Humanity will continue to require energy as it advances and banning anything "because it uses too much energy" is a ridiculous advice. How about we ban gold mining, or set quotas on the number of children people may have, that will surely contribute to our CO2 reduction goals. It's also Orwellian and reminiscent of how the world looked like for citizens of the USSR back in 1960-1990
i find views that want to ban anything for energy consumption ridiculous. also what the people advocating for this kind of thing are missing is that it’s all fun and games until something you rely gets banned because of reasons.
here are my proposals:
the entire banking system is obviously using a lot of power. how about we ban banks and go back to using paper money. that’s def more environmental friendly. /s
electric cars run on energy that’s generated with coal. that’s not cool. let’s ban electric cars and keep driving gas cars. they have been around for a long time and the technology is so good that we actually pollute less with a gas car /s
the internet in general and datacenters in particular are using a lot of power. let’s ban datacenters. guaranteed between environment afterwards /s
Also "until something you rely gets banned", what do you rely on bitcoin for besides being a store of value?
my point is that you don’t get to decide what i consume. and banning bitcoin == banning any type of computing that you don’t like. do you understand how much power a modern datacenter sucks? do you also understand that some things that run in a datacenter are straight up dangerous to the fabric of our society?
By optimizing around energy conservation at all costs, we have homes that cost 3x, held together with glue, susceptible to mold, and filled with toxic crap like vinyl.
VS
An estimate of Bitcoin power consumption by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.
I know which one I’m more prepared to believe.
Even if this were true. I go on YouTube and can learn things: recipes, FreeCad tutorials, coffee nerdery, harmonica lessons.
Bitcoin literally does nothing.
Except make those little pieces of green paper in your wallet look foolish.
The virtue of energy use argument is just dumb.
By enabling ransom ware attacks? Creating GPU shortages?
That you only use it to watch videos that bring zero gain to your life is a You problem.
You're advocating for violence against people who do things you don't like. Use your wallet and leave other people alone.
Oh give over, this is ridiculous too.
When other people are causing harm that affects everyone it's perfectly reasonable to look at legislation to kerb the behaviours.
And no, that's not violence. No.
Where do you see the problem in using less energy for a crypto currency? Why not make a cryptocurrency that uses even more energy?
Why not?
>or set quotas on the number of children people may have
Some people consume 10x less energy than others, so blindly capping the number of children does not seem a good idea. What about capping the carbon footprint per person instead?
We track and tax revenues (not perfectly but as well as we can). We could definitely track and cap carbon emissions. Sounds good to me!
Not right now it's not. Not when we have constraints on how much CO2 we can pump into our atmosphere.
Right now, and I mean right now, when we're having huge problems de-carbonising the planet's energy supplies and are risking making life very uncomfortable for ourselves for decades or centuries to come, limiting energy use is actually one of the few levers we have to try to make a difference.
In this current situation, bringing online a whole new mid-sized country's worth of energy consumption for a financial instrument is ridiculous, and a huge own-goal for humanity.
