That numbers adjusts upwards and downwards every 2016 blocks.
So if we burned the entire planet the recipient will mine most of the bitcoin for a maximum of 2016 blocks at a faster rate than before they started mining, and then the difficulty will adjust upwards reverting the block creation time to 10 minutes per block. When the planet extinguishes, blocks will be found much slower or cease being found at all, until the end of the 2016 block period where difficulty will drop much lower, allowing people to earn bitcoin using an abacus and negligible amounts of power.
So there is no absolute need for bitcoin to use a lot of power and it scales up and down.
I don’t know the answer to this but most crypto related post on this site generate super low quality discussion. Mostly echoing points that are provably debunked or really don’t do anything other than echo the sentiment of HN from past threads.
For people on mobile does any way exist to filter out posts like this that we know will produce disappointing conversations. I like conversations opposing my view points but not when its uneducated or just pandering.
You would make your point better by pointing out the "low quality discussion" and explaining why it's wrong. That way you would also be contributing to better discussion, and others will learn something.
Yup, this would ensure the benefits of bitcoin mining would not outweigh the costs, and it would make most of it unprofitable. One great thing about crypto mining is that it makes unsustainable subsidies very obvious.
The difficulty adjustment would just make it a little easier to mine bitcoins, so miners would spend the same money. But at least they'd be using clean energy if the carbon tax were high enough.
The reward for Bitcoin mining is fixed. The work required is variable. If electricity costs globally shot up, there would be far smaller mining operations but the payout would be the same because the Bitcoin network adjusts its difficulty.
It doesn't really "consume everything it can" like a paperclip optimizer would. Like you said the reward for mining is fixed, so the amount of money/resources it can consume is limited to (mining reward * bitcoin price).
The difficulty goes down as a direct result of less mining being done. Long term, blocks will be generated at the same rate, but each block would have less work behind it.
This would give an advantage to Bitcoin miners in 3rd world countries where carbon credits and other fanciful notions are optional.
We [the developed world] would be outsourcing our Bitcoin pollution to these 3rd world countries and also contributing to “environmental racism” or whatever the left is calling it these days.
You can't control everything. The west already scrutinizes many commodities it imports: diamonds, gold, shoes, phones. There's no reason to suggest bitcoin mining sources can't be discriminated against.
So at scale, damage is mitigated.
In the long run, renewable energy from wind and solar are already the cheapest forms of energy anyway.
Ok so you now have only single-origin bitcoins available that are legal to purchase though a government dealer?
What if it is a worldwide mining pool that is paying out worldwide, like most coin mining pools currently do?
That would result in income earned in many different tax jurisdictions paid to many more tax jurisdictions, kinda impractical as the pool is contributing compute but the winnings are shared among all the miners.
And would we just use the honor system for Monero mined in China/India/Africa/Indonesia/wherever? There is no incentive apart from these hypothetical miners import agreement being revoked to not mix the coins up.
This might sound a little crass, but while I do agree that wind, solar, and nuclear are the future of power generation I also believe that cap and trade and its resultant currency of offset credits are morally equivalent to the indulgence system that the catholic church had set up in the medieval thorough early modern era.
So basically when Bill Gates is trying to offset his carbon credits he's basically paying the priests of his new religion to be able to fly all over the world without a guilty conscience, whilst the poors are agonizing over bagging their groceries with plastic bags because the red states don't want to ban them.
You're going to have to find a different way to deal with that. Without completely changing the way the US government and justice system works I don't think that's possible.
I don’t know about banning crypto to stop ransomware attacks, if we followed that train of thought we shouldn’t even have an internet where people can steal personal information.
That has worked terrible with the war in drugs. How do you think its going to work when no smuggling us required and anyone with a solar panel and a satellite dish can mine?
I’m afraid this would just further incentivize mining in countries who don’t have such taxes. Further centralizing Bitcoin and shifting the energy production to places who are even worse environmental abusers.
AFAIK Canada does this by giving everyone a fixed amount of tax credit to offset the tax. That way poor people aren't taxed more but everyone are still incentivized to reduce their emissions
That's essentially what Canada has done, except on a subnational level (as it only applies in individual provinces that don't have their own emissions reduction mechanisms with at least equivalent effects)
1. that's how the tax would be collected for most peope. ie. you'll pay $x/gal more at the gas pump, rather than declaring how much tons of carbon you emitted on your tax return.
2. whether they pay or not is irrelevant. what actually matters is whether they end up paying more or less in net. for a scheme that taxes people according to their consumption but gives everyone the same amount of tax credits in return, poor people would be expected to come out ahead because they consume less on average.
Progressive taxes on carbon emissions will discourage economies of scale. This means for the same amount of co2 produced you have less production (good things for society) which is pretty bad. Ideally the co2 should be taxed at exactly the cost to reduce it to an easily stored or safe molecule.
Perpetually being stuck in a cycle of implementing politically expedient but half-assed measures? See also: "oh no, there's too much plastic! let's uh... ban plastic straws!"
Not sure why the downvotes. It is not realistic for every country in the world to pass an equivalent carbon tax. The mining will just move to he locations with no (or lowest) carbon tax
Bitcoin was as created to resist censorship— hence Wikileaks was able to raise money after visa et al banned them. It was created to resist debasement- as a result it maintains its value as inflation ramps up.
Thus you would actually not want to buy things with bitcoin, and instead spend rapidly depreciating USD.
Bitcoin is a tool for turning coal into evading CCP capital controls and financial repression, with the externalities of pollution and emboldening libertarians
"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer
We are currently in the second stage for Bitcoin. Based on the comments here, in social media and from news outlets, seems more time is needed before its better understood and appreciated broadly.
I and many others continue to believe a sound money settlement layer technology divorced from arbitrary government intervention is of enormous value to society. One need only look at wtfhappenedin1971.com to understand why. But until then, narratives that cherrypick data and paint Bitcoin in a negative light will continue to dominate.
Patience. HODL. And continue to hope for a better world on the other side of all of this.
> One need only look at wtfhappenedin1971.com to understand why.
A bunch of scary-looking graphs haphazardly thrown together with huge ads abutting either end is not an argument. This comment is guilty of its own accusation: cherry-picking data to paint a dishonest narrative.
Of course these charts are only a starting point of inquiry. Several scholars, philosophers and intellectuals have both predicted such trends and provided rigorous intellectual analysis of their underlying causes.
This is basically fake news. The plant serves regular customers, and since it costs a lot to fire it up or shut it down, during the period where there is excess supply of electricity it is used to mine bitcoin. Unless you have a huge expensive and unavailable (due to constrained supply of cells) mega battery pack you cannot store that energy.
Globally, bitcoins’ entire energy usage is equal to just 1/6th of the surplus energy that is THROWN AWAY.
All this Bitcoin energy usage nonsense is FUD to keep people oppressed and using a currency that the politicians can inflate at will.
Due to the cantillon effect it is very profitable for wall street and politicians like congress to steal from the masses this way. This is the primary cause of wealth inequality.
Bitcoin fixes this, it gives regular people an escape, so they publish FUD against it.
"Bitcoin fixes this, it gives regular people an escape"
Really? It seems to have made a small group of early adopters very rich, a small group of insiders very rich, and a large group of people suckered into buying at 60k+ very poor.
I'm not really bullish or bearish on cryptocurrency, but it has a long way to go until it's something for "regular people".
It seems that way because you are not aware if how it is being used in practice. As a savings vehicle, holding for 4 years has never been a mistake. Globally, and for half a decade, it has been protecting poor people by giving them an exit. Millions of Venezuelans have avoided starvation by using it to avoid massive inflation destroying their savings. It is held in every country and every community.
I remember comments just like yours in the past 4 years who pretended like everyone got in at $20k (a price that existed for a day).
Average price over past 4 years is way below todays price. And todays price is only down due to this coordinated FUD attack.
PS— I am the only one who made a substantive comment on this thread and am being heavily down voted.
HN isn't a place of ideas, it is a place where where only a narrow, anti-human rights, ideology is tolerated.
Notice your entire response is a downvote and the assertion “that is total rubbish”. Not a rebuttal. Not even an attempt to address the point, followed with a personal attack.
Telling me I need a time out is exactly the kind of personal attack that is really just your confession that you are anti-intellectual and you are upset that I pointed out the hypocrisy.
And of course you want me to take a “time out” because the last thing you want is to be confronted with facts that undermine your bigotry.
I stand by my point that this has miles to go before it's for "regular people" and you kind of prove it in your response. Sure, if you had cash to put into bitcoin and hold for 4 years, you might have made more - but most "regular people" do not. The swings are far too wild to price anything in BTC (rather than peg it to another currency and convert it to BTC) so ultimately we're all still cashing out for dollars or pounds, and someone has to lose for that to happen. If you're an early adopter, or and insider, you know the perfect time to cash out and "buy the dip". 'Regular people' not so much.
My comment was not an attack on you, cryptocurrency, human-rights or anything else. I'm sure you've done very well from Bitcoin - but it's not ready for my mum.
I don't think you understand. The mere fact that it COULD potentially be used by anyone is a defense against all complaints. Because democracy. Like a magic charm you see. No I have never read any theory or heard the phrase "material conditions" why do you ask.
I'm exaggerating but I fucking swear this is the level of sophistication we get from actual crypto fiends in here.
> This is basically fake news. The plant serves regular customers, and since it costs a lot to fire it up or shut it down, during the period where there is excess supply of electricity it is used to mine bitcoin.
Linking to fake news repeating the same spin is not supporting a fake news article. The plants serve retail customers. The “just to mine bitcoin” is a lie told to try and bash bitcoin.
Reality is bitcoin is being mined with stranded natural gas, waste energy etc. Not with expensive high demand electricity— because that electricity is way too expensive.
> All this Bitcoin energy usage nonsense is FUD to keep people oppressed and using a currency that the politicians can inflate at will.
There is some serious cognitive dissonance if losing 1-4% to inflation a year is unacceptable but a billionaire's tweet costing you 30-40% is completely fine.
This is exactly how old coal and biomass plants work. You can throttle them back when power prices are bad, but shutting down and restarting are expensive, multi-hour processes. Sometimes the spot price is negative, and dumping that electricity into anything is better than putting it on the grid. In some cases before bitcoin they've located aluminum smelters nearby to use excess generating capacity in the same way.
