China’s Inner Mongolia Declares War on Crypto Mining

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36 minutes ago, rand_althor_cometh said:

This is such lazy rheoteric. It's not like those big companies aren't providing something valuable with that CO2 production. Such as power or transportation. They're not calculating a useless hash over and over.

This whole "value" thing has been debated at length, so I'll be brief. The hashing was added to provide a means of security for the network and incidentally rewards miners as well. It has a use. Inefficient? Yes. Useless? No. It's useless to you and you don't see value in crypto (yet). If there was not value it would not have started or grown. Sure, I'm happy to believe most of the value and interest is now in monetary gains, but I also think crypto can become something rather cool in the future.

 

Regarding my point on energy, Inner Mongolia is a lot of coal, but China, for example, has a lot of hydro power apparently. That's what I meant by saying mining doesn't necessarily use gray energy. This made me curious so I tried to find some numbers and estimates say 28% of the world's electricity came from renewables in 2020 and 39% of mining is on renewables.

 

Now, as for CO2 production, I fully agree mining needs to go, because it is starting to and will become a problem if it keeps growing. Another way has to be found for crypto to survive. I'm just pointing out that pollution is pollution no matter the value produced. Company A delivering you power by burning coal doesn't make their pollution any "better". I think we are all hypocrites to some extent, exactly because we have different values and value being able to do what we want with things. Power, transportation, gaming, mining they're all massively bad for the environment.

 

My main point in that statement was that mining sometimes gets portrayed as the thing that will push us over the edge. The problem is, we are already close to the edge. Not because of mining, but because of what we now consider normal and justified because it is "valuable". We most likely have only a few years left before we will exceed 1.5 C global warming if we don't change the way we go about things, which wil be very bad to say the least. Climate change won't stop with you taking a 1 minute shower instead of a 2 minute shower. Just as abolishing mining won't. Those type of campaings are good, but they also conceal. In the end of course all goes hand in hand. I'm not defending mining, just trying to shed light on both sides.