Bitcoin mining is being banned in countries across the globe

What a surprise. Turns out burning through the power demands of a country to run a system of value-token-exchange lagging <i>4 orders of magnitude</i> behind the capability of credit cards measured in transactions done per year, is not a good Idea.<p>Who could have seen that coming.

It will be banned in all but one country. Then all the miners in that one spot will generate so much heat, they’ll melt the underlying crust and sink beneath the molten lava. Then we’ll have our own version of Atlantis to fuel stories for generations.

&quot;Banning&quot; bitcoin is interesting since it basically bans factory mining compared to individuals mining. Because:<p>The high power consumption used by a heavy gamer (CPU + GPU) is easily indistinguishable and probably higher than a plain old individual miner since you would have CPU + GPU + Peripherals running.<p>And since there are 1000+ X more gamers than miners, the Bitcoin Inquisitors will have a hard time finding the needle in that haystack by simply examining your electricity bills.

Heard an excellent perspective on the Kazakhstan situation the other day and how it relates to bitcoin.<p>The Kazakhs are protesting and rebelling over high fuel prices. But why would fuel prices be high in a country with large oil and gas reserves? Well, funny enough China banned cryptocurrency mining, and a lot of miners (allegedly) crossed the border into Kazakhstan, where energy is cheap in the form of oil and gas. The proportion of bitcoin mining out of Kazakhstan has massively increased since then.<p>The miners drive up the demand for oil and gas, increasing price, leading to the protests.<p>Now, how true is all of this? No idea. But you can bet that in the coming weeks the Kazakh authorities will blame cryptocurrency for the entire issue, redirecting the anger people are feeling. Then, they too will ban it.<p>And if they&#x27;re right, and this <i>is</i> what happened, you can expect to see this process repeat again in whatever country has the next cheapest energy,

Ah, so we&#x27;re currently dumping. Gotcha. When&#x27;s the next pump?

Setting aside the debate over whether it&#x27;s the right thing to do or not, is it feasible to enforce a ban on mining? Genuinely just curious, as I don&#x27;t know that much about crypto. I&#x27;m sure energy use is one big clue as to who may be running a mining operation, but are there other ways authorities might detect them? Network activity?

Perhaps I&#x27;m missing something but even as a crypto-hopeful this doesn&#x27;t disturb me too much. Bitcoin et al. is better off without mining becoming consolidated into giant conglomerates.<p>The vision is for mining to be distributed amongst many small to mid-sized, non-colluding teams, the sum of whose hashpower is still greater than that which could be mustered by, say, a government or bank.<p>I hope that one day the UX and hardware for mining and joining mining pools becomes so simple and cheap it just makes sense for many semi-technical people to run a node in their home or contribute their compute&#x2F;storage to distributed protocols. Even have this built into the operating system, with a simple toggle for turning it on and off.<p>Truly distributed mining is largely a UX problem. I hope that these bans may spur spur development on dead simple mining pools for all.

Kosovo is not banning mining because they disprove of crypto, it&#x27;s just the energy crisis - thinking they can improve the situation this way.

This is a good thing. Imagine if we kept model-t&#x27;s as our primary car instead of evolving.

Bitcoin mining can be compared with seti@home: There are some computations to be done (in BTC it is in order to verify transactions which creates trust) and results to be sent.<p>What part exactly do they want to ban? Can there be no reward for computations?

Crypto Andys like to extol the supposed virtues of crypto like being extra-governmental, distributed and robust. A lot of gold bugs have jumped on this, often out of some misunderstanding of what central banks do and that &quot;printing money&quot; isn&#x27;t the evil it&#x27;s made out to be.<p>Crypto skeptics (such as myself) point out the flaws in all this. For example:<p>1. It&#x27;s not a currency. It&#x27;s an asset;<p>2. Reversible transactions for fiat currencies is a feature not a bug;<p>3. People who can&#x27;t manage passwords won&#x27;t be able to manage a wallet so mass appeal is always going to be limited;<p>4. Crypto has its own vulnerabilities (eg 51% attack);<p>5. This whole system is hugely energy wasteful; and (here&#x27;s the big one)<p>6. Government action could shut down crypto tomorrow so how robust is it really?<p>(6) seems to be contentious but there&#x27;s a ton of evidence for this. China banned mining, for example, out of energy concerns so all the crypto miners moved to Kazakhstan, a country that may end up being invaded by Russia. What happens to those crypto farms then? Rising energy costs in the developed world are slowly going to turn the eye on crypto mining. You already see the US government cracking down on crypto anonymity and tax reporting.<p>All of this is enough for me to wonder if the solution to the Fermi Paradox isn&#x27;t just that civilizations end up choking on micro-plastics and cooking themselves to death with crypto-mining. But hey for awhile there they created a lot of shareholder value.

Wouldn’t the banning of additional bitcoin production limit supply and drive the price of existing bitcoin up, assuming similar demand?

I&#x27;m a crypto sceptic, but this is a missed opportunity. Why not apply a mining and transaction tax? Use it to fund carbon mitigation and the de-carbonisation of our grid. Maybe even use it to cut taxes for the poor. Instead, these countries opt to burn pubic funds enforcing a prohibition.

Forgive my inexperience with crypto, but wouldn’t a solid implementation of Proof of Stake, as Ethereum is attempting, solve a lot of these energy demand issues, and therefore government angst and regulatory shutdowns?<p>TFA didn’t mention PoS, and I have gotten the impression that the crypto community regards it the way people talk about fusion energy, “the future if someone ever figures it out.”<p>HN is more knowledgeable about crypto than the average bear, so I’m wondering if this crowd expects the crypto bans to cool off once PoS is (ever) proven with a mainstream stablecoin, or if I’m missing any crucial details.

I sometimes wonder whether a 14yo kid should be mining bitcoins on his home PC, leaving it on all night every night.<p>I don&#x27;t like it but his parents don&#x27;t mind - they have no clue what it&#x27;s about. I&#x27;m the Uncle, wondering if I should say anything or let him have fun. So far I haven&#x27;t said anything.<p>There&#x27;s not much learning going on mining coins, is there? I might be wrong, but I was hoping he&#x27;d be into creative programming and making things on his PC. But for the teenager it&#x27;s all games, bitcoins and good times!

Ahh, finally governments are realizing how unsustainable bitcoin is.<p>I don&#x27;t understand why it takes so much time for Government that BTC, animal farming, climate change shouldn&#x27;t be taken lightly. I feel sad for those tax payers whose money were used to subsidize electricity.<p>And it’s so astonishing to me why crytobois don&#x27;t switch to the better currency that doesn&#x27;t use POW at least they won’t use exorbitant power.

Every country should ban the crypto scams outright. That way no legitimate retailers support it and they can finally collapse. The only &quot;value&quot; in any of them is finding a bigger sucker to give you real money for your fake &quot;money&quot;.

More HN anti crypto FUD huh? Has anyone clicked on the link?<p>&quot;We could not locate the page you requested. Our apologies. It may have expired or there could be a typo...&quot;

Would it make sense to ban electric heaters?<p>Well, mining Bitcoin is not more wasteful than an electric heater. If we assume that cryptocurrencies provide no benefits, a computer mining crypto is equivalent to an electric heater.<p>If we assume that cryptocurrencies provide some sort of benefit, then mining Bitcoin is more energy-efficient than electric heaters.<p>So, if you want to ban Bitcoin mining, you should also ban electric heaters, if you want to be morally coherent.

That&#x27;s a good thing because said governments are pushing miners to out of reach regions.

I can&#x27;t read the article because of a paywall. If only there was some sort of token gated system to let me connect to the site and view it without an account that hands them my personal&#x2F;cc data.

Great news! The crypto craze is the most embarrassing waste of energy in the history of our species. The sooner we stop the better.

This could even be a net win for Bitcoin, if only sustainable energy remains for mining Bitcoin.<p>Then the one argument against Bitcoin could fall away, and companies like Tesla could start using it again.

Articles behind a paywall are not good posts, it is essentially just the posting of a headline on a particularly divisive topic on this board.

Why is it up to governments to decide whether Bitcoin is a good idea or not?

If only bitcoin mining farms existed in space on similar satellites to starlink.

Of course everyone knows that Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work coins are the main culprits in incinerating the planet. So the last resort is to &#x27;attempt&#x27; to ban them.<p>However:<p>&gt; and threatening the future of crypto<p>No it does not.<p>What does the banning of Bitcoin mining have to do with other coins that do not use mining at all? it is more like the uncertain and unsustainable future of Bitcoin and Proof-of-Work coins rather than all cryptocurrencies.<p>Again, an article who&#x27;s editors think that all cryptocurrencies have the same characteristics as Bitcoin. It&#x27;s like thinking that all cars have the same characteristics as petrol cars and having a &#x27;ban&#x27; on petrol cars means is a &#x27;threat&#x27; to the future of cars in general.<p>Downvoters: Care to explain yourselves as to how every single cryptocurrency shares the same environmental disadvantages as Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work coins?

For those that think that Bitcoin is not environmental, please read -<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoinmagazine.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;open-letter-bitcoin-tesla-and-elon-musk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoinmagazine.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;open-letter-bitcoin-tes...</a>

The &quot;Bitcoin energy problem&quot; has always been a short term issue, as it exposes the problem of under-priced fossil fuel that do not yet capture externalities (fossil fuels are subsidized by governments, and most countries do not implement a carbon tax).<p>Bitcoin comes along and becomes the most profitable way to monetize energy, so of course you have this profit seeking behavior of arbitraging low cost energy for btc.<p>This isn&#x27;t as big of a problem in the long run because renewable energy from solar, wind, geothermal, are now the cheapest forms of energy, and will probably get even cheaper. This means new capacity from these sources are likely to be built out increasingly in the future, and development would be accelerated by proper pricing of fossil fuels. Combine this with improvements in batteries and other complimentary technologies (solar roofs) and the future of self sustaining, affordable renewable clean energy is very promising. It does not make sense to use fossil fuels for mining in this future when fossil fuel gets priced correctly.