Because most fossil fuel burning is powering homes and factories. You know, useful stuff. Spending 3% of the world's power on sustaining a gambling addiction for a fringe group of gullible people who can't recognize when a technology, despite being interesting, has presented no social utility whatsoever (besides helping make scams easier) is bad policy.
HN has always been quite anti-crypto, but I'd like to pose a counter argument. I run a remote services-based organisation in a related industry, and we switched to 100% crypto payments across the business.
It's massively simplified our processes, and improved UX. Our customer base is already crypto-native, which is what makes this possible.
Users pay us simply by sending funds to our wallet. Our entire payment processing engine is under 300 lines, including USD-denominated fees in crypto. Payments arrive instantly, with almost zero fees, from any country.
We have no chargebacks or (traditional) payment fraud.
Our remote staff are paid in crypto, arriving instantly with no cross-border issues.
The cognitive dissonance here is amazing. Here is an actual application of crypto that is downvoted, while empty talking points around how crypto has zero use cases are always the top comments.
The irreversibility of payments in nearly all crypto systems does NOT prevent providing a refund to a customer. That can always be done by making a new payment to the customer.
One might argue that crypto makes customers unable to demand a refund, or that it is impossible to send a refund to a customer who is so anonymous that the merchant cannot even communicate with them, but these are less obviously a "no-no" for a business.
> Our customer base is already crypto-native, which is what makes this possible.
You've said it yourself. If the only way to accept crypto payments is to have a "crypto-native" userbase, what does this say about its utility for society? If the entire crypto industry is self referential, then once you peel back the layers there's not much left but a big system that moves money around in a circle.
YouTube used over 175 times more energy watching Gangnam Style in 2019 than Ethereum uses per year. Paypal uses 100x the power consumed by PoS Ethereum in a year [0].
This argument was (and still is) valid for PoW algorithms, but energy consumption is now barely a factor for Ethereum, which is the main network we take payments on [1].
I am not opposed to proof of stake but your arguments that youtube and paypal are more wasteful isn't super convincing- after all, you picked a video that's been watched billions of times, and paypal provides a very important service.
My argument isn't that Paypal is more wasteful necessarily, it's more pointing out the inconsistencies in how value vs sustainability is weighed up.
Ethereum is currently doing 30 TPS [0], and Paypal ~200 [1]. Assuming that energy usage scales linearly (a naive assumption, but for arguments sake), it could deliver similar value with 10x lower energy consumption, I don't find arguing against the adoption of PoS crypto solely based on sustainability very credible either.
The government is the ultimate safeguard for a whole society, where it should be the steward of common-action when individual action can't be trusted on due to a combination of perverse incentives and issues arising from the tragedy of the commons.
Without that you have an anarchic lawless society where individualism can flourish and people can exploit whatever they want without regards for the 2nd, 3rd, n-th order impact that an action might cause unto others, because it's invisible or severely hidden to them. Or that they simply don't care about said impact because their personal reward is worth more to them than the benefit of society as a whole.
I want a government which is humble about its ability to declare an activity valueless to society. It would have been vastly arrogant to declare that cryptocurrency is useless in 2012. In 2022 it is… debatable.
I wouldn't paint everything in black and white. For what concerns the discussed legislation, I think it would be more correct to legislate about goals and leave everybody free on how to achieve them (when needed).
The users and buyers of human sex slaves sponsor the human trafficking industry, and find it worthwhile.
Who is the government to say otherwise?
Oh yeah, that's right, the government SHOULD actually make policies to cut down on negative affects of things that some people want to do. You know, because that's the whole point of government.
The purpose of a state-level policy (state as in government not state as in NY) is to have a state-level agregate effect, not to actually care about each microscopic individual instance.
If you make a policy that in effect Bitcoin is illegal, that will have a population-scale effect.
The fact that you can make an argument that 'it's just computation no different from any other computation' is ignorant of the point and kind of jeuvenile. You didn't say anything they didn't know perfectly well.
> The fact that you can make an argument that 'it's just computation no different from any other computation' is ignorant of the point and kind of jeuvenile.
Why call me juvenile? That's not necessary to make your argument. It's rude too and against the rules.
> Enforcement practicality is a separate issue.
No it's not, enforcement practicality is the only important issue regarding a law. An unenforceable law is useless.
I didn't say it's not an issue, I said it's a separate issue.
The question of if a thing is harmful or should be controlled or declared illegal, and the question of how the implimentation mechanics of controlling a thing might be done, are two completely different questions. If you had no way to physically prevent murders, that does not then follow that therefor murder shouldn't be illegal. Failing to realize that is yet another example of jeuvenile.
Practically every law, policy, regulation, code, etc has some element of arbitrariness, interpretation, and discretion or selective enforcement. This one is no different.
The government should step in when the market can't serve the needs of society, in this case it's cryptocurrency enthusiasts and profiteers not paying for the externalities, causing a detriment to society. A carbon tax scheme aimed directly at cryptocurrency could be another solution, but it sounds like something that would be way more work to enforce.
I would also welcome a global carbon tax levied at the source (on raw fossil fuel) as it would solve a lot of issues but it's just not gonna happen for political reasons.
Given that the global carbon tax is unlikely to happen, we might has well take action against proof of work now since it would still be a net benefit for mankind.
NYC is not the only city in NY state either, there's lots of sprawl in the rest of the state and punishing car driving that way would be political suicide, besides being a harsh and rushed measure to undo the costly blunder that was planning cities around private vehicle usage.
That's discounting a federal carbon tax that would go this deep, because that's certainly not happening.
Because perfect is the enemy of good. A global carbon tax is my dream as well, that won't ever stop me to defend the government trying to tax incredibly wasteful industries as a step towards that. It's not black-and-white.
They hope to find it worthwhile, but are mostly disappointed when their money chasing doesn't pan out. Participation in PoW Blockchain stuff is worthwhile for the black market dealers/buyers, hackers, market manipulators, frauds, miners, and a minority of the speculators with good timing, but the overall utility is awful.
Just curious if you have considered what level of adoption is needed to change your mind about its utility. If 50% of a country's transactions are through crypto is it now legitimate? If 1% of global transactions are through crypto is it now legitimate? If BTC reaches 100k+ a coin (or a million, idk pick a number) is it now legitimate? Or is it only legitimate once you specifically decide to sell off fiat? If you don't know when you would consider it successful, I am not interested in when you consider it a failure.
I'd say 15 years of basically completely unregulated time to come up with even a single reliable use case that even a minority of people get social value out of is enough time to decide a carbon spewing "innovation" has not been valuable and it's time to cut our losses. Looking at crypto now and saying "the use case could come any minute!" is just sunk cost fallacy here. It's important to compare crypto with other innovations. The internet wasn't popular for a while but it was immediately useful and obviously powerful to a steadily growing group from the very beginning and it had no major negative externalities. Lithium ion batteries took decades to become widespread but their consumption of world resources scaled in tandem with their use, they didn't start using consuming massive amounts of lithium capacity BEFORE they were usable, unlike crypto.
Lithium-ion is a great comparison to because we should, even though there has been adoption of Li batteries, still be willing to say that massive scale lithium strip mining might be worse than having electric cars and it might be worth regulating away. Even if crypto was highly used, doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate it, particularly if it's externalities are worse than the alternatives (and they are).
Even if crypto did reach 50% of transactions or any of your other examples, and it can't, trustless environments demand waste so that kind of scale isn't possible without earth shattering waste, but for the sake of argument let's say it did, I'd still argue for it's abolishment at a societal level because it does transactions WORSE than everything else. Higher risk, fewer safeguards (oops wrong address, now my money is gone forever vs oops, I'll just call my bank), more emissions, more dark money, more money laundering, more room for scams... I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point.
It sounds like you're decently informed but then make obviously wrong statements like there is no use case. How can you say decentralized value transfer would not be a "reliable use case that even a minority of people get social value out of"? Decentralized value transfer is its primary use case, and solves a problem for hundreds of millions of people.
A global currency has now been established successfully (done organically too with no authority behind it), but 15 years is entirely too short of a time frame to guarantee adoption. The primary growth issue has been secure on and off ramps for local users, but that's a short term problem. Amazingly, we already see adoption in some of the poorest corners of the world before the richest. But you already know why that is: first world countries are fine paying a higher premium on every transaction because we can be more wasteful. It does offer some additional services like chargebacks, short-term debt financing, etc. Others aren't as fortunate due to local currency values, local infrastructure, etc. Also worth mentioning, sending any kind of remittance across the globe has a punishing level of fees attached as well. I don't think you are justified to say what we have right now is good enough, because across multiple dimensions it isn't for millions of people. The adoption curves for other countries demonstrates this: there is a need for something new.
Visa claims their network can handle 24k transactions a second. There are multiple crypto that can approach that throughput without much increase in waste. Lightning network's energy use doesn't scale with the volume of transactions. The security of the network and transaction volume are different dimensions on energy usage, so I think you are off on that point.
Energy waste is definitely a concern, but IMO should not be the concern for a much needed global financial network. Energy waste must come from global emission agreements and local regulation. High non-renewable energy users should be taxed more. High individual users can also be taxed more. The good thing about crypto is the tradeoff of value add vs energy used is extremely clear to everyone involved. If it doesn't make money people stop doing it, or commit a crime that can be pursued (whether or not it will be is another issue). The economics are transparent, which is extremely important.
The externalities are not worse than the alternatives, and it's fairly obvious. The alternative is no global finance network. The alternative is an unstable money supply. The alternative is continued manipulation of powerful countries to perpetuate financial repression. The continued funding of middle-men. The slow erosion of financial privacy (TBF, only 1 crypto actually improves this).
We'll find the energy savings somewhere else, such as the overwhelming wasteful industrial and transportation sectors. Crypto will continue do what makes sense economically. It will continue funding renewable energy and lift up areas with low industry potential but high renewable energy potential.
The current system loses hundreds of billions of dollars in credit card scams. But CC companies are still profitable. Wire fraud scams are up to $3.5 billion per year. Crypto has a better chance of fixing these through new security processes (there's room for custodial wallets) than the current system. The bank is already going to tell you to take a hike if you were scammed. If you can prove it's identity theft then you will typically be made whole, but even then it's not guaranteed without additional insurance.
What’s the fossil fuel burn of Bank of America’a entire IT and anti-fraud department?
I don’t care about the merits of bitcoin, but these simplistic crude and inaccurate legislation attempts are fundamentally market distorting and inefficient and restrict our rights.
Ok looks like you're going to judge bitcoin on its transaction capacity. There's nearly an infinite number of transactions that can occur nearly instantaneously on L2 with the lightning network for example.
Ok, since you are such a big fan of lightning network, can you help me with some quick maths? Imagine we get everyone on the world to adopt Bitcoin + lightning. That means we need to open at least one payment channel for each person. How long would it take to create just that one payment channel per person, if we ignore all other transactions in the Bitcoin blockchain?
[Spoiler: it's more than 30 years just for onboarding, for those who are curious. For the unaffiliated bystanders, next time you hear "Lightning network solves all issues, layer 2!" chant from the cult, remember that Bitcoin is still a tired old database at the bottom of it that is still looking for a problem to solve.]
Lightning works and it's easy for anyone to start using it now. Whether you want to discount it cause it can't immediately onboard the entirety of humanity within an arbitrarily short timeframe is just nitpicking because there certainly will be a protocol capable of achieving that absurd high bar for a trust-less blockchain.
Spoiler: eltoo & an upgrade with SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT along with channel factories seems perfectly capable.
> you want to discount it cause it can't immediately onboard the entirety of humanity within an arbitrarily short timeframe is
The "arbitrarily short" timeframe is 30 years. That seems kinda long to me. But then again I keep hearing "We're still early!" after 13 years of Bitcoin, so maybe you guys are targeting sometimes next century, in which case, my apologies.
Oh, and also, it's not _just_ to onboard, it's the first transaction. Anytime you want to settle, close a channel, create a new one, it's the same congestion. Unless you propose people initiate a channel for their newborn so the kid can eventually start using lightning when they get their third real job at 30? That _could_ work, hmm.
> there certainly will be a protocol capable of achieving that absurd high bar for a trust-less blockchain
"My project is gonna be working by the time for the final! I swear!" stopped working for me when I graduated high school and entered what some may call the real life. Seems cute that it's still alive and well in the crypto fantasy land to judge things by the publicity pieces instead of what they actually are.
Anyway, I'm not nitpicking. I'm punching holes through your tired arguments about an inefficient database and how it's the savior of humanity (just to pump up your coinz.)
To all knee deep bitcoiner, please understand that your future of finance wet dream doesn't actually ever scale to 1% of what's needed, stop burning fossil fuel, and find a new hobby, ffs.
Unfortunately, an apt description for people shilling alternate monetary systems that I once read was: "For them, the largest problem with the banking crisis of 2008 was that they didn't have a finger in the pie." I often think the lack of anti-fraud features may be a feature and not a bug.
"We also are making our operations more sustainable – including achieving carbon neutrality and procuring 100% renewable electricity in 2019, a year ahead of schedule."
Drastically lower than Bitcoin if this is anything to go by. So low you might as well put BofA into a fossil fuel burn limbo contest.
Given that result took less than three seconds of searching, I'm wondering if you have an ulterior motive in targeting BofA specifically.
