Brendan Jones
What an obscene waste of energy. The way I read this, we could ban crypto mining and we'd drop electricity usage by 2% overnight.
Nothing of value to humanity would be lost, and it'd be a great help in decarbonising the grid.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/over-2-percent-of-the-uss-electricity-generation-now-goes-to-bitcoin/
#crypto #bitcoin #climatechange
Brendan Jones
This is exactly the kind of economic activity that contributes exactly nothing to human wellbeing, meaning we should eliminate it under efforts to downscale material and energy throughput (and therefore environmental impact). #degrowth
atro
@Brendanjones if you think that's bad why not extend this to tech at large? We've ported the same types of applications from desktops, to mobile platforms to web, and back again. The vast majority of applications today can be expressed in the data structures as invented in 70's/80's; when email was already at least decade old. We've gone from 15k developers in 1980 to 4 million in the US alone (30m globally) and account for 10-30% of the global usage for what exactly?
Brendan Jones
@atro well. One might argue that plenty of computer technology is quite useful for running companies, connecting humans, making stuff, and just generally having fun. So I'm not going to sweepingly extend this to all tech at large.
Certainly, there are some tech things we could do more efficiently or even not at all.
But crypto I'm quite confident in saying it does absolutely nothing of value.
atro
@Brendanjones one can argue but that arguing doesn't progress towards sustainability The basics of corporate cybernetics and logistics were solved by the late 1980. This very service, fosstodon, is not dissimilar in kind to usenet. If fun should make up a large chunk of our energy usage then we should admit that but blocking the easy things and failing to admit the issues are closer to the core is not a pathway to viable economies. It's pandering and virtue signaling.
womp
@Brendanjones This is an ignorant and frankly, privileged, wealthy North American take. Just because you personally have no use for it, you assume it has no value to humanity?
Wait until you have a Cypress, Argentina, or Venezuela situation. Or are unbanked in Malaysia.
If it had no value it would be long dead. Could it be better? Sure. Everything useful uses energy though.
Shit like this is why you can't have meaningful conversations about it.
Brendan Jones
@womp I am not from North America.
GNU Too
🇺🇦 Myke :emacs: :clojure:
@gnu2 @Brendanjones yes, isn’t it how it works? You just tell people “this is now banned” and next morning nobody does it any more. Worked great with drugs.
Brendan Jones
@mykhaylo @gnu2 wait, do you two actually think we can't stop the vast majority of crypto mining? This is not like drugs in the slightest, it's not millions of individuals doing the thing. That 2% of electricity use is coming from large scale mining, and there's only 137 operations doing that. And guess what? They now have to report their power consumption: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptomining/just-137-crypto-miners-use-23-of-total-us-power-government-now-requiring-commercial-miners-to-report-energy-consumption
So we know exactly who these people are, and how to stop it.
Brendan Jones
@mykhaylo @gnu2 I mean sure, making mining illegal wouldn't stop people doing it, there'd still be people trying. But I don't really care about someone illegally running a bunch of GPUs in their basement, because that's not going to use 2% of the country's electricity.
GNU Too
GNU Too
Brendan Jones
@gnu2 So we should never ban things that are allowed in other countries? And we should allow environmentally harmful activities just because they (temporarily) boost local economies?
Sorry but these are ridiculous arguments.
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