I am all for a ban too, if not because of the power waste then because of the semiconductor shortage.<p>Every wafer that doesn't become bitcoin miners can become something else.
The entire world should ban it. Burning the energy requirement of a nation to do less than 1M transactions per day, when credit cards alone handle 1 BILLION transactions per day, is absurd.
This really is getting quite tiring. It’s such a red herring.<p>I’d suggest reading this article by Nic Carter to get the other sides POV: <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-mining-americas-most-misunderstood-industry-opinion-1669892" rel="nofollow">https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-mining-americas-most-misund...</a>
It's funny how every time free market tries to do something new which people consider useful enough to pay money for, somebody will scream for regulators to save us from it. Usually somebody that didn't build a scrap of honest value in their life.<p>Sure, you're going to say it's a problem of coordination. How about I give you another problem of coordination instead. In this world there are a lot of pretty complicated things, built by smart and learned people. Problem is, there is a supermajority of less smart and/or less learned people that sometimes get to decide what other people can or cannot do.<p>Usually, we can see that societies that let people mind their own business are a lot richer, happier, more civilized and more ethical than societies which tell people what they can do with their time, work and money. But there is still a problem of coordination that a majority of people still haven't internalized this meta-rule, so democracies tend to meddle a lot more than they should. But such is life.
A practical issue is how you stop it though. You may ban the "rising proportion of renewable energy devoted to crypto mining" in the EU only to have the same mining done with coal in Kazakhstan and such places.<p>A better policy might be to have a tax on holding proof of work coins. I hold a little bitcoin and a little non proof of work coins. If there was such a tax I'd probably just switch over to the non proof of work ones. If most people did that the price of bitcoin would crash and there wouldn't be much money in mining it hence less mining would be done.
I’m unable to read the full article, it looks like a repost from two months ago:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29355447" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29355447</a>