How can regulations can make alternative, less climate-harming projects such as this more attractive over bitcoin? Would crypto-currency income taxes or perhaps data center laws (similar to cyber-crime laws) be a useful tool? Or would that only favor lightning networks/PoS and those not declaring earnings.
Your aim is off, bitcoin using energy is fine just like any other use of energy is fine, part of the free market of ebergy. It’s production of energy from fossil fuels that isn’t fine.
I don't think that's really true. There are plenty of cases where we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular price for it. As an obvious example, no one would argue that hospitals in Texas should have been paying the "market rate" for electricity last week, and conversely, it would have been a scandal if someone had been mining bitcoin on the Texas grid, no matter what price they were paying per kWh.
A similar thing happens with water, where people are asked not to use their sprinklers during a dry spell. They can _afford_ to buy a lot of water at the market rate, and raising the price might not even change that (besides being super unfair to someone else who then might struggle to afford even enough water to drink).
So yeah, I think it's fair for us to say as a society that turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource that we'd like to use for other things.
> we can decide collectively as a society that a thing is valuable or not-valuable and intentionally set a particular price for it
yeah, that's exactly what's happening to bitcoin for last 10 years.
> turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource that we'd like to use for other things
first of all, heat is a sign of inefficiency, the better bitcoin mining gets the less heat it will produce. second - it's a gigantic and unacceptable waste of resources in your opinion, personally i very much disagree and think the opposite: decentralized financial security expressed directly in terms of energy required to subvert it is the largest discovery in financial theory since the concept of money itself, it is extremely valuable.
> turning electricity into heat in the form of bitcoin mining is a gigantic and unacceptable waste of a resource that we'd like to use for other things
Hi I live in a cold place! Interestingly, bitcoin mining is an electric space heater with 100% efficiency. I could theoretically heat my home. Currently I use natural gas (which emits CO2 aka a greenhouse gas). The furnace runs at 95% efficiency I think. If my electricity can be generated with less CO2 emissions than my furnace via nuclear, solar, wind, then it would be quite desirable wouldn't it? Would it be fair to say electric heaters are a giant unacceptable waste of compute?
> Interestingly, bitcoin mining is an electric space heater with 100% efficiency.
Technically you can get greater than 100% with electric heat pumps. But you're correct if you're marginally comparing just a space heater with/or without a CPU inside it.
A fair point, but in reality almost all of the Bitcoin heat is vented to the environment— no one is seriously capturing it for reuse at this point.
Also important to note that resistance heating ("100%") is in fact not the most efficient way to use electricity for warming a space. The most efficient is with a heat pump, where you're actually moving the heat from outside to inside.
This is an excellent point IMO. Unregulated central institutions (such as currency) lead to anarchy, in which public interest is not aligned with benefits. For example, pure Bitcoin serves only Bitcoin, with disregard for laws about, say, money laundering. If you can find a way to make it work for you, great — but that will only align with the public good by chance.
GridCoin seems like an attempt to mitigate that with internal regulation — it seems like the assumption is that GridCoin commits to proof-of-work tasks that are publicly beneficial.
I can't think of anythink more suitable for state intervention than solving the coordination problem to ensure the continued habitability of planet Earth.
Oh heck yeah. Climate justice is the issue of our age. I'm not saying not to take it seriously (few are anymore, right?).
However, choosing a PoW algorithm is unrelated to this task (and also risks giving cosmetic satisfaction while solving nothing).
Continued habitability of planet Earth is made dramatically more likely by supplanting monetary systems which:
* encourage people to treat money like a hot potato, better swapped for cheap plastic crap
* Make wars (the absolutely King Kong of carbon emission among human activities) much less expensive at the margins by slushily funding industrial complexes.
So let's crack the fuck down on externalities of power generation and consumption. Ban fossil fuels on an aggressive timeframe. Make car-free cities everywhere. Stop all wars right now today.
But those things are orthogonal (and not even adjacent) to selecting an algorithm for PoW consensus.
I also want to caution against circlejerking over clean water and ozone restoration. Things on a global scale are still pretty dire; the solution is ahead of us, not behind, and it's not clear what it will be.
