessed with these "drawing lines" and "moving posts", particularly on recent years. What lines are these exactly? What posts? This is very bad heuristics, actually.
Fair enough. I love this orange website, but I also despise it. Flying off the handle is rarely a sensible solution.
To your point, though, I'm willing to wager that most of the people whose biggest problem with crypto is energy consumption would happily also support other harsh measures against all manner of pollution generating entities. I know I would.
A pollution tax is really the only viable solution though. Playing whack a mole against individual entities and activities will never solve the problem, and creates a lot of legislation.
So long as pollution and carbon are free or cheap, people will find wasteful ways to generate it.
Incentives work, and taxing carbon and pollution will incentive green alternatives.
In the specific case of proof-of-work cryptocurrency, I don’t think a carbon tax is directly useful: If it’s unilateral then mining trivially shifts across borders; if it’s global then it’s an inflationary pressure on the coin price which offsets the reduction in mining you might otherwise expect.
a pollution tax will not work. That just becomes the price of doing business and that cost is factored into other areas of the business model. Even worse, it just gives more capital to inefficient governments
> That just becomes the price of doing business and that cost is factored into other areas of the business model.
Yah that's the point and business with less environmental impact will be more competitive. Industries/products with more of an impact will be more expensive, reflecting their true cost.
> Even worse, it just gives more capital to inefficient governments
Most pollution/carbon taxes are proposed to be revenue neutral, i.e. all the proceeds are returned to the tax base. This is also important because like other (non-luxury) consumption taxes, a carbon tax is regressive.
Solar is taking off not because we banned coal, but because it's cheaper than coal. If coal and natural gas were taxed according to their carbon output, solar would be even more ahead, nuclear may become more attractive as well.
Aluminum is heavily recycled not because it's green, but because it's significantly cheaper than mining new.
Incentives work. The free market responds to incentives, and works around regulations.
I have a few disagreements with the MMT crowd, but on this one point they are transparently correct: the exact level of taxation has little relationship to government ability to spend. Talk of "giving more capital" to governments shows a deep misunderstanding about the nature of fiscal constraints.
> Perhaps it's not idle pedantry to observe that many of those who are angry about crypto energy usage couldn't care less about the energy wasted and pollution generated by other endeavors.
Have you observed this, or are you simply speculating?
There's a hidden subjective value judgment built into the word "excessive" that's doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. These "regulation" comments tend to have a high likelihood of boiling down "I want the government to stop things I don't like", where environmental concerns (crypto) or data collection (adtech) is a mere pretense grounded in incomplete information at best, emotion at worst.
Personally speaking I find it just as irritating of a pattern here that knee-jerk calls for "regulation" (i.e. bring in the coercive power of the state) or outright banning are so often floated as a/the solution to every problem. When legal coercion is suggested, it is entirely proper to bring up the existence of the dragons that lay down that road.
I want the government to look seriously at things that are using the energy footprint of a mid-sized country simply to spin up a new financial instrument. Particularly when there appear to be equivalent things that don't.
If cryptocurrencies didn't have the energy footprint, I would find them pretty uninteresting and/or ridiculous for various reasons, but ultimately it wouldn't bother me that people do what they do with them. When they start adding seriously to the global energy load in a time of climate crisis that makes them pretty offensive.
I don't know whether you're referring to me or some of the other replies, but I am definitely against most forms of excessive energy consumption if they can be avoided.
The argument stands for itself. If your uncle gave a good argument against tax exemptions, it's a good argument for tax exemptions. Just pretend somebody else gave it that doesn't have the same alterior motive.
Attacking the motive or whatever is not said out loud is responding to a weaker interpretation
> Perhaps it's not idle pedantry to observe that many of those who are angry about crypto energy usage couldn't care less about the energy wasted and pollution generated by other endeavors.
I don't think that's correct. I think that it's possible to care about both, but to be dismissive of misdirecting subject changes, i.e. "whataboutism".
This is not an edge case at all. Who is to decide on what to spend energy or not? This is curing the symptoms only.
The (counter) solution is not to discuss for what to burn coal, but to finally stop burning coal, oil and gas. USA and EU could do that within a few years. And then stop or tax imports from countries that still do burn coal.
But that is inconvenient for many, so they prefer discussing nerdy Bitcoin PoW instead.
I mean, thank you for offering the alternative solution! I couldn't agree more that not burning coal is the only ultimate solution. A severe, possibly overly severe, Carbon tax is maybe the way. But as the great Stephen Schneider once quoted some other great, "Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good". And he was talking about cap and trade vs carbon tax!
The real reason is twofold, first and more importantly, because you don't know the unintended consequences of proposing something like that. Who knows what else would get caught between the regulatory framework needed to prevent someone from doing math, because let's face it, that is impossible so unintended consequences will be the only consequences.
And secondly and most importantly, the government should not decide what products are allowed to be traded: Governments should lift all bans on products currently banned, all drugs, all books, all music, all banned clothing, etc.
The last sentence comes off as a rhetorical sleight of hand. You can be against censorship of books and music and still believe that the government has a role to play in regulating dangerous goods like plutonium. The trade of goods with an outsized environmental impact is regulated today, though this mostly shows up as restrictions on chemicals that are themselves direct pollutants.
Sure, you can be against anything, pro anything, and believe in anything. What I believe is what I wrote, you can believe governments should control plutonium if you want.
If you think the US and EU could completely stop burning coal, oil, and gas in a few years (less than 10?), you must know something no one else knows, or this plan involves a lot of dead people. But I'd love to hear more about it.
Electricity produced in France by coal + gas + oil is around 8% (vs. 70% nuclear, 10% hydro, the rest is wind + solar + bio-energy).
It took more than "a few years" to build, though.
Like lawns. We seriously use way too much water, chemicals, energy and time on a plant crop that is basically only for our visual enjoyment. We often think of the big fixes, which are needed, where there are some low hanging fruit we could pick first that would make an impact.
American SUVs and trucks come to mind. We can for now ignore the wooden, uninsulated houses built in the desert with the AC on for 6-9 months of the year.
You do realize that while sunlight and wind are renewable, lithium-ion batteries are not, right? Nor are solar panels. Cadmium and lithium are highly toxic materials we must mine, just like coal. They have the benefit of not directly adding CO2 to the atmosphere as you use them -- but they come with their own set of issues. There is no free lunch. POW is Proof of Waste, and we shouldn't be blithely wasting any of these non-renewables.
Because this is a website full of engineers who write computer software for a living? And finding and solving for those edge cases is literally a core function of what most of us spend the majority of both our work and leisure time doing?
To me the big gripe is not the concern for edge cases but the immediate dismissal of a very productive first step in addressing an issue by resolving the entire conversation before it even happens.
It is very possible to bring up edge cases in a productive manner. Expand the conversation to include them. there's no need to assume the first solution idea posted is meant to be the final form
But is it even a productive first step? There are arguments to be made that proof-of-work mining incentivizes renewable R&D.
By banning that because it uses "too much" energy now - what are we potentially losing? What developments in renewables, energy storage, or grid development simply won't be there, which we won't know we don't have, because we banned the largest for-profit, skin-in-the-game competitive contest for low-cost energy that the world had ever seen 25 years prior?
Banning it outright is short-sighted. Thinking about it from a higher level is a way of addressing the real issue of carbon emissions while allowing a phenomenon that has the potential to massively help, not hurt, to thrive.
The desire for energy is near limitless - PoW simply bends the curve upward. As the price of BTC increases, the drive for less costly energy slackens off.
The issue is clearly a tragedy of the commons - the cost (higher air pollution/higher energy costs) is socialized, while the profits are centralized. So the maximization function is cheap >>> anything else. Why wouldn't we expect more and larger coal plants versus research into fusion reactors?
That's only true so long as the price continually rises. As soon as the price settles, everyone is operating on the margin and can only become more profitable by reducing costs.
Unsubsidized renewables are already the cheapest new source of energy generation. [0] Even if miners wouldn't be doing direct renewable research themselves, their capital investments into renewables in the name of competition and cost-savings would incentivize more efficient technologies.
In this case the immediate marginal profits from mining are centralized, and the larger benefits of more advanced renewable energy are socialized.
Plus - do you believe that the price of Bitcoin will rise forever? If it did, wouldn't that mean to you that it might be doing something important, to constantly have growth and demand for 100 years? Cuz if I thought so then I'd want to preserve it, not throw it away. Sounds important.
Bitcoin isn't the only option. We've already seen that when the price of Bitcoin dips miners flip over to whatever cryptocoin seems next to bubble, seems next most interesting. Certainly what is called Bitcoin itself (today) has "hard" "deflationary" "caps", but as soon as miners get bored with that, there's always more room for more forks and other coins.
Even if Bitcoin isn't intended to be "growing forever", the ecosystem can and will.
> The desire for energy is near limitless - PoW simply bends the curve upward. As the price of BTC increases, the drive for less costly energy slackens off.
Shameless hijacking here: at what point will the heat consumption/release rate be so great that the Earth becomes unable to support life? I've seen some back of the napkin calculations that estimate a couple hundred years, at our current acceleration.
IIRC (it has been a few years), we only need a few degrees to reach a tipping point. The decay of methane hydrates could push out 1000 GT CO2 equivalent suddenly, accelerating warming by roughly ~40-50 years.
Lighting all the oil and gas in the world on fire will also incentivize renewables. But that's not a good practice for a lot of reasons including increasing the pollution and CO2 levels.
Making renewables isn't actually useful if they're used for something we don't even need to do. We could switch to a low-energy crypto currency and do all the things we were going to do with Bitcoin.
Making this change would introduce an enormously impactful precedent. Politicians might take it and run with it to places we don't even want to imagine. I'd agree with you in a world without the current style of politics and decision making, but that's not where we live - and sadly alternative to that is unknown to me too.
I'm a software engineer, and I'm probably at least in the 90th percentile for ability to manage (or design not to have) edge cases. I try not to be that pedantic when criticizing coworker's designs, other than perhaps pointing out that lots of edge cases in a design is a common symptom of over-complexity.
On this particular topic, I particularly hate the amount of fossil fuels getting burned on cryptocurrency. I'm less concerned about the amount of energy getting "wasted" on data centers in general. At least in most cases, there's alignment of interests when it comes to efficiency optimization. Facebook has an incentive to make their servers more power efficient over time, and scale their capacity to the size of their customer base. With proof-of-work, there's also incentive to increase power efficiency, but also incentive to scale up to capacity limits.
I think it is possible that proof-of-work cryptocurrency algorithms could be tuned to the point of striking a sustainable balance long term, but that would require the world economy to converge on one or two of them. The issue with that I think is the speculative nature of the currency's distribution of ownership. With large portions of the currency being held by a small number of anonymous people, and no clear path for the majority of normal folk to exchange their wealth, it's just not going to happen without some sort of societal collapse. I also struggle to have faith in a system meant to disrupt the global economy when its existence depends on global scale internet infrastructure.
It's not pedantry, it's calling out issues in armchair proposals. "Why not regulate" and "Why not let the market sort itself out" are kinda intellectually lazy propositions: there are good regulations and bad regulations, and good and bad implementations.
And banning isn't really a proper solution in the first place. It's a literal avenue for tax revenue for countries at this point. The fact that PoS coins like Cardano and L2 solutions like Polygon are bullish despite the crash in Bitcoin shows something about investor sentiment surrounding the whole energy consumption ordeal. Voting with your wallet is a real possible solution and IMHO, people are starting to take the hint.
I don’t understand why you don’t find these “where do you draw the line?” inquiries extremely relevant to this conversation. It seems like everyone here has just assumed that Bitcoin is useless and therefore the externalities from its energy usage should be unacceptable. Personally I’m not a big fan of bitcoin’s energy usage either, but it strikes me as bizarre to recommend banning arbitrary things that use energy rather than, for example, addressing the externality problem directly.
I wouldn't say OP recommended banning anything 'arbitrary'. It was very relevant to the discussion to state that the ban should be on proof-of-work currencies.
Here's my issue. There is such a thing as too-late in environmental matters. Once it's too late, it's a fire that sustains itself. Therefore, acting quickly matters. Addressing the source directly is obviously the superior solution. But I just don't see it happening at a fast enough rate. I see nuclear power in the same way. Yes, it's a little bit of trading one problem for the next, but it's a very necessary stop gap to buy us time.
Because banning outright is stupid, and banning a technology is even stupider. Technologies have both benefits and drawbacks. TAX (not ban) the drawbacks.
In this case, tax carbon. Then people will decide what they want to spend their (expensive) energy on.
I'm actually hopeful that crypto will bring about a carbon tax. I figure the people getting rich in crypto are a different set of people than those getting rich in traditional CO2 emitting industries. So there's a slightly better chance that politicians will enact the necessary legislation.
It's not a counter-solution, it is a suggestion that the problem isn't really a problem. PoW power usage is high in an absolute sense but lower than many other things which people would consider an obvious waste. So why does PoW power usage have so much contention compared to those other things? I would say because there's too much baggage/hype associated with cryptocurrencies, not because there's a genuine belief that increasing the energy usage of our species is a universally bad thing.
As for the carbon side of the issue, that isn't something which is specific to cryptocurrencies or any other kind of energy usage. I support carbon taxes and import taxes on CO2-producing goods/services, including cryptocurrency services, and I am certain that many cryptocurrency believers feel the same way.
So if ready alternatives didn’t exist, sure PoW is wasteful but has no alternative... but we have an alternative. If there were alternatives to running a social media platform that didn’t spend energy we should also back that option.
Assuming you are talking about PoS systems, I think they are very promising but it's still not obvious that they can achieve the same risk profile as PoW systems. I think they are worthy of further research and I am excited to see how Eth 2.0 works in practice, but I don't think we understand the economic nature of cryptocurrencies well enough to definitively say that it can completely replace Bitcoin.
While I agree with the genral thrust of your tirade, this is not slippery slope, this is hypocracy of the highest degree.
OP proposal to ban cryptocurrencies for 'damaging environment' while we have companies who's entire business model is giving their customers cancer and preying on addicts.
1. We can work on more than one thing at a time and I’d be quite surprised if the original poster didn’t want to do something about those companies, too.
2. For all their many flaws, those industries also provide something of value. If they shut down tomorrow, people would miss having cars, pesticides, fuels, medications, etc. but if every cryptocurrency suddenly halted tomorrow nobody outside of a few speculators would find their daily life any different. That doesn’t mean that those externalities aren’t real and don’t require action but they’re widespread because there is some kind of real value to society and you’d need a transition plan to avoid disrupting a lot of processes.
I'm gonna bet OP would be happy to ban hammer the hell out of the companies who's entire business model is giving their customers cancer and preying on addicts too
The crowd of HN tends to be more philosophic. Without a moral / ethical / long-term practical view, we're just ships with torn sails floating in the waves, wandering about, making short-term decisions. Decisions often have 2nd, 3rd, 4th-order consequences that can be unpredictable and often counter to the goal we think we're working towards in the short term. It pays to think them through from a high level and apply long-term thinking principles.
I agree. Having used Reddit for too long, and Facebook too before I deleted it completely, my experience has been that HN is much better at talking about things, and more careful about wording. Despite the predictable slippery slope comments, there is always some good commentary in most threads. I can't think of anywhere else to go to get discussion on a multitude of complex topics like this.
That doesn't mean that threads on HN can't take a nosedive and become flame wars. But that's what good moderation is here for, and I believe HN has that.
Because it's missing the forest for the trees. Look at total energy usage, across all industries. This is more an indictment of cryptocurrency than it is about actually caring about the environment. Compare it to say, eliminating all gas vehicles for electric cars. Where is the HN thread advocating for that, if the end result would be massively fewer carbon emissions versus this proposal? My criticism is this proposal is like banning plastic straws. It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real solution.
Are you joking? There are plenty of conversations on Hackernews about electric vehicles, it just so happens that replacing every single car in the world with a totally different energy system is a way harder problem than banning useless cryptocurrencies that are burning energy to fuel equity bubbles.
You may have heard of this company Tesla based in Silicon Valley, one of the largest companies by market cap in the world, just led an electric car revolution that's inspired automakers worldwide to shift off IC engines
This comment isn't productive. The original comment suggests states act to ban wasteful energy use. The comment you're replying to asks "who decides?" , and gives an example of energy use they find particularly wasteful.
You're presupposing this is a problem that needs a solution. I think myself and the commenter you are replying to would agree that either: A) it's not or B) it does not need to be solved by a regulatory body.
Instead of getting annoyed by people pointing out edge cases, it would be more productive to explain what criteria should be used, or admit this is a half baked solution.
I am not being pedantic. I am simply bringing up two points:
- There are those who are OK with high carbon emissions for various things that are a proven net-negative to the society or the planet - examples being, as I mentioned, social media, user tracking and advertising server farms, plus anything directly related to that. If these things are not a net-negative, then at the very least they could operate at the fraction of their current emissions, were they built with externalities in mind. To be OK with that but not with Bitcoin where it objectively provides some value by directly helping human lives (it is a store of value and a way to transfer money for people whose home currency is unstable or restricted by hostile governments, for instance), is hypocritical.
- Literally all legislation surrounding cryptocurrency (well, anything else too, really) by necessity has to be based on someone's opinions. Whose, is my question. Because that will shape what's allowed and what's not allowed to a great extent. Badly chosen opinion-givers lead to clusterf*cks like Disney, Sony and a few other giants effectively being in charge of worldwide copyright durations, which causes untold damage to the cultural commons.
There's nothing wrong with pointing out problems with a solution and not providing a counter-solution. When one isn't provided, it can simply mean that the offered solution is actually worse than the status quo.
In this particular situation, I may not have the solution, but I know that the offered one is a short-sighted knee-jerk reaction which has terrible implications for other things
Why? Because that's what I bet most people come to HN for. I'd rather find out that my idea is impractical or plain stupid on a HN thread than in some other and expensive way.
> must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child comment about failing to do so.
Because it is an incredibly common fallacy to ignore boundary conditions and unintentional consequences when proposing a pie-in-the-sky regulation that is supposed to just fix things.
Any regulatory mechanism is essentially a machine that will need to work with every input and minimize some class of error, be it precision or coverage or some other system level metric. Turns out the most interesting part of such a system is indeed around the edge cases, and the difficulty of handling such cases is essentially the bulk of the difficulty of building such a system to begin with.
It is like saying "why don't we build a system that punishes criminals", which sounds very agreeable and popular at that level of construal, but is incredibly complex and sophisticated at the actual implementation level; e.g. to have a process to minimize false positive convictions rather than maximize conviction rates.
> It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring
Not to sound harsh but HN does not owe anyone their favorite type of entertainment and honestly criticisms on those metrics are more trite, predictable, wearisome and boring themselves than anything else. Many find intellectual stimulation and systemic thinking entertaining and thus those comments enjoyable.
In my mind its not about figuring out the edge cases, its more about building a framework in which tradeoffs can be analyzed, debated, and mindfully considered before drafting legislation. In order to do this there might need to be a few conversations that some may consider pedantic.
I will say that given the text based medium of HN, it can be hard to gauge whether one wants to have a mindful discussion or if one is just trying to mindlessly ding a poster.
I don't know if that was their intent, but I would actually like a good answer to your parent's question to have a strong argument for backing OP's proposition, which I'd like to happen.
Moral arguments (ones that offer only should and should not with some supporting evidence but no actual solution) are going to be dismissed more regularly because while they may offer perspective, they offer very little value beyond that. That makes them fairly non-actionable.
Choose an argument which requires you to offer a viable and compatible alternative and you'll probably get a lot more ears.
the thing is that 'simple' solutions are never that. and if you find that boring or whatever than maybe its time to think a bit further before making some arguments.
if a case is so easy to dismiss, it might not be a good case after all.
That’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone describe Facebook as an “edge case”.
If $900,000,000,000 of market capitalization counts as an edge case, I’d think you must be hard to please at Christmas - those are some really high standards!
Or is that you refuse to address the complexity of "Regulations"? The easy seduction of oversimplification runs high with those whose argumentation is primarily a fallacious appeal to emotion.
Maybe it's time to grow up and realize that the real world is highly complex and requires sophisticated tools, mathematics, and questions in order to better live in it?
There is a counter solution to advocating for regulation. It's to create an economic system where people are naturally incentivized to do what's best. Vote with your wallet. You don't want energy that produced Co2? Don't buy it and advocate for others not to buy it.
Instead what people are doing is advocating for the government to come and point guns at people who don't do what they want -- even if they happen to be wrong. And when they are wrong, there are disastrous consequences as is currently extremely apparent in California. There are all kinds of perverse incentives which have resulted in the severe homelessness and extreme government waste.
The people advocating for this neither listen to the wisdom of Murphy's law, nor do they understand that when regulation impacts the market that regulation becomes what is bought and sold. Have you never heard of regulatory capture? That has worse human-cost impacts than leaving people to their own devices.
Vote with your wallet. Don't like the environmental cost of beef? Don't buy it. This works -- you can see it playing out.
"Vote with your wallet" depends on several micro-economic assumption holding true, that don't hold true here.
One of those is the assumption of perfect competition. Electricity is far, far from being a market with perfect competition. How many electricity providers are you able to choose from at your house? I'm going to guess 1.
Another assumption that doesn't hold here is the absence of externalities. The full cost of damage to the environment is not included in the price you pay for electricity, so people are going to over-consume it.
You rail against laws and regulations but even in the second sentence of your post you assume their necessity with the phrase "create an economic system..." Laws and regulations are how you create such systems.
Regulatory capture is a real thing, but it's not a good argument against all regulation. Maybe it's an argument for relatively less regulation than we'd have otherwise. It's also an argument for doing regulation better.
> Those regulations are going to create as much cost on humans as leaving it to people like yourself who care.
Humans optimise for short term gain, generally perceived gain over others, and rationalise this over large nebulous things like climate change, environmental health etc. They don't count externalities without being made to. And that's individuals. Companies are downright sociopathic and will happily defecate in their own back yard if they can make a dime out of it.
As a result we can already see what happens when people are left to choose themselves or the environment, they choose their own short term relative gain over the long term prospects of the whole species (before we even look at other species).
> Fixing the problem is up to you.
Yes, in a democracy it is, which is why I vote for political parties which will bring in regulations.
This idea doesn't apply at all for stupid speculative bubbles like proof-of-work crypocurrency.
As another good counterexample to your "market solutions for everything": I don't want rhinos driven to extinction, so I vote with my wallet by never buying powdered rhino horn or other poached products, and donating to environmental charities to protect them. However, it's very likely that rhinos will be extinct in the wild within our lifetime. Does this mean "the market" has decided to exterminate wild rhinos? Should we eliminate poaching regulations and remove red-tape to stop distorting the free-market price of rhino horn?
I think the proposal here is very simple. Pass a law against proof of work crypto currencies, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and deal with the next big waste of power when it comes about by passing a law about it.
Don't address of any the things that you are proposing need addressing, because they don't need to be addressed in the same law, or really addressed right now at all.
The law doesn't need to try and anticipate the actions that occur in the future, we will still have a legislature in the future capable of addressing the future when it comes about. The law needs to address the actions of today.
Bitcoin does not consume fossil fuel as a raw material; it is not an ingredient required for its operation. It uses electricity which can be generated from any source, be it wind, solar, or coal.
Subsidized coal mining and untaxed carbon emissions are dangerous ideas.
Electricity has higher economic value due to miners seeking to maximize profits.
This makes investments in renewable energy infrastructure more profitable and paid off sooner. A solar farm has more demand and higher margin for its products.
On the other hand, it means cheap coal energy is also financially productive.
What is anti-economical is the unfair price competition due to externalities not captured by coal energy's pricing.
"gratuitous use" is completely subjective, so the anti-economical assertion isn't provable. You're suggesting there are no trade-offs between PoS and PoW, no tradeoffs between solar+batteries vs coal or nuclear.
PoS can be easily copied and modified by the powerful. There's little cost to create the system and force adoption rather than incentivize. There's an enormous amount of investment and technology dedicated to bitcoin that makes it more resistant to devaluation and duplication. But it saves electricity. That's the trade-off.
Why not focus on the source of the electricity rather than what the electricity is used for?
I don't see how proof-of-waste makes bitcoin more resistant to devaluation and duplication. How would switching to proof-of-stake make bitcoin more prone to devaluation, for instance? As far as duplication is concerned, bitcoin is open-source software which means anyone can duplicate it and make derivative works from it. There are dozens of bitcoin clones. It doesn't seem that bitcoin is resistant to duplication at all, or that there is any reason the lack of difficulty with which it can be duplicated should be influenced by whether it uses proof-of-waste or proof-of-stake.
Any software engineer can clone Twitter. The value of it is in the network and the high cost of users switching because they can't convince the people they follow and those who follow them to switch at once. The same applies to Bitcoin, but miners have an even higher cost of switching because they have specialized hardware that can only generate revenue on the Bitcoin network. Ethereum validators have a much lower cost to switch.
> proof-of-waste
It's Proof of Work. Productive work has value and in this case, it's widely distributed censorship-resistant validation of transactions.
Is it? Over time human energy creation and consumption has grown exponentially with technological innovation. Fire to cook meat, a wagon attached to an ox, combustion engines, air conditioning, wireless networks, data centers, etc.
Today you probably consume more energy in a few days than your ancestors whole lives.
Now, we've created distributed, immutable property, something that has never existed before. It turns electricity into value storage. What is the "correct" amount of energy for humans to spend on such a thing?
Energy consumption has nothing to do with increasing planet temperature, if Bitcoin consumed 10x the energy via solar panels, it would not have any environmental impact beyond the raw materials used in the panels.
You're equating energy usage to carbon emissions, but you should be able to distinguish the difference.
> Energy consumption has nothing to do with increasing planet temperature,
As long as we're using fossil fuels, planet temperature does in fact have something to do with energy consumption. You seem to be arguing that because renewable energy sources exists, Bitcoin has nothing to do with fossil fuel emissions. However, that is false, as 8% of Bitcoin mining happens in Inner Mongolia, which is home to many of China's large coal mines[0].
I'm arguing that China subsidizes coal[0], and that China does not utilize a carbon tax[1].
So when you call for a ban of Bitcoin in the name in environmental concerns, you've decided to be the arbiter of energy usage, on what is productive and valuable, and what is not.
You're welcome to argue your points, but it would still be far more efficient and productive to addresses the actual core problem: coal fire plants, and energy prices.
> a bunch of aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and people with big guns, which gives the ability to say (credibly) that it is a crime to forge dollars no matter who you are or where you live
Cryptocurrency offers all this and more for a fraction of the price.
Bitcoin? Yes, it's a useless coin. I wouldn't mind even higher amounts of energy being spent on Monero though.
It's good that Ethereum is moving to proof of stake. Not because of some environmental impact though. Mining is just really expensive, it results in huge fees making the coin almost unusable for normal people.
> Current estimates put bitcoin’s energy requirements at around 130 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually, which would rank it in the top 30 electricity consumers worldwide if it were a country.
Not even 1%. The USA alone pollutes a ton more and is always utterly unapologetic about it. Historically I don't think they ever adhered to any global effort or treaty to reduce pollution. You have big entrenched organizations such as the oil industry doing far more damage and nobody messes with them. Not to mention the entire developed world's dependency on China for their borderline useless cheap consumer products.
This concern over the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies is utterly laughable when you figure out the real source of these problems. I guess they're just too powerful to be messed with.
Well, some environmental activists try by turning off oil valves[0], just like environmental activists are upset with Bitcoin.
> You have big entrenched organizations such as the oil industry doing far more damage.
People who criticize Bitcoin for its environmental impact don't give a pass to oil companies. The issues overlap, like in Texas where they plug Bitcoin mining rigs straight into the oil well[1].
But I hear you. All big entrenched organizations must be held accountable. Of course.
The problem isn't even bitcoin mining, it's pollution. The energy usage wouldn't matter at all if it was generated via renewable sources such as solar.
People who want to see real change need to deal with fossil fuels. Taxing mining operations will do absolutely nothing to solve the actual problems of this world.
It applies to laws in the sense being discussed here. Ban X which is really bad while not banning Y which is totally unrelated but happens to be bad in the same way. Why does that need to be perfectly right?
> Pass a law against proof of work crypto currencies, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and deal with the next big waste of power when it comes about by passing a law about it.
If we won't legislate it now, it's possible we won't get a chance to do it later thanks to bickering from lobbyists and fossilised laws and practices. See IPv4.
You seem to be proposing that not passing a law against proof of work cryptocurrencies somehow makes it more likely that we will quickly pass a law generally "solving the climate issues" ... I think that is highly unlikely, and in fact I think the opposite direction is more likely, that passing a law banning PoW cryptocurrencies makes us more likely to pass another law which solves climate issues in other ways.
Banning PoW cryptocurrencies is not a big enough priority for anyone that it will be a motivating factor to move past the other issues surrounding the climate debate, especially not anyone on the side of "don't do [thing] to fix the problem". I don't see any other mechanism by which it makes passing other climate legislation harder.
Banning PoW cryptocurrencies removes money that is currently on the side of "don't pass climate legislation because it will harm my PoW cryptocurrency business" from the table. That makes passing future legislation easier.
In general, trying to solve all the worlds problems at once doesn't work. It's too complex, you paralyze the decision making body with too many tradeoffs. When something is obviously bad, banning it immediately not only has the effect of meaning it's gone immediately (and doesn't hang around until you solve the whole problem), but it simplifies the remaining problem for the decision making body. This makes them more likely to come to a consensus on exactly what to do in a finite amount of time.
> Banning PoW cryptocurrencies removes money that is currently on the side of "don't pass climate legislation because it will harm my PoW cryptocurrency business" from the table. That makes passing future legislation easier.
Does it? And, do you have data that backs this up? It stands to reason to me that PoW miners only want cheap power; they don't really care too much how it gets generated. Considering that the cheapest power source you can build out today is green energy, it sounds like a win-win to me for them to put their money into "advocate for more cheap power."
They answered it. The person they were responding to was trying to broaden the scope too much. Many laws purposely have narrow scopes in order to handle problems that arise without setting too much precedent.
They did not answer it. "Broaden the scope too much" - why? The question seems completely appropriate if you're actually trying to solve the climate problem. The response didn't address this, it targets crypto specifically, which makes it seem like the motivations are not climate but something else.
The question was about how to choose who is using too much and how, and the response was basically "don't think about it, we will exist in the future and can think about it then." But we exist now. And even if we were to wait, it's still a question we can answer now to have enacted later. The response provided was a bypass, a non-answer.
They didn't do that either. It reads more like avoidance. The semblance of an answer by posting anything, rather than a plain, direct response. Which gives the original questions more weight: why were they not able to be responded to directly? Are the questions potent? Your reply here is just shifty on shifty.
You really don't understand the problem with asking questions like "well who decides?!?" To literally every proposal of legislation ever?
Because that is what always happens. Every time someone make s a general proposal, for any law at all, there are people making the same old, dumb argument, of "well who decides?!?" Every single time.
Sure you do not believe that all laws ever are wrong, right?
Because the answer to this dumb question is the same as for every law ever. That makes it valid, unless you believe that all laws ever are bad.
I don't understand. We clearly have general laws like "don't shoot people," rather than 320 million individual laws like "John Edmund Smith IV of Springfield, Ohio cannot shoot people." And we didn't start with laws targeting individuals and then broaden it later. "Don't shoot people" was the proper, general rule that addresses the problem of shootings. Laws like this seem to be pretty effective and desirable. I don't know why we wouldn't take the same approach with something like carbon emissions.
There are absolutely many laws, that are very targeted and specific. Were you unaware of this?
For a random example, there are laws that probably say something like "A truck, of this size, must follow these specific environmental regulations".
That would be a specific law, that applies to a truck, and required it to do a specific thing, like have a certain mileage efficiency, and it is not general. It is pretty specific, and it is not a general law that applies to all environmental related things.
The world is full of many specific laws, all over the place.
> Pass a law against proof of work crypto currencies
once again, you have merely just assumed the role of arbitor. What makes this opinion better than the opposition?
What needs to be addressed isn't energy usage, but the cost of energy in the first place. Why isn't the fix be passing a law to tax carbon properly? Tax the externalities, and the rest would follow. I don't care if people burn up energy for crypto, as long as they pay for the cost properly.
> once again, you have merely just assumed the role of arbitor. What makes this opinion better than the opposition?
This is literally the role of legislators. What makes "my" opinion better, is in the event that this sort of legislation passed, the majority of the elective representatives in both houses agree we should ban proof of work crytpo currencies, nothing less, nothing more.
> [alternative proposal]
I mean, I happen to like this proposal too, but you haven't given any reason not to do both...
I think OP is suggesting that a targeted ban on proof of work crypto will be more politically feasible -- particularly in the US -- than a carbon tax. Even the state of Washington (which is far more left/democratic/liberal than the US as a whole) failed to pass two different modest carbon taxes in recent years.
So while carbon pricing would be a more ideal solution, OP is suggesting that a targeted ban on POW crypto is a good-enough bandaid that might actually pass.
> What makes this opinion better than the opposition?
Nothing about the opinion is better than any other. But the only thing we have to achieve is that it is a majority opinion, which frankly doesn’t seem all that hard to me.
I'm aghast that Facebook burns that much power to run what is basically a giant BBS. I guess mining all of our personal data must take up an outrageous number of computer cycles.
However, in Facebook's defense it's per-user per-transaction energy costs are going to be much lower than Bitcoin.
> I'm aghast that Facebook burns that much power to run what is basically a giant BBS. I guess mining all of our personal data must take up an outrageous number of computer cycles.
Did Ye Olde BBS support 1:millions broadcasting, and real-time viewing of high-definition video? Uploading and viewing thousands of high-quality photos?
Calling Facebook 'basically a giant BBS' is a lot like saying 'Oh, I could build Twitter in a weekend'.
It definitely is. Either that, or it's incredibly short-sighted.
That comparison ignores the actual value add of Facebook and the fact that people are using it. Most BTC trades happen off blockchain and are powered by the servers of the market places and nobody really knows how much energy they use.
No, it's because competition between miners necessarily drives the hash rate and thus energy usage to scale up with the value of mining rewards and transaction fees.
But if there aren't more transaction (as number of transactions), what happens when the hash rate increases? They hash incomplete blocks of transactions? Or does the same block gets confirmed by a greater number of miners?
The second answer, although there is only one "winner" of each block's competition, so it's only one miner/mining pool which ends up confirming a transaction. It's controlled by a hardness parameter that's readjusted automatically in a regular fashion.
Miners tend to increase their hashrate because that's how they compete for block rewards. However, the electrical energy a miner spends on finding blocks should not be more than the value of the block rewards, otherwise they would operate at a loss. This provides a ceiling for the energy expenditure.
Therefore, if the price of Bitcoin doubles, miners can afford to burn twice as much electricity. (Roughly. This is a simplification of course.)
Because the chain of transactions with the most accumulated waste is chosen as the "correct" chain. In order to double-spend, you have to cause a different chain to be the "correct" chain, so you'll have to waste even more energy than has been wasted by everybody else, over whatever span of time you're trying to roll back. Thus the more waste, the more secure the chain.
Proof of stake is a newer way of coming to consensus on one correct chain. It took people a while to figure out how to do it securely and efficiently.
Okay, so the chain of transactions that is regarded as correct is the one that has been more expensive to create. Instead of wasting energy, the same result could be achieved by wasting other stuff, such as bitcoins themselves, for instance?
Sure. In fact, that's almost how Ethereum's proof-of-stake works, except it has a protocol that comes to consensus without wasting anything as long as people follow the rules, and only destroys stake when someone provably breaks the rules.
Bitcoin uses far less energy than the gold or banking industry, uses more and more renewable energy every day and has some significant game theory going on regarding renewable usage and research.
IDK in Germany it's forbidden per § 30 StVO to drive around senselessly inside settlements. You are still allowed to drive around, even if the reasons are stupid. But if they are too stupid, police can fine you. There is a youtuber in Berlin who specializes in driving around for hours and he's been stopped by police already. The original video has been made private [0], but a raw version of it still exists [1].
It's mainly to reduce emissions and to protect the local environment. The paragraph also more generally states that you have to "prevent unnecessary noise pollution and emissions", which as we learn in driving school also means shutting off your motor when sitting at a red light.
> So burning electricity on running a cryptocurrency is not right, but burning electricity on running servers for Facebook or user tracking is all right?
Spinning up cores to do intensive math for the sake of its difficulty is wasting energy by design. PoW's financial incentive is to waste power.
Facebook spends a massive amount of money on compute, and their profit is only as good as the margin they can make over that compute cost. Therefore they have a financial incentive to save power.
> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case?
The legislature and the regulatory agencies it has created, obviously.
The exact same way literally every other environmental regulation has ever been passed.
There are entire divisions of agencies dedicated to drawing the line of "too much" in all sorts of areas, for pollution, poisons, contamination, energy usage, etc. In fact, pretty much everyone but extreme libertarians agrees this is one of the main functions of government.
So while you might not agree on the resulting policy or even the mechanisms that arrived at it, it is a solved problem. You don't need to wonder how we'd accomplish it -- that part is easy.
> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case?
I see a lot of people replying with a slippery slope argument of this nature, which makes me think I should explain my argument better.
I'm not arguing that burning electricity alone is the problem. I'm arguing that burning electricity for the direct purpose of making a financial product is a problem for society, when 1) the financial product explicitly incentivizes burning up as much as you can to make more money and/or 2) burning up that energy can be alleviated by other technical solutions.
I'm not arguing that mining should be illegal. I'm saying the 'sale' of the results of that mining should be illegal. Using or making incandescent lightbulbs is not illegal, but the sale of them is banned or restricted in large portions of the world [1]. Less harmful alternatives exist, so sale is disincentivized, the world moves on.
This is not the government deciding how you spend energy resources. You can continue to mine all you want. But you shouldn't be rewarded for that.
One thing I should point out is that I recognize that an alternative solution for these incentives is to make electricity always so expensive that it costs more money in electricity spend to mine crypto than you can make money of it. Make electricity price depend on crypto price. Needless to say I don't see that working out :)
We have such a system for appliances already, energy star. And we do restrict the manuf and sale of appliances that can't meet those goals. Same for cars.
> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case?
The difference is that Facebook’s energy use potential is limited and gets better with improved computer tech.
There is a limit to how much analysis you can do. As you get more efficient hardware, the energy use would go down. Facebook also invests a lot of effort in optimizing their code to run more efficiently.
With proof of work crypto, the only limit is the price of crypto. Despite any efficiency gains, you can always expect the energy use to scale with the price of crypto. For example, a 10x more efficient miner, won’t cause 10x less energy use, it may actually increase energy use as more people mine with higher rate electricity.
There is a chance that we develop a situation that the most monetarily efficient thing you could do with electricity is to mine proof of work crypto. If that becomes the case, then even a carbon tax won’t help because proof-of-work crypto can easily pay the tax compared to all the other uses of electricity.
The arbiter is "if you build something that is build to be as inefficient as possible by design that's forbidden". I can't think of anything other than PoW that matches this.
Burning gasoline to drive somewhere is fine, but (at least in my city) sitting parked with your engine running incurs a fine.
Fundamentally it's become too big a waste to ignore, like so many other things. We banned incandescent bulbs, we can ban proof-of-waste, which is basically an incandescent bulb that never illuminates anything.
Why would a company pay the same tax rate as a person? A company pays a tax rate of x% because that income is also taxed when they distribute it to individuals. Thus we've built a system that incentivizes them to invest it back in the company (doesn't always work - but that was the intent).
So 21% + 15% to 20% capex on individuals = a tax rate around the same.
Now, if you really want to look at the big picture, look at a company's tax rate of 21% on profits, but they also pay taxes on employees of ~21% of salary in the USA not to mention health care (which in europe would be included as taxes so maybe in Europe 46% to 50%). So if payroll is 40% of your costs that is another 8.4% of taxes added in there. And, you can probably add health care as a tax as well.
Legal tax avoidance is legal. I hate when people bitch about companies doing legal maneuvers. It is very easy to stop that, apply a tax on gross receipts for all income created in the country.
Washington State does that for example if you have a company operating in their state.
> So burning electricity on running a cryptocurrency is not right, but burning electricity on running servers for Facebook or user tracking is all right? If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case?
Yep, I hate to say it, but even FB is more useful compared to BTC. No one uses BTC for actual payment but to hold a value. People holding BTC could just switch to MtG cards and saved tons of energy without losing any benefits that they are currently using.
The elephant in the room is bitcoin literally requires the mass consumption of computation to work - the more the better. And it was designed this way. In comparison, Facebook and industrial processes work to make their processes more efficient and use less resources for their workload. Bitcoin will just gobble up any efficiency to do more mining and end up consuming the same amount of resources.
Bitcoin is an endless energy pit. The same isn't true of things like Facebook.
Exactly, that's how laws work: they express value judgements. Installing solar on the roof? Good, the people will help you pay for it. Earning a fortune? Bad, the people want a piece of that.
The laws set up the playing field, and the market responds to the incentives. There has never been any such thing as a "free" market, and it's a good thing too.
I think the real problem is that there is no cost associated with emitting CO2 for the emitter even though it creates tremendous costs for the society in the long term. If there was a tax associated with the act of emitting CO2 itself (purpose of which could be to invest in green technologies) then the market could be the arbiter.
The key difference is that I'm certain that Facebook makes continuous efforts to use less energy. Maybe not for environmental reasons, but they have an economic incentive to increase efficiency.
Regulating the energy consumption/efficiency is more akin to fuel efficiency standards for cars.
Facebook actively makes the world a worse place in every way -- be it be providing a captive audience for authoritarian governments to push their propaganda, for surveillance states to collect and build models to control humanity, or trying to control the flow of money and implement economic censorship on Earth via Diem.
> If that's the case, who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case?
"If there is a clear and obvious better with minimal impact."
It's just that simple.
We make choices like this all the time. Here in the US we set CARB rules to slow emissions but we don't just ban old cars even though that would be better for the environment. Grey is okay in laws if the black and white bit behind it is clear! (Reduce emissions if possible with least possible impact on people.) Otherwise you will never be able to improve anything until the harmful methods have grown too much.
It's easier to get Facebook to be carbon neutral because they are a centralized institution, and it only takes a committed government to zero down on a corporation and force them to move to clean energy or pay a carbon tax.
With crypto it's too decentralized to implement either.
> who's the arbiter of what's "too much" power for a use case
Ultimately Mother Nature will be the arbiter. If people spend too much time arguing about politics instead of either lowering power usage or moving to clean energy, those people will be killed sooner or later.
Exactly! Just because you don't think something has value doesn't make it so. Value is a matter for the market to decide.
Electricity usage has almost no negative externalities. Electricity production does. Attacking people for using their own resources on something that they find to be useful and worthwhile is foolish. Confront the actual problem, and quit harassing innocent third parties.
Facebook used 5 TWhr in 2019 (citation: totally unverified top summary from google). Bitcoin alone is estimated to have used 110 TWhr in a year. To put that in perspective, that is sixfold the power output of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Produces power on the order of magnitude of detonating two small atomic bombs per day.
This isn't exactly what you're talking about, but I keep waiting for Google's Chrome team to add an energy rating icon to the browser that gives you a rough feel for how energy intensive a given page is.
At some point the shaming would begin, web devs would respond, and then I'd generally get what I'm really after -- much faster page load times!
Burning energy to prove that you burned energy is not right. You can run cryptocurrency without requiring proof that burned electricity.
You don't need to worry about how much electricity was burned, only that it wasn't done in exchange for a plaque saying "I filled a swimming pool with gasoline, then lit it on fire"
The difference is that Facebook is actually using electricity to provide services that somebody wants. It's just that you happen to disagree with the value of this service. Meanwhile, Bitcoin uses a country's worth of electricity just to provide a tiny amount of accounting.
Last time I checked, Facebook isn’t designed to adjust its computational difficulty in order to suck up any amount of energy thrown at it to do the same (pitiful) amount of work.
I know something about addiction so to me Bitcoin enthusiasts sound like alcoholics who justify their drinking by saying "many people drink and doctors say a little drinking is good for you so lay off me." The fact that I couldn't even criticize Bitcoin's energy usage on HN util Elon Musk came out against it reinforces my opinion that it's an addiction. I imagine Bitcoin is a game like poker with a bluffing and holding strategy. Bitcoin as it is currently played has many addicted to it without regard to disastrous environmental consequences.
Not everything is "Whataboutism". The parent poster wants to know how we should treat various uses of energy in the context of calls for the outright banning of specific uses. How can you expect them to talk about that topic without talking about the various uses of energy that currently exist?
I think the correct comparison is against the Bloomberg Terminal, through which the vast majority of capital flows responsible for environmental damage, occur. Not only does the terminal itself use a vast amount of power with its humongous do-it-all servers and 8-screen users, but the facilitated capital flows, commodity trading, speculation, are probably responsible for 2-3 orders of magnitude more environmental damage than proof of work.
HN embodies this weird upper class environmentalist fascism where they proudly pick and choose what the plebes should be allowed to do with their lives based on totally logically inconsistent environmental reasons. The Musk thing was so funny for this. "No you plebes should have no recourse or experimentation against a fiat system it's bad for the environment, now don't mind me driving my Tesla around to do things like shop at expensive stores in my gated community or just kick it on the weekend doing a road trip in my TOTALLY ENVIRONMENTALLY NECESSARY electric vehicle that uses electricity from my wall socket not derived from fossil fuels at all which was not mined from not dubious sources whose environmental impact is totally not cool". I can't imagine where this ideology will land but I imagine the scope will expand greatly outside of PoW cryptocurrencies. Pretty soon commenters here will be scolding your for turning up your graphics settings in AAA games but only if you're poor and your house is in a dump that doesn't have a renewable grid.
Nah, you're right. Best not to do anything just in case we incovenience the 'plebes'. Or just in case First They Came For My PoW's And I Said Nothing. Then They Came For My AAA Games. Nevermind the burning planet, nothing should ever be done for the greater good if 100% logical consistency isn't baked into the thought.
You just proved my point. Your comment presents the idea that Bitcoin is "burning the planet" and needs to be focused on with ZERO elaboration as to why, then you use an appeal to emotion invoking the undefinable term "greater good", then you ignore logical consistency as if it doesn't matter when making an argument. Absolutely pathetic.
It's not about power. Well, not electrical power. It's about control over our currency. The argument is a trojan horse for an effective ban on the entire category of currencies not controlled by central authorities.
Without Proof of work, cryptocurrency would have never been established as a novel concept. Proof of work was the only rationale way to decide who should initially own how many units of the currency.
Does it need to remain? At some point coins were composed entirely of valuable metals because that's how their value was determined, but we've moved on from that. Can't we move on from proof of work as well?
Crypto is currently the only viable reason to overbuild renewables so we can expand their capacity faster than the battery technology allows us.
Just tax the carbon sources and ban building new coal power plants or reactivating defunct ones.
Instead of downvoting please give me one other example why would rational market entity build more renewables than to satisfy demand when production peeks. Because to go full renewables without batteries (and we barely have any when compared to our renewables) we need to always meet the demand even when renewable energy production is the lowest. And what should rational market entity do with the power at all other times where production is far higher than demand?
Because "mine cryptocurrencies with it" seems like the only reasonalble answer in the world where cryptocurrencies exist and people with too much money buy them enthusiastically.
It's amazing to me that the real answer on how to make renewable energy economical (while avoiding the ecological toxicity of building utility-scale batteries) are getting downvoted.
If that's not the case, how do you propose to enforce that all use cases use less electricity, and how do you punish those who use too much?